“I used to see her going to back doors, being talked about while she was standing right there, and basically being treated like a non-person. Her father died during her infancy and her mother ’s occupation provided Butler with early lessons in racism and economic inequity: “My mother was a maid and sometimes she took me to work with her when I was very small and she had no one to stay with me, ” Butler recalled to Black Scholar. ” Inpsired Early By Science Fictionīutler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California. The limits are the imagination of the writer. ” As the award-winning author told Black Scholar, “A science fiction writer has the freedom to do absolutely anything. Such explorations, Cooper noted in Vibe, were previously absent from science fiction: “In the ’70s, Butler ’s work exploded into this ideological vacuum like an incipient solar system. ”īutler ’s work has helped put race and gender into the foreground of speculative fiction, exploring these and other social and political issues with a developed sense of ambiguity and difficulty. ” Vibe magazine ’s Carol Cooper declared that what Gibson “does for young, disaffected white fans of high tech and low life, Octavia Estelle Butler does for people of color.

Along with “cyberpunk ” novelist William Gibson, Terri Sutton of the LA Weekly listed Butler among “ science fiction ’s most thoughtful writers. ” Butler -the only recognized black woman writer in the genre -has become one of sci-fi ’s leading lights, having published the Patternmaster series, the Xenogenesis Trilogy, the celebrated historical fantasy Kindred, and 1993 ’s highly praised dystopian saga The Parable of the Sower, among other works.

“I didn ’t decide to become a science fiction writer, ” Octavia Butler claimed in an interview with Frances M.

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