8/7/2023 0 Comments Octavia e. butler books list![]() That was one of the knotty complex problems that she turned her mind to all the time. That question of survival, and the moral ambiguity that comes with it, seems to be a theme that Butler returned to again and again. I think it’s a question of survival: ‘I will not exist if this does not happen.’ It is a good metaphor for emotional bribery, but it’s also just a question of existence. But I don’t think of it as emotional bribery. Annalee Newitz selected it as one of the best time travel books, saying that it’s “a great metaphor for why we get emotionally bribed into participating in systems that oppress us.” Do you agree with that take on it? I think that that’s why it’s so effective, because it is written with a mission to show something to people that they were ignorant about. And she wanted to show them that, actually, they too would have been right there in the kitchen, begging for scraps. It works so well because the initial impetus for the book was that Octavia was upset with her contemporaries in college, who downplayed the rigors that their enslaved ancestors endured and denigrated them as Uncle Toms and as kow-towing too easily to white oppression. So that’s a little bit about how the book goes. I wrote about it for Tor.com I called it ‘Grandmother Paradox’ because the ancestor who needs to be born before Dana can give up on saving the slave owner’s life is her great-great-grandmother. That’s all I can say without spoiling it, but it’s hopefully enough to entice people. In the 1970s she’s married to a white man-again, very revolutionary for the time to be writing about this-and her husband goes back with her on one of these chronological jaunts and he also has a very disturbing experience there. And over a number of confrontations with him, he grows, he becomes increasingly dangerous to her and she eventually comes out of this situation physically maimed and intellectually changed. Kindred is the story of Dana, a 1970s African-American woman-‘black’ as she calls herself at the time-who is drawn back through time to preserve the life of one of her ancestors who is white and a slave owner in the South. I selected Kindred because it is one of two portals to her work that most people come across, and she wrote it to reach a certain audience. We writers like to make those sorts of lawyerly distinctions. Well, I just will say that I’ve selected these books as the best introduction to her work, not as her best work. Could you talk us through the book, and then why you think it was one of Butler’s best? This was a big bestseller on publication. During her lifetime, she was rather prolific and published 12 novels and one short story collection. ![]() But there were only a few, just one or two people trying to prove that this speculative fiction field was as diverse and wide as humanity. There are countless Black people who were writing at the same time who were breaking down barriers. I’ve read that she herself said that she ‘wrote herself into’ the science fiction and fantasy literature as an African-American. You need to be able to go anywhere and for people there to know who Octavia Butler is. She needs to be famous throughout the globe, in the same fashion that you can go to Nepal and people know who Mickey Mouse is. NASA named a feature of Martian topography after her. I think that she has achieved the fame that she deserves, to an extent. Through her writing life she won pretty much every prize going: a MacArthur Fellowship, Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, Locus Awards… ![]() You have the thrill of undergoing the dream state that she was in as she was writing, and the results of those really vivid dreams. She took risks, big risks, and she allowed people to come along with her as she took those risks, so you had the thrill of participating in the audacity of what she was writing. And I think that gets to why she is so influential. That’s what I knew her as, a beautiful person inside and out, whose work was challenging and dangerous. But to me, she was a gracious, wise, kind, and compassionate friend. Who was she? I could write a book about that-others already have. Who was Octavia Butler, and why do you think her books have been so influential in the world of science fiction and fantasy-and literature more generally? Let me start with a very general question. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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