Octavia Butler
2023
Science Fiction Writer · MacArthur Fellow
Octavia Estelle Butler created worlds as real as our capacity to imagine them. Butler is a celebrated figure of literature – a giant of the Afrofuturism genre of science fiction.
“What is not imagined is not attempted.”
Butler was born in Pasadena, California, in 1947, and raised by her mother and maternal grandmother. While the social and systemic racism in Pasadena was not on the scale of the Jim Crow South, prejudice, racism, and misogyny are a constant in the United States. She would address all of these while sounding the alarm about the dangers of climate change.
“What good is creating and imagining and getting off the beaten tracks, off the narrow, narrow foot paths of what ‘everybody’ is saying and doing – whoever ‘everybody’ happens to be this year. Science fiction is a handful of earth, and a handful of sky, and everything around and between.”
Butler was described by those who knew her as a shy child. When her mother presented her with a library card, she took refuge in the local library. That library card, her journal, and writing implement helped to fill her days with reading and writing. After watching “Devil Girl” (1954) she decided to become a writer. This experience made her realize that writing could be a job and that she could write stories better than what she just watched.
“My teachers always did claim that I seemed to be in another world.”
She worked as a telemarketer, dishwasher, and potato chip inspector, among other occupations, to survive. She was an early riser waking up in the predawn hours to begin her day writing in the quiet of the night, struggling financially until winning the MacArthur “Genius” grant in 1995.
“Writing things down a little might help untangle them – answers in a flash of insight or something.”
Butler chose to write about the world as it is and as she felt the world could be. She incorporated critiques of social and economic justice into her stories. She discussed the drug crisis as well as climate change. For this reason, it is not uncommon for people to find her to be somewhat of a prophet. She never assented to descriptions of herself in such terms but considered her perspective informed by research and life.
“Normal is what I was trying to escape. It was boring me out of my mind…”
She was the awardee of the L.A. YWCA Creative Arts Award (1980), the Nebula Award (1984 and 1999), the Hugo Award (1984 and 1985), the Science Fiction Chronicle Award (1985), and the Locus Award (1985), among others.
Butler died in her home in Seattle, WA, in 2006. The public's interest in her writing began to grow after her passing. Posthumously, she was awarded the PEN America Center Lifetime Achievement Award (2000), the Solstice Award (2012), and the Eisner Award (2018). She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.
New authors, inspired by her and, in some cases, mentored by her, helped to spread the word about Butler, and our interest in her work continues to grow. Her writings, notes, and journals are at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, near her hometown of Pasadena.