![]() ![]() I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure. My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do. And even in the earliest grades, I got pounded for it. I was quiet, bookish, and in spite of my size, hopeless at sports. Butler quotes:Īt school I was always taller than the rest of my class, and because I was an only child, I was comfortable with adults but shy and awkward with other kids. Via BrainyQuote, here's a selection of Octavia E. After starting and discarding numerous projects, Butler wrote her last novel Fledgling (2005), which was an innovative take on the concept of vampires and family structures, the latter being one of her works' prevailing themes."Īfter a fall at her Seattle home on February 24, 2006, Butler died. "Her efforts were hampered by her ill health and the medications she took. She was a perfectionist with her work and spent several years grappling with writer's block," said. "In 1999, Butler abandoned her native California to move north to Seattle, Washington. She later found herself stuck for inspiration. She was the first science fiction author to achieve this. In 1995, Butler was awarded a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation, which made her a fellow. "It was this passionate interest in the human experience that imbued her work with a certain depth and complexity." But for Butler, it largely served as a vehicle to address issues facing humanity," reads her profile on. "For some writers, science fiction serves as means to delve into fantasy. In the series were the books Dawn: Xenogenesis, Adulthood Rites and Imago.Ī black lesbian, Butler broke the science fiction mold, a writing genre dominated by straight white men. A year later, her short story collection Bloodchild earned another Hugo as well as the Locus award and the Nebula award.Īt the end of the 1980s, Butler published the critically acclaimed Xenogenesis Trilogy, also known as Lilith's Brood, in which humans and aliens reproduce with each other to survive. In 1984, her short story "Speech Sounds" won Butler her first Hugo award. The protagonist must save the life of the plantation's brutal white slave owner who, it transpires, is also her ancestor, in order to maintain her own existence-even if it means facilitating the horrors he will inevitably commit, such as rape. It tells the complex and gripping story of an African-American woman who jumps back and forth in time between 1970s Los Angeles and an early-19th-century plantation in Maryland on which her ancestor works. It was the first in the four-book Patternist series that, according to Goodreads, details "a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague."īut it was her 1979 novel Kindred that became her breakthrough. That interview is embedded at the bottom of this article. Butler appearing on "Charlie Rose" in 2000. ![]()
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