The science fiction world was reeling Monday over the news that Octavia Butler, one of the few celebrated black science fiction writers, had died Friday.
Butler was pronounced dead at Northwest Hospital after a fall at her home in Lake Forest Park, outside of Seattle. It's reported that she struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home.
Butler, 58, was known for addressing issues of class, race and politics in her work. She was the only science fiction writer to ever receive the coveted MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “genius grant,” which she won in 1995.
In 2000, she won the Nebula Award, science fiction’s highest prize, for her novel “Parable of the Talents.” The story was set in a futuristic utopian community that had been ravaged by civil war. The book explored intolerance, the growing gap between rich and poor and environmentalism.
Butler began writing at age 10, and told friends she embraced science fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called "Devil Girl from Mars" and thought, "I can write a better story than that." In 1970, she took a bus from her hometown of Pasadena, California, to attend a fantasy writers workshop in East Lansing, Michigan.
Parable of the Talents
Kindred
Her first novel, "
Kindred," in 1979, featured a black woman who travels back in time to the South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, "Fledgling," an examination of the "Dracula" legend, was published last fall.
Steven Barnes, a fellow black science-fiction writer, told BlackAmericaWeb.com that Butler was “the realest writer I’ve ever known. She was more deeply into her art than any sane person ought to be.”
Barnes said he and Butler became friends more than 25 years ago when they ended up in the same neighborhood, after Barnes moved into his mother’s home following her death. They became fast friends, frequently having dinner at each other’s homes and talking about writing and various issues.
Barnes said that Butler was such an intellectual giant that she sometimes risked being overwhelmed by her quest for perfection and deep understanding. He also noted that the early years of her career could not have been kind to her as a nearly lone black and female science fiction writer at a time when that was simply unheard of.
“Slogging through that morass requires almost superhuman strength,” Barnes said. “She simply was an extraordinary human being. Being an artistic soul means you have to expose your skin to the elements.”
Butler had completed a book tour in the fall and had begun to decline speaking engagements because of health problems and a desire to concentrate on her writing.
“She was working on a new novel, and she always had herself on several things at once,” Leslie Howle, senior manager for education and outreach at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
“She was funny, warm, solicitous, caring, kind -- everything you want out of a good friend,” said Howle, who said she had known Butler since 1985. She said Butler enjoyed nature, and the pair went on a trip to the mountains or the ocean every summer.
While she had a reputation for being “private and hermit-like,” Howle said, Butler enjoyed the company of a small, close-knit group of friends and was always up for chatting on the phone or receiving visitors.
She also was seriously committed and outspoken in her efforts to end social injustice. “The current (George W. Bush) administration made her irate and despairing,” Howle said.
“She thought the Bush administration was destroying the planet,” Barnes said. “And she was this extraordinary intellectual woman. She could make her case.”
Barnes said Butler was a meticulous researcher and that to engage in debate with her came at your own peril, if you were not prepared. “If you got into an argument with Octavia," he said, "you better come to play.”
Burler's death "was such a shock," science fiction author" Peter J. Heck told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "She had a lot of good books left in her."
Heck said he first met Butler in a telephone interview when he was editor of “Xignals,” WaldenBooks’ science fiction newsletter which was promoting her book “Parable of the Sower.”
“I was on the phone with her about an hour, and I was charmed by her,” Heck said. “Her responses to questions tended to (show) …that she was really interested in answering the question. A lot of (authors) will say what they think people need to hear to read the book.”
Heck said Butler’s willingness to tackle “uncomfortable” issues in her books was virtually unparalleled among science fiction writers. “She was one of the first to make that a consistent focus of her work,” he said.
On science fiction Web sites Monday, words like “devastated” and “shocked’ were used repeatedly as word of Butler’s death spread.
“I’m stunned,” Diane McClure, a copy editor at the Newark Star-Ledger, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “I first discovered her when I moved to a new town for a new job, and I knew no one. I was feeling lonely, and I went to the library for something familiar and comforting. I was looking through the science fiction section and saw a book titled ‘Wild Seed.’ I pulled it off the shelf and there was a drawing of a black woman on the cover. I’d never seen that before. I grabbed it, read it and have been a fan ever since.”
“Devastation comes to mind,” author Leslie Esdaile Banks told BlackAmericaWeb.com when reached at her home in Philadelphia Monday afternoon.
Banks said she had just learned hours earlier that Butler had died. On deadline for the seventh of her nine-book Vampire Huntress series, Banks had turned off the Internet, radio and television over the weekend to concentrate on work.
"When I [heard the news],” Banks said, “I was like, ‘Wow, a serious beacon of light in that whole genre of writing -- in that whole genre of thinking -- just went out.’”
Banks said she once moderated a panel on which Butler sat at a Celebration of Black Writing conference in Philadelphia a few years ago, but really only knew Butler “as an admirer. She was someone who had opened the door first for the rest of us.”
She said she saw Butler at a book signing in December “and I stood there gaping like anyone else,” as she waited in line to have her book signed.
Butler was born in Pasadena. Her father died when Butler was young of heart failure, Howle said.
In various interviews, Butler described herself as a shy daydreamer, who struggled to overcome dyslexia and that she took up writing at age 10 to “escape loneliness and boredom” and that by 12, her interest in science fiction began to develop. She moved to Seattle in 1999.
That dyslexia, along with other health issues, including high blood pressure, led Butler to give up driving in later life, Howle said.
Howle said Butler’s relatives were en route to Seattle and that funeral services would be held in Pasadena. She said the Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame is planning a memorial service to be held later this week.
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Associated Press contributed to this story.
