“All good things must begin.”

December 3, 2021 3:07 PM

The thing that has surprised me most was really how cash poor she was. She’d journal just about every single day. She would write something in her journals and then she would work on her novels or a story or whatever. She would be doing calculations in the margins — word counts and how much she would be paid per word for something, how much money she had to get through the week, or how much or how little food she could purchase. Her shopping lists down to the penny. Which meant she had to go without a lot of things to produce the writing that we have been gifted. And it was kind of heartbreaking. From Tracing Octavia Butler’s Footsteps: An Interview with Dr. Ayana A. H. Jamieson

Related: Radio Imagination celebrates the life and work of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler.

In 1985 she won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for the story "Bloodchild," one of the most powerful and disturbing stories of human/alien relations you 're ever likely to read, a story in which we are not only subjugated, but damn proud to be so, too. . . .

Octavia Butler previously

posted by chavenet (6 comments total)

You definitely got the sense reading her Parable books that she knew Southern California well, and that she had visited enough more north to to capture the essence of the other places the characters visit. I was touched she described my hometown favorably, and I hope it's because she herself was treated decently when she passed through.
posted by JauntyFedora at 3:27 PM on December 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

We just found her typewriter in the Smithsonian.
posted by doctornemo at 6:37 PM on December 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

In March, the Perseverance rover's landing site on Mars was named after her. More at Wikipedia.

The previous rover's landing site, in 2012, was named after Ray Bradbury.
posted by intermod at 6:49 PM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

One of the things I learned reading the 2001 anthology Dark Matter was just how few Black sci-fi authors there were in the 80s. Octavia Butler. Samuel Delany. And that's about it, for mainstream awareness. Delany has a whole thing about how funny it was the two of them kept getting invited to appear together because other than being Black SFF writers, their writing has very little in common. Dark Matter is two decades old now but still an excellent and very fresh read. It does a great job finding other examples of older SFF by Black authors and then introducing a bunch of new ones, many of whom have gone on to be quite successful.

Butler's stuff is almost too powerful for me to read. The Xenogenesis books are intensely uncomfortable body horror, but excellent for that. Kindred nearly broke me, particularly since I read her fictional Black woman's narrative of enslavement on the heels of a real Black woman's slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Butler's research for Kindred is remarkable, it is an excellent book. Very curious to see how the TV adaption works out.

I had not realized there were 13 Butler books. I've only read half of them. It's sort of a "save it for your lifetime" kind of thing, but maybe it's time to finish the rest.
posted by Nelson at 7:17 PM on December 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

What a lovely interview with a person doing important work, the importance of which is only underlined by the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network’s origin story, that Dr. Jamieson had to get the cemetery to put Butler’s headstone in the right place. How deeply infuriating that they lost her grave.
posted by Kattullus at 5:58 AM on December 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

Thank you.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:00 PM on December 5, 2021 [1 favorite]