When Los Angeles native and journalist Lynell George was researching her book A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The Works of Octavia Butler, she was astounded by the depths of the author’s curiosity. Whatever we find novel and confounding in the current news cycles was almost certainly happening back when Butler was writing, and the many newspaper clippings in her collection of papers at Huntington Library in San Marino prove it. If she sounds impressively ahead of her time, it’s because she was steeped in the goings-on of her era. Born and raised in Pasadena, where she also lived for much of her adult life, Butler was deeply interested in what drought and segregation in California would mean for the state’s most vulnerable populations, especially Black women, a theme she explored with unflinching intensity in Parable of the Sower. For Butler-unlike Le Guin, who died in 2018, and Delany, who is 79-the peak of her recognition has arrived posthumously.īutler’s books-from the Xenogenesis trilogy to the Parable series to her later work, including Fledgling-tackled environmental destruction, border conflicts, intergenerational trauma, and the intricacies of race, gender, and reproduction. In recent years, we’ve seen the tremendous literary contributions of these politically insightful sci-fi writers fêted rather than ghettoized. But genre fiction was historically not considered the breeding ground for the great American novel, especially if you were Black, gay, and/or a woman (all three authors were at least one of the above). Le Guin were the only significant science fiction authors attempting such ideologically ambitious stories within the genre, placing left-of-center national politics and local histories right at the core of their plots. In the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, when Butler published the bulk of her work, she, Samuel Delany, and Ursula K. Butler covered in her 15 novels and two story collections is traceable-but you need time.
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