Remembering Octavia Butler

The great African-American science fiction writer saw herself as a reclusive outsider, but to her peers she was a beloved insider.

By Karen Joy Fowler

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Octavia Butler

March 17, 2006 | The last two stories I read by Octavia E. Butler prior to her death in February, at the age of 58, were "The Book of Martha" and "Amnesty." Both were published in 2003, and both are available in the SciFi.com archives. Neither, in my opinion, is absolutely first-rate Butler; still, they are quintessential as to theme and character. They have their own strengths, and remind you of the pure stuff that made Butler's work so powerful.

The opening to "The Book of Martha" makes for sad rereading now, though. In it, God tells Martha that she is free for the very first time. Martha seems to be much like a younger Butler -- a woman of 43, an African-American and a writer. Her first concern is that she must be dead, and she doesn't want to be. Her last memories of earth are of writing, the "sweet frenzy of creation that she lived for."

As it turns out, Martha is not dead; God merely has a task for her. The human race is racing toward self-destruction and the black, female science fiction writer is being given the chance to save the world. The rules of this deal-with-the-deity story are as follows: Martha can make a single change and whatever society results, she must occupy the bottom rung of it. "I don't believe in utopias," Martha tells God, and no reader of the fiction of Octavia Butler could doubt this.

In the second story, "Amnesty," a woman named Noah works as translator between humans and a species of alien invader referred to as the Communities. The arrival of the Communities has crashed the economy; humans are dependent now on the aliens for employment and food. Many humans died in the days of early contact -- the aliens experimented casually on them to discover what the human body could and could not withstand. The humans have not forgiven this.

The Communities ask Noah to turn six human recruits into willing workers. Abducted by the aliens at age 11, released only many years later, Noah knows, as the recruits do not, that the Communities can and will completely eliminate humans if the two species prove unable to live together. No one has asked, but Noah has taken on herself the task of saving humankind. She has no reason to love either side. When the Communities finally released her, she was seized and tortured by the military for information she was assumed to be withholding. Much worse, she tells the recruits, to be tortured by your own, who know what they're doing, who know how to hurt you, than by the curious, ignorant aliens.

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Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to s.f. writing as an enthusiastic reader. She said many times in many interviews that she began to write science fiction at age 12, having seen the movie "Devil Girl From Mars" and been convinced that she could tell a better story than that. (Her first published novel, "Patternmaster" in 1976, was purportedly a reworking of her childhood story.) As a young woman she attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, at which she later taught many times, and in the 1980s won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for short work. In 1995, when she received a MacArthur "genius" grant, the reaction inside the field was one of pride and pleasure for one of our own.

She also described herself as a hermit, but on the occasions when I met her she struck me less as reclusive than as shy. She had the wrong body for someone who so disliked being conspicuous -- she was extremely tall and imposing -- and the wrong personality for someone in the public eye. In 1985 when she won the Nebula, her acceptance speech consisted of a thank you and the observation that she had become a writer "in order to avoid moments like this." Yet she was, through sheer determination, an effective, seemingly confident public speaker. Formal and impressive onstage, she was warm and friendly in person. She used to say that the last thing she wanted was for her work to be prophetic. In 1993 when she wrote "Parable of the Sower" -- which is, among other things, a meditation on the ways a nation can turn to fascism, an evergreen issue in George W. Bush's America -- she was not trying to predict but to warn.

I learned of Butler's death (too young, with too much work left to do) through a phone call while it was still a rumor. Moments later, confirmation appeared online on various science fiction Web sites. A science fiction convention known as Potlatch had convened that same weekend in Seattle, where Butler lived. She was expected to put in an appearance; there were plans for lunch. Her sudden death, the result of a fall in her front yard, was a terrible shock to everyone.

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