Octavia e butler historical fiction10/4/2023 ![]() (In fact, Butler flirted with the idea that she might be gay or bisexual, but ultimately decided that she was “a hermit” rather than someone seeking romance of any kind.) She was a large, Black woman in a society that demonized being large, Black, or a woman, and although she enjoyed being alone, her sense of rejection never left. This, along with her tallness-she would grow to six feet-made her easy fodder for schoolyard bullies. ![]() Classmates teased her about her voice, which had a notably deep, even masculine, rumble. She was painfully shy, and, as she grew older, she developed insecurities about her body that would linger. If the world of science fiction seemed lonely for someone like Butler, real life seemed lonelier still. Fittingly, “Nightfall” (1941), one of Asimov’s seminal short stories, contained no women beyond passing references to them as child-breeders or siblings. “Notice, too, that many top-notch, grade-A, wonderful, marvelous, etc., etc., authors get along swell without any women, at all,” he declared in another from 1939. “When we want science-fiction, we don’t want swooning dames,” he scoffed in one letter. Twenty years earlier, the sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov had gone so far as to declare, in a series of sneering letters in Astounding Science Fiction, that women had no place in such stories at all, as they were only there for “romance,” and he, like serious authors of his ilk, had no time for such expendable narrative distractions. ![]() White men filled both its ranks of authors and their stories. “I can write a better story than that.” Ironically, this abysmal film became partly responsible for reshaping the world of American sci-fi, inspiring Butler to compose narratives that forever changed what was possible in the genre.īut it wouldn’t be easy, because in the 1960s, science fiction-which had risen in popularity as a distinct category throughout the twentieth century-was a field that rarely included anyone who looked like Butler. The year before, she had watched Devil Girl from Mars, a 1954 science-fiction B movie, and its remarkable mediocrity had astonished the writer in her. “In all my thirteen years,” she wrote, “I had never read a printed word that I knew to have been written by a Black person.” Still, this dearth did not dissuade her if anything, it made her want to have her writing published even more fervently.Īnd not just any writing, but science fiction, which she began to submit that same year to a slew of magazines. ![]() As she later admitted in “Positive Obsession,” an autobiographical essay from 1989, her aunt’s reaction led her to realize something startling. For years, Butler had yearned to be a writer it had never occurred to her before her aunt’s casual dismissal that her very identity might complicate things. “Honey,” her aunt sighed, “Negroes can’t be writers.” “Well, that’s nice, but you’ll have to get a job, too.” Butler insisted she would write full time. She was sitting at her aunt’s kitchen table, watching her cook. Butler told her aunt that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. ONE DAY IN 1960, when she was thirteen, Octavia E.
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