Octavia Butler, Champion Science Fiction Writer and Certified Genius, Dies at 58

Lots of writers think they're genuises, but Octavia Butler — who died over the weekend at her Seattle home — was one of the few to have it certified: she received one of those MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants in 1995, which made it possible for her to buy a house and enjoy a measure of comfort after a lifetime of scraping by with her writing. The recognition was all the more striking because Butler was a — shhhhh! — writer of science fiction, that most cootie-laden of American literary genres, of which few critics have anything good to say and from which only a few lucky talents — Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, anybody else? — are allowed to escape.

Butler's ticket to wider recognition was Kindred, an overwhelmingly powerful novel about Dana, a modern-day black woman who is repeatedly carried back to the antebellum South in order to save the life of a white boy named Rufus, who malignantly flowers into a raging bigot and slaveholder - and who turns out to be the heroine's ancestor. Each time she goes back, Dana (and the reader) gets a wider, deeper view of life as a slave; each time she returns from the 19th century South, Dana bears psychological scars she sees reflected in the mid-1970s America around her. Butler is particularly good at showing the psychological deformations slavery requires of both master and his chattel; in the book's edgiest sequence, Dana is wrenched back with her white husband, and must watch the appalling ease with which he assumes the privileges of a white plantation owner.

A book that deserves to be equally well known is Parable of the Talents, a panoramic view of a fundamentalist America that puts The Handmaid's Tale completely in the shade. Reading her obituaries, I realize that her output was much wider than I realized — I have some catching up to do, and so do you if you want to read somebody whose work was not only several cuts above most science fiction writing, but much mainstream wrirting as well.

Article Author: Steven Hart

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

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