[Previous entry: ""] [Main Index] [Next entry: ""]

02/27/2006: "One of the good ones."

Octavia E. Butler
22 June 1947 - 25 February 2006


I'd be lying if I said Octavia Butler was one of the authors whose work inspired my love for SF in the first place. I discovered Harrison & Heinlein in my early teens, Philip Dick only a little later, but Butler didn't come to my attention until I rediscovered the medium in my undergrad years, yellow-bound hardback SF classics from Hillhead Library enticing me back to the genre of ideas. The 'Xenogenesis' series was 'proper SF', based around a series of events that is currently technologically impossible, but which was both plausible & consistent, and which was used to explore important questions about human nature. Her protaganists were tough, practical women - a welcome relief from the love-sick flakes that populated Heinlein's stuff - and she was more than willing to put them through the ringer.

I came across 'Kindred' a while after that, and it remains one of the handful of SF novels that I unreservedly recommend to anyone, be they genre enthusiast or sceptic. Political without being preachy, horrific but not prurient, heart-rending but with a core of that trademark solid pragmatism; if you're regularly being dragged back though time to the slave-owning Deep South, do you (a) curl into a ball & cry, (b) rant a disbelieving world until they lock you up in this time period too, or (c) carry a flick-knife & some antibiotics with you at all times, & spend your time in the library learning as much as you can about the period? For Butler's heroine, that's a no-brainer.

She was one of the few SF writers (along with, I'd say, Priest & Ballard) who could stroll unselfconsciously from the genre ghetto into the literary mainstream, and be warmly welcomed in both worlds. I know I'll read her work again, and I'm sorry their won't be more to come.