Octavia Butler & The Devil Girl From Mars

I met Octavia E. Butler, the pioneering black female science fiction writer, only once. In September, 1992, she came to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University for the Second Shooting Star writers’ conference. The conference was sponsored by the Pittsburgh-based Shooting Star Productions, an organization dedicated to promoting black culture and artists. At the time, Butler was working on her novel, Parable of the Sower, which would be published the following year and nominated for the Nebula Award in 1994. Butler agreed to sit down with me and Anita Alverio for an interview about her life and work. And it was good that we actually did sit down, because, although neither I nor Anita are short, Butler towered over us.

Octavia E. Butler, who was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010, was also a towering presence in science fiction. Her work often mixed gender, feminism, religion, politics, and racial themes in a brew seldom seen in the genre. The field responded with two Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards. In addition, in 1995 she received the first MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius grant to be given to a science fiction writer. The grant was for $295,000 dispersed over five years to enable her to write more of her genre-bending science fiction novels, which have sold over a million copies.

Octavia Butler was born poor in Pasadena, a Los Angeles suburb. Her mother, a cleaning woman, read her bedtime stories until Octavia was six. After Octavia began to eagerly anticipate the bedtime reading, her mother handed her the book and said, “Here, read them yourself.” And so it began. Reading, and a neighborhood branch library, became Butler’s escape from the ghetto neighborhood in which she lived.

She wrote her first story, about horses, at age ten because she was forgetting the stories she’d been making up since age four. Then, Butler recalled, in 1959, when she was 12, she saw the schlocky 1954 movie, Devil Girl From Mars, rebroadcast on TV. The movie is one of the silliest examples of British SF ever made. In it, a beautiful Martian woman dressed in black leather lands her spaceship outside a remote Scottish inn stocked with cliched Brit types. She tells the Brits that Martian women have taken power on Mars and established “an intransigent matriarchy,” which has eliminated all the men. But now, Mars needs men for a Martian-human eugenics program, and she’s come for them. “Surprisingly,” Butler told us, “the men didn’t want to go.”

From such small acorns mighty oaks may grow and, watching it, Butler said to herself, “I can write better science fiction than that.” And so she wrote her own story of alien-human interbreeding which, reworked as an adult, became the seed of her acclaimed Patternmaster series of novels. And thus began her science fiction career.

We asked Butler why she thought there were so few black science fiction writers like her. “There are so few black science fiction writers because there are so few black science fiction writers,” she replied. “That sounds like a joke, but I think it’s true. People don’t do what they don’t see others like themselves doing. I’ve had a number of black women say to me, ‘I’ve wanted to write science fiction, but I didn’t know there were black women science fiction writers.’

“Well, now here I am, but not having role models didn’t stop me. I just began writing. Science fiction is free and open and you can be anyone and write it. The only person who ever told me I couldn’t write was an aunt, who told me when I was 13, ‘Negroes can’t be writers.’ Being 13, I, of course, disagreed with her.”

And so Butler kept writing. After high school she worked at a series of unskilled, low-paid jobs, while writing every day. “I had no social life,” she said, “so I went to bed at 8 o’clock and rose at 2 a.m. and wrote for several hours before leaving for work. It was a habit. And that’s how I made it. Habit is better than inspiration; habit is better than talent; habit is better than imagination, all of which are completely useless words. Have you ever seen a child without imagination? We were all children once, and our imagination is still there. You have all the imagination you need, right now. Just start writing. Make it a habit.”

While working, Butler enrolled in Pasadena Community College, from which she graduated with an Associate of Arts degree in 1968. While there, one of her stories won a school writing contest.

After graduation she enrolled in the Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters Guild of America-West. One of her teachers was Harlan Ellison. Impressed with her potential, Ellison began supplementing her income from odd jobs so she could write more. He also told her about the Clarion science fiction workshop, founded in Clarion, Pennsylvania, in 1968, and encouraged her to apply.

In 1970 she did, and Clarion accepted Butler even though she had sold nothing at the time, usually a prerequisite for admission. Ellison then paid the 23-year-old Butler’s way to, and tuition for, the workshop. Not only did the SF community at Clarion embrace her, but that crucial support was also her breakthrough, as she sold her very first story written at Clarion to Robin Scott Wilson, one of her teachers. That story was “Crossover,” included in Clarion, Wilson’s premiere 1971 anthology in the series of outstanding stories by Clarion Workshop students. (At the same time, she sold a second story to Ellison, who was also teaching at Clarion, for his anthology, The Last Dangerous Visions. That anthology, with Butler’s story, has never been published.)

Butler returned from Clarion convinced that she had at last made it as a writer. However, she didn’t sell another word for five years. Even so, she continued writing and submitting for publication. “Persistence,” she said, is the most important attribute of a writer. And she quoted her teacher, Harlan Ellison, who told her, “If anything can discourage you from being a writer, then you shouldn’t be a writer.”

Octavia Butler eventually fulfilled the promise her teachers saw in her. “Speech Sounds,” her 1983 story from Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, won the 1984 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. “Bloodchild,” her 1984 “pregnant man story,” as she called it, also from Asimov’s, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Short Story in 1985. And “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” was nominated for the Nebula in 1987. These, and other short fiction, were published in her 1996 collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories.

But, although Butler became a prize-winning short story writer, she focussed most of her attention on novels, of which she published eleven. At first, after returning from Clarion, she despaired of being able to write anything as long as a novel. But, she told us, she knew she could write a short story of about 20-pages. So, that’s how she began to approach novel-writing. She wrote 20-page chapters as if they were short stories. And that, she said, was how she wrote her first three novels, all of which she eventually sold without benefit of an agent.

The first of these novels were in the “Patternmaster” series. These included Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984). These novels describe the origins of a vast eugenics project meant to breed superior humans. The project begins with a 4,000-year-old shapechanger in Africa in 1690 and ends in a future global Armageddon which will bring either a heaven or a hell for humanity.

In the midst of this series, Butler published one of her most evocative works, Kindred (1979). In this novel, the first written, although the fourth to be published, a Southern California black woman time travels back to the antebellum South, where she is enslaved. The protagonist did this in order to save the life of a white man, the son of a slavemaster, who will become her own ancestor. She thus ensures her own existence in the future by enabling atrocities in the past. The horror of a modern black woman, with modern sensibilities, trapped in a nightmarish past is both riveting and disturbing. Kindred has become a common text in high school and college courses and has sold over 250,000 copies.

In the 1980s Butler published her “Xenogenesis” trilogy, comprising Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1987), and Imago (1989), collected into the omnibus volume Xenogenesis (1989) and also republished under the collective title of Lilith’s Brood. Again, humanity is subjected to a vast eugenics program. This one, however, is conducted by aliens who have come upon a post-holocaust Earth where only a few humans remain alive in suspended animation. The aliens launch a long effort to inter-breed with the humans. Their goal is to produce a hybrid alien-human species which no longer exhibits the destructive tendencies which almost destroyed both humanity and the Earth itself.

The 1990s brought her powerful double-novel series, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). In Sower, which takes place in 2024, an apocalyptic Southern California is ravaged by global warming and swarming with murderous hoards of scavengers attacking the walled communities of the wealthy. The story continues in Talents, where a right-wing religious zealot ravages the remnants of American society. Talents went on to win the 1999 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Butler’s last novel, published shortly before her unexpected death at age 58 in 2006, was Fledgling (2005). A “young” female vampire is the only survivor of an attack on her vampire community. Genetically modified to enable her to walk in sunlight, she now must survive on her own, and discover what it means to be human.

In all of her work, Octavia Butler enlarged the genre of science fiction -- and helped teach us what it means to be human.