It was also at PCC that the seed for a story, which would eventually become her novel Kindred, was planted in Butler’s mind. Butler attended Pasadena City College, where she won a school-wide short story contest as a freshman.
What resulted was the beginnings of a story that would later become the foundation for her Patternist series.ĭespite being told by her aunt that Black people could not become writers, Butler persisted in pursuing her dream, continuing to write through junior high, high school, and beyond. As she mentioned in many interviews, she was moved to begin writing science fiction after seeing the movie Devil from Mars when she was 12 and deciding she could come up with a better story.
Though she may not have understood the grace and courage of this as a child, these events certainly inspired Butler’s worldview and writing later on.Ī shy child, Butler spent much of her time reading at the Pasadena Central Library, where she eventually gained an interest in science fiction in particular. Raised by a working mother, Butler witnessed from a young age the quiet heroism of survival, as her mother endured cruel treatment from white employers whose homes she cleaned. Guy and Laurice Butler, though her father passed away when she was a young girl.
Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947. Not only can we take Butler’s words at face value to understand her devotion to writing and her personality and beliefs, but we can also see the sharpness and incisiveness-even in this small sample paragraph-that characterizes her work. A pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil and water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.” I am also comfortably asocial, a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles. Her body of work, including such acclaimed novels as Kindred and Parable of the Sower, is lauded for its trenchant social commentary and continued pertinence well beyond its original publication.īutler’s self-penned author description in an early edition of Parable of the Sower gives us a great picture of the person she was: “Who am I? I am a forty-seven-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer. Butler was a renowned Black author who wrote in, and arguably revolutionized, the science fiction genre.
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