Octavia Butler’s science fiction made black girls heroes
She was the first sci-fi writer to win a Genius Grant, and opened the door for works such as DuVernay’s adaptation of ‘A Wrinkle in Time’
When Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was finally published in 1962, following a brutal 26 rejections, a teenage black girl in California was sowing the seeds of a future as the grand dame of science fiction. Octavia Estelle Butler had decided at 12 years old that she would become a writer after watching the 1954 movie Devil Girl from Mars on television. She was shocked that someone had been paid to write it, and knew she could do better.
Sci-fi writers build futuristic worlds that connect the imaginary with reality. But reality for Butler, even in a genre that’s supposed to be boundaryless and reward creativity, posed a particular challenge. A black girl coming of age in 1960s Pasadena didn’t have the luxury to invent worlds in which race and class didn’t matter. Not seeing herself on the pages of the mostly white, mostly male genre she loved inspired her to imagine fantasy worlds with black girls and women at the helm.
In Butler’s 1976 debut novel, Patternmaster, the author explores dominance and power in a community of telepaths. At the top of the hierarchy sit the Patternists, who hold all the power, while the mutes at the bottom lack both power and social status. It was the first of five books in the Patternist series, published between 1976 and 1984, in which the recurring theme of dominance played out between humans categorized into genetic groups. Kindred (1979), a stand-alone novel and her most famous, sends the main character, Dana, back and forth between Los Angeles and a pre-emancipation-era Maryland plantation. Butler’s Xenogenesis series (1984 to 1989) continues her exploration of hybrid humans who have to coexist with other species for survival, while her Parable series (1993 to 1998) deals with the collapse of 21st-century America. Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, is an eerily prophetic dystopian tale that resonates strongly in today’s political climate. The story, which begins in 2024, is told through the journal entries of its 15-year-old black protagonist, Lauren Olamina, who describes a world suffering from an economic crash. As The New Yorker’s Abby Aguirre writes of the novel:
The middle class and working poor live in gated neighborhoods, where they fend off the homeless with guns and walls. Fresh water is scarce, as valuable as money. Pharmaceutical companies have created “smart drugs,” which boost mental performance, and “pyro,” a pill that gives those who take it sexual pleasure from arson. Fires are common. Police services are expensive, though few people trust the police. Public schools are being privatized, as are whole towns. In this atmosphere, a Presidential candidate named Christopher Donner is elected based on his promises to dismantle government programs and bring back jobs.
In other words, Butler not only invented futures and alternate universes with black girls and black women at the center; her work served as a cautionary tale for 21st-century America, investigating community, race, class, and politics. In Butler’s worlds, the disenfranchised could be heroes. Communities were a mixed bag of fantasy and true diversity. She shone a light on the perils of humanity’s domination problem and envisioned something better.
“Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other ‘isms’ that cause so much suffering in the world,” she wrote in her essay “A World Without Racism.”
Butler’s own journey begins in a mixed-raced Pasadena neighborhood. Her father, a shoe shiner, died when she was seven, leaving her to be raised by her mother and grandmother. She vividly remembers, as a child, accompanying her mother to the houses she cleaned for a living and having to enter through the back door. A weird and shy child with dyslexia, she began to write to ward off loneliness. As a kid, she fell in love with science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Before Butler’s untimely death, in 2006, she wrote more than 15 novels, received the esteemed Nebula and Hugo Awards (among many others), and, in 1995, became the first science fiction writer (of any race or gender) to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship. Her imagination granted her entry into spaces that had been dominated by whites for far too long. She showed other artists from marginalized communities, especially black women, that world-building knows no bounds.
Selma director Ava DuVernay took a cue from Butler by imagining new possibilities with her adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, which hits theaters this week. With a biracial lead (played by Storm Reid) to resemble modern times, and the casting of Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which, Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dr. Kate Murry, the world of this movie is dramatically different from the universe of L’Engle’s original. Nor will Wrinkle be DuVernay’s last foray into sci-fi. She recently inked a deal to bring Butler’s Dawn to the small screen. The series in development tells the story of a black woman who works with aliens to save humanity 250 years after a nuclear war. It’s a universe that Octavia Butler had to create, because for her, a world — real or alternate — without black girls was not a world worth creating. And, thanks to the godmother of sci-fi, she made sure it existed.
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