It’s hard to talk about Octavia Butler without going all inarticulate and rhapsodic.
In the preface to Bloodchild, she says this:
“The truth is, I hate short story writing. Trying to do it has taught me more about frustration and despair than I ever wanted to know.
(…)
“My earliest collections of pages weren’t stories at all. They were fragments of longer works–of stalled, unfinished novels. Or they were brief summaries of unwritten novels. Or they were isolated incidents that could not stand alone. All that, and poorly written, too.”
(…)
“I am essentially a novelist. The ideas that most interest me tend to be big. Exploring them takes more time and space than a short story can contain.”
Her short stories were as cohesive and balanced as everything else she wrote. But they aren’t…contained. They move and grow. It would be misleading to say that she shocks you; that would imply some point when she pulls back the curtain and you figure it all out. It doesn’t happen that way. Her prose–clear, stately, efficient–leads you in and then quietly changes around you. Eventually, mostly, you catch up, maybe, but the story never becomes manageable.
“Bloodchild,” the title story, starts:
“My last night of childhood began with a visit home.”
Here’s her description from the afterword:
“I tried to write a story about paying the rent–a story about an isolated colony of human beings on an inhabited, extrasolar world. At best, they would be a lifetime away from reinforcements.”
Home.
{ 16 comments }
OT: You’re back!!! You’re back!!!!
Where did you go, Feministe?
(Sorry, piny, for being off topic. The blog just up and disappeared two days ago. I missed it.)
I won’t ban you, but you have to go out–right now–and purchase and read Bloodchild.
I hope someone else in the cohort knows from Butler. Nothing more pathetic than a bookclub of one.
/waves/ Butler fan here. Bloodchild was one of her best works, IMO. What I like most about her stuff is the way she addresses (literally) outlandish situations successfully in the first person, from the POV of someone who’s living them out and sometimes has lived them from birth, as everyday reality. The best possible response to the grand “What If…?”
I read Fledgling last week, and I must say her editor(s) falied her in this one. It reads like a hasty publication, quite aside from being the expectable first-of-a-series setup story. Amnesia is a decent way around the old expository lump problem, I guess, and the intro was terrific, but this one needed another round of editing — which is not something I’ve thought of her other stuff. I know she’d had hypertension and (I heard) heart trouble; I wonder just how sick she was, and if that affected the timing.
I’m glad to see you back too.
I haven’t read any of her stuff, but your descriptions have piqued my interest (I had heard of her, I just haven’t read much SF lately).
Since I’m winding down on the current reading material, I’ll swing by a bookstore or library and pick up Bloodchild.
Damn. I’m saving it until I reread everything else. If it’s her Something Happened, I don’t know what I’ll do.
Sweet! I’m planning to write about it.
I’ve said before (but not here, IIRC), but xenogenesis -trilogy (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago) is amazingly good and thought-provoking. And trust me, I’m not praising it because of what Miss Butler was.
It would be interesting to see an analysis on that.
Am I now on perma-moderate?
Eh, never mind.
I prefer her Parable books [Parable of the Sower, Parabel of the Talents], but her xenogenesis books were also pretty good.
I haven’t tracked down many of her short stories– the ones I’ve read have been a part of “Years Best” collections.
Right. Apparently she hated writing them.
Considering the wealth of critical acclaim she accumulated in her lifetime, and the laudatory obits all over the press and the blogosphere, why would you assume that people here would think that?
piny:
Sometimes the fact that Octavia E. Butler was a woman and black (rare in scifi) is emphasized more than the fact that she was an incredible writer. Sort of “Look! I like African-American scifi!”.
I regret that line I wrote, and hope that this doesn’t turn into a race debate. I respect her and I hope this doesn’t start something negative.
I admit that that’s true. I think, however, that her position relative to the usual canon does bear mentioning, and not in a patronizing way: when she took on that genre, she basically had to create one of her own. And she…did. The worlds you can imagine are defined by the world you occupy; she ventured into unpublished territory in part because she was coming from a previously unacknowledged place. Ironically enough, the fact that her worlds were yet more alien to people weaned on Heinlein meant that she received less recognition for her work.
Yes, I think the fact she was from a different background than many other authors may very well have been the reason her writing was so unusual.
OT, but I didn’t even know that she was black when I picked some of her books at the local library (The scifi section wasn’t that big, so I read pretty much everything).
Heh. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know she was African American until I laid eyes on her.
What most intrigues me about her stuff is that I couldn’t put it down — even Bloodchild messed up what passes for my schedule — and I couldn’t quite say why.
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