1/1/2024 0 Comments Octavia e butler occupationThe genre-bending musician and actress has cited Butler-who has, after all, been described as the Mother of Afrofuturism, an aesthetic and philosophy that Monáe has helped to popularize-multiple times as both personal favorite and creative inspiration. Also, taking it is way less lonely for people of color these days than it was when you first set out. We have the path you were walking when you died.Įspecially for science fiction authors of color, that path is easier to see now that you’ve walked it. And we have the memory of you, your pessimism and persistence. We don’t have weapons but we do have numbers. We’re going to have to do everything we can to maintain life on this planet. We’re also going to have to bake change-the-world cookies and ride change-the-world horses and vote in change-the-world elections. At least in this sense: we’re going to have to write change-the-world fiction, like you. All of us: women, and men, and every other gender as well African Americans, Native Americans, and every other race-all of us. Never would want to.īut now, despite that, despite the endearment with which I opened this letter, it looks like we’re all going to have to be Octavias. Gill, Nnedi Okorafor, and I started by telling our audience why each of us was in no way your replacement. How many ways is this question just plain wrong? Who has a vested interest in there being “an Octavia,” new or old? What would a “new Octavia” look like? How does her literary legacy affect the field today, and how might it do so in the future? And how does this legacy relate to this disturbing question? A panel of African-descended women currently writing genre fiction addresses this question, talking about Octavia’s oeuvre and their own: similarities, differences, market forces, and the pressures to model their contributions to the field on hers. Butler, some have asked who will take her place. This was a very big deal to me.Īfter the untimely death of the great writer Octavia E. In may ways, reading Wild Seed proved that what I was writing was okay, that people like me could be a part of this canon. And there is nothing like seeing a story in print that is similar to what you are trying to write. Reading Wild Seed, a story that featured an ageless shape-shifting Nigerian woman, blew my mind. When I look back, it’s clear to me that I discovered Octavia right when I needed her. Plus, I’d never read a purely speculative story set anywhere on the continent of Africa that addressed womanhood and patriarchy bluntly. I was one of two people of color in the writing group, and I was uncomfortable about workshopping my story. In the previous weeks at Clarion, I had just begun writing about an angry Nigerian woman in pre-colonial Nigeria who’d been run out of her village because she’d developed the ability to fly. That was the beginning of my bingeing on Octavia Butler’s works. I grabbed it, clasped it to my chest as if someone was going to snatch it from me, quickly bought it, and ran to my dorm room to start reading. There was only one copy of the book there on that fateful day. I was staring at Wild Seed by Octavia Estelle Butler As I strolled through the aisles, something extraordinary caught my eye, something I’d only ever seen once before in the science fiction and fantasy section of a bookstore: a cover featuring a dark-skinned black woman. I was attending the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University, and the organizers had brought my group to the local bookstore. I first came across Octavia’s work around 2001, when I was well on my way to identifying as a black female writer of speculative fiction. In her introduction to the graphic novel adaptation of Butler’s Kindred, Okorafor writes: The below are simply missives from a few writers and artists whom I found discussing the great Octavia Butler’s influence-on their own work and otherwise-at length, to help us consider the lasting good she’s done for literature. That list might actually be infinite, and at least also includes Wayétu Moore, Rivers Solomon, Sarah Pinsker, Nalo Hopkinson, Lester Spence, Valjeanne Jeffers, K. Of course, the writers quoted below are not the only ones to love or be influenced by Butler-not by far. Not surprisingly, this includes many of the best writers of SF, fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror working today, and so to celebrate Butler’s birthday, I’ve collected a few of their thoughts on her influence. She died in 2006-much too young, at only 58-already a certified genius who had a profound impact on many readers and writers across the world. Tomorrow, June 22, would have been legendary SF novelist and short story writer Octavia Butler’s 72nd birthday.
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