Home Again Reviews New York Times
The Essential Octavia Butler
She created vivid new worlds to reveal truths about our own. Here's where to start with her books.
Octavia Butler walked a singular path. A writer from her poverty-stricken childhood to her death in 2006 at the age of 58, she committed her life to turning speculative fiction into a home for Black expression. In her hands, the genre felt capacious and infinite. "I wrote myself in," she told The New York Times in 2000.
Her ink was permanent. Weathering rejections, dead-end jobs and her own persistent doubts, Butler rose to international prominence. She became the first science fiction author to be granted a MacArthur fellowship, and the first Black woman to win Hugo and Nebula awards. Today her influence spans literature, genres and media.
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The plaques and firsts are the least interesting part of her story, though. Above all, Butler was an observer and ponderer. The probing mind that animates her novels, short stories and essays is obsessed with the viability of the human enterprise. Will we survive our worst habits? Will we change? Do we want to?
These questions led Butler to explore settings banal and fantastical, brutal and tender. Her peculiar, unsettling worlds, rendered in prose trimmed of sentiment and ornament, overflow with desperation and tragedy. She deeply distrusted utopias, saviors, power brokers and escapism. Accordingly, her works are heavy and bleak, full of warnings and catastrophic failures to heed them.
Yet Butler was neither a pessimist nor a didact. Her recurring character archetype is the survivor, a figure of endurance, resourcefulness and compromise. To read her works and follow her wearied protagonists through badlands is to experience the treachery of change, its capacity to snatch away gains and proffer flashes of relief. There are few refuges in her 14 books, but there are always insights, always futures.
I don't read much speculative fiction and don't plan to start.
KINDRED will change your mind. Butler takes time travel, one of speculative fiction's oldest and most overdone premises, and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, "Kindred" is controlled and precise.
Butler stages slavery as a site of pain and violation as well as community and resilience. Dana, the protagonist, slips back and forth against her will between her life in 1976 Los Angeles and a Maryland plantation before the Civil War. In Butler's hands, the slaves and slave owners Dana meets — and befriends, nurtures, protects and betrays — become individuals rather than historical abstractions. The book is a marvel of imagination, empathy and detail, speculative fiction at its best.
I want a sampler of her immaculate prose.
Butler didn't write many short stories, and many of them mirror the themes of her novels. But the short form served her economic writing style well. The stories collected in BLOODCHILD move quickly, often laying out their premises and conflicts in a single exchange or sequence.
Even better, each piece is followed by an afterword, offering insights into Butler's inspirations and writing process. She doesn't waste a word.
Let's go on an epic adventure.
Golden age sci-fi conceits like alien encounters and superpowered beings abound in Butler's work, especially the Patternist series, which spans five books (one, "Survivor," remains out of print at her behest). But the constant presence of drama shows she read penny romances as well as comics and pulp novels. Many of the tensest, most hair-raising moments in her books occur in conversations between romantic partners.
Spanning continents and centuries, WILD SEED details a tense courtship between two African immortals, one a psychic parasite who can switch bodies, and the other a shapeshifter. They traverse present-day Nigeria, the Atlantic Ocean and then colonial and antebellum North America, seducing and conning each other the whole way like competing spies. The book draws upon the extensive research on chattel slavery that Butler conducted for "Kindred," expanding on the institution's horrors — and forms of resistance — beyond the plantation.
I want psychic duels and fratricide.
PATTERNMASTER takes place in the same milieu as "Wild Seed," but is set far into the future, when the descendants of the immortals have overtaken the world through a psychic network known as the pattern. Their ascension pitches much of society into slavery, and Butler follows two superpowered brothers as they vie to become the Patternmaster, the virtually omnipotent puppeteer of the pattern.
This is Butler's first book, and it lacks the range and gravitas of her later works. People without psychic powers, or mutes, are pawns at best and furniture at worst. And the mutant Clayarks, a third party seeking to usurp the pattern, are narrative fodder. But Butler's clash of titans is briskly plotted and starkly rendered. Though her books would turn pensive and philosophical, she could pulp with the best of them.
I feel right at home in dystopias.
"Parable of the Sower," the first in a two-book series, is a slog. Lauren Oyamina, the teenage protagonist, offers few insights into the nightmarish setting of an America burning itself down, and the story is too shaped by her stilted, dry voice. PARABLE OF THE TALENTS is the masterpiece. The sequel retains the brutal atmosphere of its predecessor — severe economic inequality, climate disaster, lawless mayhem — without sacrificing momentum or texture.
By refining Lauren's voice, Butler found others scarred by the American apocalypse, from a rising fascist who wants to "make America great again" to new-age slave traders to children who are forcibly separated from their families — and are happy about it. The Parable series is known for its discomfiting prescience. But "Talents" shows that the series' true strength is its attention to the lives destroyed by fascism. There's less spectacle and inferno than "Sower," but far more sweat and anguish.
I want nuclear annihilation and alien sex.
I appreciate your honesty. Lilith's Brood, a trilogy first published as Xenogenesis, details the long and seedy seduction of humanity by the Oankali, sluglike aliens that delight in genetic trade with other species. The story is set hundreds of years after the Cold War turns hot and obliterates the superpowers and most of humanity. The Oankali arrive after the war, abduct and resuscitate war-ravaged humans and plan to send us back to Earth — at the cost of merging our biochemistry with theirs.
DAWN is the core of the series, setting the stage for the Oankali's protracted and perverse colonization. Many critics read the Oankali as benevolent saviors and Butler certainly does not make them outright villains, but the first book renders clearly their manipulation. Chemical essentialists, the Oankali see reality in narrow terms that ignore verbal consent and are always patronizing. Despite the condescension of her captors, Lilith, a resilient Black woman, comes to accept a future with them, a fraught choice that Butler characterizes with haunting nuance. The book, researched in Peru, also features her most scenic writing.
Alien sex? No thanks! Vampire sex? Sign me up.
Butler's vampires are an unusual bunch. They are nocturnal and they drink blood, yes, but they also worship a goddess, own vineyards and farms, and form intimate harems with humans. Butler's vampires are more cultured than monstrous, and FLEDGLING, an action-packed whodunit that builds into a riveting legal battle, teems with ideas about the creatures as well as the mechanics of relationships. In charged, erotic prose, Butler weaves a mystery that's as titillating as it is disturbing. Fledgling is a work of fantasy, but it explores many of the ideas of consent and desire that Butler broaches in Lililth's Brood. Even when she wasn't writing about aliens, she was.
I want a deep cut.
UNEXPECTED STORIES features two stories that went unpublished in Butler's lifetime. One, "Childfinder," was supposed to be Butler's big break. She sold it at a writing workshop for an anthology that was never released, a false start that haunted her early in her career as rejection slips accumulated. The other story, "A Necessary Being," takes place in the world of "Survivor," Butler's out-of-print third book, and was one of her many rejected stories. Both stories demonstrate how early she discovered her voice as a writer.
I'm familiar with Butler's work and seek trivia, B-sides and scholarship.
Butler's private papers are collected at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. Drawing from the Huntington's archives, OCTAVIA E. BUTLER, by Gerry Canavan, covers Butler's career, life and works, teasing out the many overtones and themes in her books. Canavan is an excellent critic and formidable researcher, and this book, written in accessible, quick-moving prose, is rich with perspectives and ideas. The best sections detail the stories Butler didn't publish or complete, using those fragments to dive deeper into the texts that she finished. Like all good criticism, the book is both authoritative and invitational. Read it and you'll marvel at the arguments and feel invited to develop your own.
Stephen Kearse is a contributing writer at The Nation. He has contributed to Pitchfork, The Baffler and The Atlantic, among other publications.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/books/review/the-essential-octavia-butler.html
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