So I’ve finished re-reading Bloodchild, and am about to start Parable of the Talents, but I wanted to talk a little bit about Octavia Butler’s role in my reading life before I tackle “friendly aliens who want to implant their larvae in our stomachs,” and all of the other wonders of the Butler multiverse.
Hearing that she’d passed away was like hearing that Trina Schart Hyman had died of cancer, or that Kate Bornstein had been diagnosed with cancer. With Hyman, it was, I want to be a painter/artist/illustrator because of you. With Bornstein, it was, I knew I wasn’t gonna die because of you. They were the people who opened up possibilities that I had given up on; they were the first ones I found. With Butler, it was, I figured out how to read books that didn’t blow dead wharf rats because of you.
Some background:
I was an extremely bookish kid, partly because I was smart and partly because I cannot make friends. I have always read–constantly, reflexively. I am never without a book. I am never without a list of books I want to read. When I’m curious, I find a book to teach me. When I’m bored, I find a book to occupy me. When I’m sad or lonely or depressed, I find a bookstore to comfort me. When I enter anyone’s house, I make a beeline to the bookshelf.
Although I am grateful for this habit, it doesn’t mean much all by itself. There’s a wonderful Victorian short story I saw once, which I’ll never see again, whose narrator is a confirmed book addict. He describes his proclivity as no different from alcoholism or morphine addiction, and goes into detail about his itchiness and discomfort whenever he can’t get his reading fix. Any book will satisfy him. Tacitus, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Smith. But he has to have some book near at hand, or he’s completely miserable. So dependent is he that he has carted a steamer trunk of fifty books with him on a trip around the world.
I’m the same way. And like that guy, I was tasteless. I am tasteless; I read for no purpose but reading. But I fell in with a much worse crowd than Wilkie Collins. After I’d read every children’s and young-adult book I could find (happened on Francesca Lia Block, Dianna Wynne Jones, Mildred Taylor, Roald Dahl, Kathryn Lasky; failed to find Katherine Paterson among many many others), I started looking around for something else to chew on.
So, what does a nerdy little pre-teen jump to when they’re looking for something interesting, thick, adult, but not too scary? When they haven’t gotten much further than “should not have pictures”?
Sci-fi and fantasy! (And horror, of course, but that was a little unladylike.)
Now, I’m not trying to say that there is no good speculative fiction or fantasy–or that it’s much worse in general than plain old fiction. I’m just saying that a lot of it sucks.
I managed to find its most meagre offerings–especially since I had a tendency to equate “quantity” with “quality.” One Robert Jordan book was as good as eight Ursula K. LeGuin titles. Sheckley? Zelazny? Edgar Rice Burroughs? David Weber? Mercedes Lackey? Charles DeLint?
Anne McCaffrey long–long–after she stopped caring? Star Trek, Star Wars, Magic: The Gathering novelizations? Isaac Asimov when he was making puns? Stephen King? Stephen King: lyrical fantasy novelist?! Cat-themed anthologies? Unicorn-themed anthologies?
Yes, please!
Remember that it is an unregenerate book addict and proud book lover who says this: I might as well have been watching television. (I did a whole lot of that, too.) “To Serve Mankind” was the equivalent of “The Overcoat.” Anne Rice was Tolstoy. If there was an electric blue sword on the cover, or a vampire in the blurb, I wanted it. The trashier the better. The less challenging–in every way–the better.
This makes a lot of sense, really. If you had taken me, age ten, to the world’s biggest supermarket and told me I could buy whatever the hell I wanted for dinner, do you think I would have chosen:
(a) dew-bright fruits and vegetables?
(b) prime cuts of meat (or high-fidelity alternatives)?
(c) a ready-made meal?
(d) cookies, candy, cookies covered in chocolate, candy masquerading as cookies, candy with cookies in, froot, corn syrup and food coloring, ersatz cereals featuring marshmallows in every conceivable shape and color, maybe a big ol’ sack of marshmallows, chocolate chips to eat straight out of the bag, peanut butter “chocolate chips,” butterscotch “chocolate chips,” hot fudge sauce, hot fudge sauce with marshmallow, every single carton of ice cream on offer…?
I didn’t know what the hell I was doing! I was making myself sick on the literary equivalent of all Frankenberry all the time, because, hey: bright colors and lots of sugar. It didn’t even taste all that good. I was bored out of my skull. I had forgotten what a good book was like, but I sure didn’t love the ones I had.
Octavia Butler, bless her forever, was the first decent writer to drift across to the far banks of River Dumbass. A carton of raspberries after five years of Jolly Ranchers. Speculative fiction that actually considered. A universe that opened up ahead of you, a narrative that opened up your head. She wrote because she was sick and tired of all the books that failed to nourish her and speak to her, and her brass need to really get it exactly right all the time comes across in every necessary word. I picked up Imago thinking it was gonna be a cowboys-and-aliens novel, or maybe a spy-vs-alien novel. It had a picture of a tentacly person on the cover, which was bright purple. A lot of it went right over my head (Intersex aliens? Extraterrestrials as colonists rather than humanity as Rudyard Kipling? An “enemy” both victorious and complex? An apocalypse they don’t really talk about much? The threat and reality of non-gratuitous rape? Racism as, um, mentioned?) but I knew I wanted more. I started to look for the interesting stuff.
I owe Trina Schart Hyman for Egon Schiele. I owe Kate Bornstein for az and Jay. I owe Octavia Butler not only for her books, but for Candas Jane Dorsey, Samuel R. Delany, Ian M. Banks, Ursula K. LeGuin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cynthia Ozick, J.M. Coetzee, Hari Kunzru, Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Carey, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, E. Annie Proulx, Nawal El Saadawi, James Baldwin, Henry Roth, Jo Ann Beard, Rohinton Mistry, Lorrie Moore, Ralph Ellison, George Orwell, Edwige Danticat, Herman Wouk, Andrea Barrett, Toi Dericotte, Myla Goldberg, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, ZZ Packer, and everyone else I found waiting for me as soon as I put down the breastplate-rippers.
I can’t believe I’m about to do this.
I agree with everything piny said. As a nerdy (though outgoing) kid, I also gravitated to a lot of that schlok. I admit: the writing was awful. The stories were cheezier than the worst teen TV. The cover illustrations, god help us all, were embarrasing enough to be hidden behind other books like a secret porn stash.
But. I’m about to defend (on a few counts) some of those people he takes to task. I picked up a lot of those books starting at the tender age of, oh, 11 or so, and kept reading them throughout high school. And the messages that I took away from them, I believe, made me a better person. Mercedes Lackey had the first gay characters I’d ever encountered, and they were often the heros. Her books and others had quirky, determined, independent female characters, and the resolutions to their stories were not necessarily predicated on their finding love. Many of them were about the goodness in people rejected or ignored by polite society. I encountered these stories at an impressionable age. Though my mother tried, to a greater or lesser extent, to instill these same lessons in me, these books cemented them when other popular culture undermined them, and I think there’s a great deal to be said for that. Many, many other books were able to help me develop as a writer and thinker; these cringe-inducing pieces of pulp helped me remember (at such a vulnerable age!) that there was dignity and honor in a thoughtful rejection of mainstream trends when those trends were shallow, bigoted, and hurtful.
The appeal of the books died off when I went to college and began to live my life more fully than I’d been able to earlier. I would have been embarrassed to admit how comforting they had been to me in earlier years. I haven’t looked at them in at least 8 years. But I’m grateful they were there for me when I needed them most.
…You’re right, and some of them did help me in that way too. But I don’t think all of these books were oases of recognition for all readers; look at Mercedes Lackey’s protagonists.
I confess, piny, that I haven’t looked at them in a long time; there might be a lot in them that I’d find very problematic now. I was speaking from my memory of how they felt at the time. I also don’t know anything about what these authors have written in the last 10 years. I’m certainly willing to be corrected in my impressions.
Heh. The talking horses, for example.
I didn’t mean to impugn your reading habits, honestly, or to imply that there’s anything wrong with remembering any of these writers fondly. I suppose I just wanted to point out another way in which Butler provided something that was scarce before.
I definitely need to try Octavia Butler again. I read one book way back when, didn’t understand it and moved on. I confess to being a book addict – I will read cereal boxes, the free ad papers, info pamphlets – anything. Its a definite compulsion and I too have read a lot of bad sci-fi. As for Zelazny – have read a Rose for Eclesiastes and Lord of Light over and over again….
He might have been a much-too-young, actually. Although I remember reading and hating one of the novels in the Amber series. We had problems with that in my house. My dad tried to get me to read Aurora Dawn when I was twelve.
I’m a big fan of Charles de Lint, despite deep, deep reservations about his appropriation and romanticization of Indian culture. But my discovery of Moonheart when I was 14′ish can probably be credited with turning my head towards anthropology, which if I hadn’t ended up majoring in I might never have learned to have deep, deep reservations about his appropriation and romanticization of Indian culture.
That said, of course a lot of SF is crap. That’s Sturgeon’s Law: 95% of everything is crap. (None of Sturgeon’s SF is crap, though.) But I think that crap has a purpose; a lot of discriminating readers grew up on a diet of crappy SF — many times over the number who grew up on a diet of Ralph Ellison, Henry Roth, and Cynthia Ozick! If nothing else, even the worst SF seems to ready its readers for the complexities of everyday life that someone like Roth writes about (pick your Roth — Henry, Joseph, or Phillip). And while a lot of it is, in fact, juvenile, a lot of it (most than is, maybe) isn’t — which is precisely why writers like Butler and le Guin found in SF a useful template for discussing “adult” topics like racism, sexism, rape, exploitation, religion, etc.
Dustin, de Lint does tackle–in part–the European appropriation of Native culture in his upcoming Newford book. I think he’s always tried to be respectful; I’ve never gotten the sense that he’s trying to be exploitative, rather that he’s trying to be inclusive. I’m not saying he succeeds all the time or even most of the time, but it sure is nice to read a fantasy novel set in North America where there all the people aren’t pink or where the token non-pink person is exoticized.
My evening/weekend job is as the SF/F reviewer for a national magazine. I read widely within the genre, and there is a lot of interesting and good work being done. Tobias Bucknell’s debut novel was fantastic, as was Tim Pratt’s. Kage Baker is doing incredible work in her Company novels. And there’s Lois McMaster Bujold, who just keeps getting better and better. I try really hard to choose quality books for the section, but it can be difficult to balance my desire to review books which aspire to more than just bestsellerdom with the commercial needs of the publication. Usually, the commercial needs win. Sigh.
I was devastated to hear that Butler had died–I haven’t read all her work, but what I have read has stuck with me, in particular the Xenogenesis books. Butler’s work was never easy to read or even always likable, but it always makes you think.
Natalie, I agree with you, to a point (I must — I easily spend more money on de Lint books than any other author, what with Subterranean Press’ beautiful limited editions and all). As a reader, I think de Lint’s work is, as you say, respectful; as an anthropologist, though — and a Native Americanist at that — I am concerned about work that casts the traditions of an Other culture as “fantasy”, “urban” or otherwise. This is not just de Lint’s issue, of course — fantasy has always thrived on folk traditions: Tolkein with his Anglo-Saxon elves, dwarves, and orcs; Yeats and Dunsany with their Celtic faeries; White and Steinbeck with the King Arthur stories; and so on. Then again, these were *Their* folk traditions; de Lint isn’t digging into his own cultural heritage so much as someone else’s. So I’m conflicted — which is fine. There are few pleasures in life that aren’t conflicted ones in one way or another.
I don’t see Sheri S. Tepper on your list.
That’s a disturbing oversight that should be corrected as soon as possible. Start with The Gate to Women’s Country or possibly Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Grass is another great one, too (and it’s not about what you think.)
Thanks.
Everyone else is free to add book recommendations.
David Brin, of course, and Vernor Vinge. Quite “heavy” scifi, both, but exceptionally good.
Check out Molly Gloss (“Dazzle of Day” and “Jump-Off Creek”). Some of the greatest depictions of every day human living, in my humble opinion, in a science fiction setting in one and in a western in the other. “Dazzle of Day” has a blurb on the cover from Ursula K Le Guin, which is why I picked it up in the first place. Since then I’ve read it a couple times (including this past week…it’s on my mind). It’s kind of a future utopia…
C. J. Cherryh.
Patricia Kennealy-Morrison. Celts in space!
oh, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series is interesting reading as well.
Sorry, I forgot one more favorite that wasn’t mentioned: Suzette Haden Elgin. She is a linguist, and makes fascinating word pictures for one’s mind. (Native Tongue trilogy is very appropriate for these times!)
Also, her Ozark trilogy is great, from a anthropological standpoint, and especially for independent-minded Southerners (yes, there are some of us around).
Reading is one of my favorite things in life, always has been. I get a little carried away when discussing favorite authors and books.
I too am a book addict, both cheesy and breath-taking. Someone mentioned Tepper and I had to stop myself from waxing lyrical about her – she is one of those authors that, in reading her, I saw a whole shift in the way I looked at the world.
I think even cheesy sci-fi is better than most novels because sci-fi lets you see your own culture objectivly (even if you dont realize it).
Id like to add that since everyone in our family is a huge Stargate fan I have often framed answers to my son’s hard questions in terms of the show. And before you judge me, Twisty herself has used Stargate in a forced-childbirth comparison.
I am a dork. I admit it. But any of you book-lovers are welcome to come read at my house whenever you’re in Joisey.
Same.
Kudos to you. Stargate is a great show because, far more than Star Trek ever did, they use the science-fiction premise to explore significant, contemporary issues. For instance this past season (and the upcoming one) have explored the threat of a militant fundamentalist religion and the response of a pluralist, secular society and military.
I’m another of those sci-fi as junk food/ junk TV replacement people. I do enjoy just reading– the reading the cereal box compulsion that’s been mentioned makes me laugh with uncomfortable agreement.
Your list of authors (at the end of your post) gives me a place to continue my habits… with, perhaps, a little more nutritional value.
I consider them all to be fantastic reads in the entertainment sense of the phrase. Equating “challenging” with “booooring” does a disservice to…everyone involved. Butler snapped me out of that, too.