The Oracle: Octavia E. Butler

"I began writing about power because I had so little."
— Octavia E. Butler

As a science fiction lover, Octavia E Butler started to write her own stories as a teenager. She liked to write science fiction that “it has no walls, no closed-door,”[1] she said in an interview with Charlie Rose. Butler built imaginary worlds while using the inspirations from the real world she experienced, including the problematic features in the world, such as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, class, and ability. Different from white male heroes busting aliens, saving brown people, Butler created diverse characters for diverse audiences. What is more, her visionary stories seem to have predicted many current circumstances today and become more and more relevant even after decades of original publication.

"Why aren't there more SF [science fiction] Black writers? There aren't because there aren't. What we don't see, we assume can't be. What a destructive assumption."
— Octavia E. Butler

Born in Pasadena, California, in 1947, Octavia Butler was raised by her mother and her grandmother. Growing up she was shy and introverted, and reading and writing were her outlets. She begged her mother to buy her a typewriter at the age of 12.

And after watching a science fiction film called “Devil Girl From Mars”, she was impressed by the terrible story and thought she could do better than that.

Butler struggled for decades to make a living doing work as a telemarketer, potato chip inspector, and dishwasher, among other things. She got up at 2 AM every morning so she can write her fiction before going to work.[2]

In 1993 and 1998, Butler published Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, the novels that solidified her fame as a writer. In 1995, she was awarded the MacArthur Grant, also known as the “Genius Grant”, as the first science fiction writer.

"Who am I? I am a forty-seven-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer. I am also comfortably asocial—a hermit. ... A pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive."
— ctavia E. Butler