Hello my lovely readers! This biography came out on Tuesday, I got a Libby copy of it on Wednesday and I'm already finished! Let's get into it.
SYNOPSIS
As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.
In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories.
Morris explains what drove She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”
MY THOUGHTS
Octavia Butler. An ordinary woman with a "positive obsession" for writing that it turned her into a trailblazer.
Octavia Butler. An ordinary woman with a "positive obsession" for writing that it turned her into a trailblazer.
Like a majority of readers, I was first introduced to Butler through Kindred. I have never bene a fan of science fiction, but this piqued my interest because it was mostly based in reality. I haven't read any of her other works since then, but everyone claims Butler is a prophet because of her novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents and how accurately they predict what is going on in the 2020s, despite being written in the 1990s.
Butler's dedication to her craft and her dedication to being accurate and researching places, people and things for her novels resonated with me because that's how I operate as well. I truly felt a kinship with Butler and her writing process.
This was an incredible biography with how it perfectly balanced her professional life and personal life, gave great insight and analysis to her novels and gave great context to the world in Butler's lifetime.
Out of five stars, I'd give it a four. I had to knock a star off because the author started inserting herself into second half of the book, which I don't care for.
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