Octavia Butler

[Wreybies]

This is a little scrap of a gushing praise I posted at a fan site for one of my all time favorites

Octavia Butler’s work redeemed Science Fiction for me in many ways.

As a young, gay, Latino man in love with a genre which constantly betrayed me by making me invisible and unrepresented, Octavia’s work said to me, “I see you. I recognize you. I validate you, and I will write about you.”

Once the initial euphoria passed at finding a woman of color writing Science Fiction about diverse people, I took a deep breath and read again.

Although I have read most of her works, I am drawn again and again to her Xenogenesis trilogy. It is raw, uncompromising, even brutal at times in the way it asks, “What is this thing that I am? What kind of creature am I?” She takes the question to its origin, to its root. She does not complicate the matter with philosophical blankets to coddle and swath the sensibilities of the reader. She asks how and why do we function in our most basic manner, as animals evolved along with the rest of life on this planet. For many this would seem a rude and base question. But for me, it is the most honest and frank question one could ask because without an answer to this most basic of questions, no subsequent questions can truly be asked or answered with any meaning.

How refreshing to find honesty in literature.

How refreshing to find someone with the courage not to pander, not to lie, and not to treat me, the reader, as a dullard.

Um, yeah. That’s how I feel. :mrgreen:

[jebni]

It’s funny, I recently read something about there being a consensus about Butler’s lack of prose style. I had no idea where that was coming from!

[Wreybies]

I have read similar concerning her work, and I agree that it seems like a completely non sequitur comment. Almost as though they had not read the work. And no, she was not an author given to wax rhapsodically and “wow” the reader with her grasp of the language and capacity for purple prose which, for me, makes her an enviable roll model. She asks the reader to focus on her work, not on her, the woman behind the work. I have read much work by other, more “popular” authors where the prose is so distracting from what is happening in the context of the story that it ends up just being masturbatory on the part of the author.

I won’t name names.

coughcoughstephenkingcoughcough

Sorry, I had some ego stuck in my throat just then. Better now.

I would think, knowing Miss Butler’s cultural background here in the U.S., that this is part of a cultural predisposition to not use language that excludes certain readers. Her work is purposefully inclusive. I feel that perhaps those who would make such disparaging claims against her work, critics and the like here in the U.S., are unaware of their own privileged positions within our cultural paradigm giving them the sense of entitlement to make such claims.