Remembering Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it. She called herself a writer rather than a science fiction writer and said on at least one occasion, in an interview: "How dull it is to have people defining you." But she used scientific extrapolation in most of her work and did so carefully -- acknowledging what was known to be true and inventing only into the blank spaces on the map.

In the '70s and '80s, when much of the field was out in the clean, sterile sweep of space or jacking into the Web and leaving the body entirely, Butler's scientific interest was in biology. Her work is all about the body -- about disease, about reproduction, about the horrible realities of the food chain. Many of her stories feature graphic depictions of fluid-spilling, flesh-eating, oozing, gooey physicality. There were times as a reader when you might find yourself wishing her imagination and her prose were a little less vivid. In my opinion, she was one of the field's scariest writers. There was nowhere she wasn't willing to go in her imagination. There was nowhere she wasn't willing to take you.

She had a particular fascination with relationships of dominance and submission, master and slave, predator and prey. Though she always positioned herself on the side of the victims, she frequently focused on complicity, portraying such interactions as complicated and intimate. One cannot be eaten or raped without being touched. There was sometimes a narcotized pleasure built in on one side of the relationship or both. The idea of humans as carriers for alien seed, of cross-breeding between humans and aliens, of the mutual dependence of predator and prey -- these are staples of Butler's books, appearing in both her Patternist series (four novels) and her Xenogenesis trilogy. In some ways, her 1984 short story "Bloodchild" has distilled this to a disturbing essence.

"Bloodchild" takes place in a world where the dominant species, an insectlike alien called the Tlic, reproduces by laying an egg in a living host. When the larvae hatch, they eat their way out. Humans prove to be excellent hosts for Tlic larvae: In fact they provide the only possible means of reproduction; without the human hosts, the Tlic face extinction.

Initially the Tlic kept humans like animals just for this purpose, but it has become possible to intervene in the hatching so as to save the human host -- not always, but often. Over generations, families of Tlic and families of humans have become intertwined in an intimate sexual history. Gan, the human boy who is the protagonist of "Bloodchild," is not only the proposed host for the child of T'Gatoi, a highly placed Tlic, but also her brother, as his own father was host to her. T'Gatoi could compel Gan's cooperation, but she won't. The decision to bear T'Gatoi's child, or not, is left to Gan.

"Bloodchild" won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1985. A number of readers have argued that it's a story about slavery. Although this is a possible reading, it's a difficult one, and I can't help wondering how much it depends on knowing that the author of the work is a black woman. The slavery metaphor is contradicted, or at the very least complicated, by the consensual, loving relationship at the heart of the story.

Other readers have argued that "Bloodchild" is simply a gender reversal story in which the female impregnates the male and the male delivers, in great pain and at bodily risk, the baby. The egg-laying scene is subtly, uncomfortably erotic. Butler herself described it as a love story. The intimate relationship of predator and prey is the juice of the vampire tradition, and after a long struggle with writer's block, Butler arrived here (though science fictionalized) in her final novel, "Fledgling." Her vampire, who looks like a young girl, is in fact a 53-year-old member of a long-lived race that cohabits the world with humans, but predates them by many centuries. This race is called the Ina. Like vampires, the Ina need human blood to survive, but their feeding is not homicidal and the blood comes from willing volunteers. Maybe they're volunteers. Or maybe they're addicts. We learn that the saliva of the Ina carries a powerful addictive narcotic as well as an agent that extends the human's life. The book takes place in a fictional world and features a fictional race but is, once again, primarily about complicated, disturbing, tangled webs of dominance and submission, sex and compulsion.

Butler's novel "Kindred" may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979. Butler always refused to classify "Kindred" as science fiction, because there was no science in it, calling it instead "a grim fantasy." Still, it's clearly embedded in that science fictional tradition of stories that revolve around the conundrum of traveling back in time and killing your own grandfather.

Part of the impulse to write this book, Butler said, was guilt. Her own mother was taken out of school at the age of 10 and worked in jobs that, as a child, Butler found demeaning. It took her several years to see that endurance and sacrifice are, in fact, the characteristics of the hero.

The protagonist of "Kindred" is a modern woman from Southern California, a black woman married to a white man. She finds herself transported back to the pre-Civil War South, where she faces many terrible choices, including the quandary of whether to save the life of a sadistic slaver who is one of her own ancestors and, therefore, someone on whom her own future depends. About "Kindred," Butler said that she wanted people to think about what it would be like to have all of society arrayed against you. She wanted people to think about this often.

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Last week, Dave Itzkoff, the new science fiction reviewer for the New York Times, created a stir on s.f. chat lists and blogs when he posted the titles of his 10 favorite books of science fiction. Since this list was never represented as more than an idiosyncratic selection of personal favorites, it's probably unfair to object. People must be allowed to like the books they like (however clear it is that the books we like are superior books) and I think (at least I think I think) it's better, even for reviewers, to be honest instead of politic about what they like.

And yet, with Butler's death still quite recent, quite raw, readers couldn't help noticing that the list is, among other things equally shocking but less to the point here, exclusively white, straight and male -- as the field of science fiction is not. If the New York Times ever asked the women of science fiction for our idiosyncratic, personal favorites, our lists would look quite different from Itzkoff's. No doubt they would also look quite different from each other's. Still, I think there are few among us who would not have included Octavia Butler in our top 10.

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