Octavia E. Butler

At 58 years old, Octavia E. Butler physical status not available right now. We will update Octavia E. Butler's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an African-American science fiction author.

A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, she became in 1995 the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.Butler was born in Pasadena, California.

After her father died, she was raised by her widowed mother.

Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing.

She began writing science fiction as a teenager.

She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction. She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time.

Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public and awards judges.

She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington state.

Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58.

Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library.

Early life

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, the only child of Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshine. Butler's father died when she was seven. She was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in what she would later recall as a strict Baptist environment.

Growing up in the racially integrated community of Pasadena allowed Butler to experience cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of racial segregation. She accompanied her mother to her cleaning work, where the two entered white people's houses through back doors, as workers. Her mother was treated poorly by her employers.

From an early age, an almost paralyzing shyness made it difficult for Butler to socialize with other children. Her awkwardness, paired with a slight dyslexia that made schoolwork a torment, made Butler an easy target for bullies, and led her to believe that she was "ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless." As a result, she frequently passed the time reading at the Pasadena Central Library. She also wrote extensively in her "big pink notebook". Hooked at first on fairy tales and horse stories, she quickly became interested in science fiction magazines, such as Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She began reading stories by John Brunner, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon.

At the age of 10, Butler begged her mother to buy her a Remington typewriter, on which she "pecked [her] stories two fingered." At 12, she watched the telefilm Devil Girl from Mars (1954) and concluded that she could write a better story. She drafted what would later become the basis for her Patternist novels. Happily ignorant of the obstacles that a black female writer could encounter, she became unsure of herself for the first time at the age of 13, when her well-intentioned aunt Hazel said: "Honey ... Negroes can't be writers." But Butler persevered in her desire to publish a story, and even asked her junior high school science teacher, Mr. William Pfaff, to type the first manuscript she submitted to a science fiction magazine.

After graduating from John Muir High School in 1965, Butler worked during the day and attended Pasadena City College (PCC) at night. As a freshman at PCC, she won a college-wide short-story contest, earning her first income ($15) as a writer. She also got the "germ of the idea" for what would become her novel Kindred. An African-American classmate involved in the Black Power Movement loudly criticized previous generations of African Americans for being subservient to whites. As Butler explained in later interviews, the young man's remarks were a catalyst that led her to respond with a story providing historical context for the subservience, showing that it could be understood as silent but courageous survival. In 1968, Butler graduated from PCC with an associate of arts degree with a focus in history.

Source

Writing career

In the 1971 Clarion Workshop anthology, Butler's first work was "Crossover." Harlan Ellison contributed the short story "Childfinder" to the anthology "The Last Dangerous Visions anthology. Butler recalled in her short fiction collection Bloodchild and Other Stories, "I thought I was on my way as a writer." "I had five more years of rejection slips and gruesome little jobs ahead of me when I first sold another word."

Butler worked on a collection of books that would later be published as the Patternist series, depicting humanity's evolution into three morphological species, the dominant Patternists, humans with heightened telepathic abilities and linked to the Patternmaster by a psionic chain; and the Mutes, ordinary human beings linked to the Patternists.

Patternmaster (1976), the first book in the series's internal chronology, became the final installment. It takes place in the distant future and depicts Teray, a young Patternist who fights for a position within Patternist society and eventually for the role of Patternmaster.

Mind of My Mind (1977), a precursor to Patternmaster's set in the twentieth century, came next. The story follows Mary, the psionic chain's designer and the first Patternmaster to bind all Patternists, as she and her father Doro, a psychopath who is determined to hold control of the psionic children he has bred over the centuries.

In 1978, Survivor, the third book in the series, was published. Alanna, the adopted child of the Missionaries, fundamentalist Christians who have travelled to another planet to escape Patternist control and Clayark disease, is the titular survivor. Alanna, who was captained by a local tribe called the Tehkohn, learns their language and adopts their customs, which she later uses to assist the Missionaries in avoiding bonding and assimilation into a rival tribe that defies the Tehkohn. Butler would later name Survivor as the least favorite of her books and have it outright from reprinting.

Butler took a break from the Patternist series to write Kindred (1979), as well as the short story "Near of Kin" (1979). Dana, an African-American woman, is transported from Los Angeles, 1976, to early 19th-century Maryland in Kindred, Dana. Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, a black free woman who was forced into slavery later in life, are among her ancestors who were forced into slavery later in life. The protagonist in "Near of Kin" discovers a taboo with her mother as she goes through her mother's things after her death.

Butler's fourth book of the Patternist series, Wild Seed, appeared in 1980, and his tale became the series's origin tale. Wild Seed follows the struggle between the four-thousand-year-old parapsychological vampire Doro and his "wild" child and bride, as well as the three-year-old shapeshifter and healer Anyanwu. Anyanwu is deceived by Doro, who has raised psionic children for decades, but she eventually escapes and creates communities that rival Doro's. Anyanwu, who has been waiting for or fighting Doro for decades, decides to commit suicide, causing the detective to admit his need for her.

Butler wrote "Speech Sounds," a story set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where a pandemic has caused the majority of humans to lose their ability to read, speak, or write. For those people, this sadness is accompanied by intense feelings of resentment, resentment, and rage. The 1984 Hugo Award for Best Short Story "Speech Sounds" was named on "Speech Sounds."

Butler wrote Clay's Ark, the last book of the Patternmaster series, in 1984. It is set in the Mojave Desert and focuses on an anthropology of humans brought to Earth by an extraterrestrial microorganism introduced to Earth by the one living astronaut of the spaceship Clay's Ark. As the microorganism encourages them to pass it, they kidnap ordinary people to infect them and, in the case of women, give birth to the mutant, sphinx-like children who will be the first members of the Clayark race.

Butler based on Clay's Ark on the recently published short story "Bloodchild" (1984). It's a fictional story on a desert planet. Human refugees and the insect-like aliens who keep them in a preserve in order to shield them from harming them while also breeding their children. The Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, as well as the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award, were often called Butler's "pregnant man story."

Butler's first book, Dawn, appeared three years later, was published as the first part of what would be described as the Xenogenesis trilogy. The series explores the theme of alienation by inducing situations in which humans are compelled to coexist with other species in order to survive, and extends Butler's ongoing study of genetically altered, mixed individuals and communities. After surviving a nuclear explosion that destroys Earth, protagonist Lilith Iyapo appears in Dawn's Dawn. The human race must be rescued by the Oankali aliens in order to establish a new race that eliminates a self-destructive characteristic of humans, namely their robust hierarchical tendencies. Butler stayed on Dawn with "The Evening and the Night," a story about how females with "Duryea-Gode Disease," a genetic disorder that causes dissociative states, obsessive self-mutilation, and violent psychosis, are able to influence others with the disorder.

Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989), the second and third books in the Xenogenesis trilogy, explore human evolution's predentious and innate tendencies, as humans rebel against Lilith's Oankali-engineered progeny. Adulthood Rites explores the abduction of Lilith's part-human, part alien baby, Akin, by a human-only group opposed to the Oankali, thirty years since humanity's return to Earth. Akin discusses both aspects of his identity through his time with the humans as well as the Akjai. The Oankali-only group acts as their mediator and colonizes Mars with a human-only colony. In an island off the coast of Imago, the Oankali people form a new species more able than themselves: the shape-shifting healer Jodahs, a human-Oankali ooloi who must find suitable human male and female mates to survive its metamorphosis and finds them in the most unexpected of places in a village of renegade humans.

Butler also published two books in the mid-1990s that were later identified as the Parable (or Earthseed) series. The books depict the Earthseed community's struggle to withstand 21st-century America's political and political turmoil due to poor environmental stewardship, corporate greed, and the growing divide between the wealthy and the poor. As solutions to such dilemmas, the books suggest alternate philosophical viewpoints and religious interventions.

Lauren Oya Olamina, the fifteen-year-old protagonist, appears in Parable of the Sower (1993), the first book in the series. Lauren, who suffers from a slew of physical ailments, is having trouble coping with her hometown Robledo's religious convictions and physical loneliness. Earthseed, the human race's space race, is projected to have a future on other planets. Lauren and two other survivors fled north after Robledo was ruined and Lauren's family and neighbors were killed. Lauren relocates her new organization to Northern California, naming her new neighborhood Acorn after recruiting members of varying social statuses along the way.

Parable of the Talents, Lauren's 1998 sequel, is set a year after Lauren's death and is told through excerpts of Lauren's journals as framed by her estranged daughter, Larkin. It discusses right-wing fundamentalist Christians' assassination of Acorn, Lauren's efforts to re-educate, and Earthseed's triumph as a community and a doctrine.

Butler's collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995), "The Evening and the Night," "Near of Kin," "Speech Sounds," and "Crossover", as well as non-fiction "Positive Obsession" and "Furor Scribendi," were among her Earthseed books.

Butler wrote the short stories "Amnesty" (2003) and "The Book of Martha" (2004), as well as her second standalone book, Fledgling (2005), after many years of writer's block. Both short stories explore how impossible circumstances can compel an ordinary woman to make a difficult decision. An alien abductee in "Amnesty" chronicles her horrific torture at the hands of the unwitting creatures and then humans who rescued her, and explains why she became a translator for the aliens now that the Earth's economy is in such deep decline. God commands a middle-aged African-American novelist to make one significant change to resolve humanity's destructive habits in "The Book of Martha." Martha's wish — to make humans have vivid and fulfilling dreams — means that she will no longer be able to do what she loves, writing fiction. These two stories were included in the 2005 edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Butler's last book published during her lifetime was Fledgling, a book that delves into the culture of a vampire group living in a mutualistic symbiosis with humans. It's location on the west coast of Japan and depicts the coming-of-age of a young female hybrid vampire named Shori whose species is called Ina. She must find revenge for her death, build a new family, and re-invent how to be an Ina. She was the only survivor of a brutal assault on her families, leaving her amnesiac. Fledgling was a significant departure from the vampire genre, according to scholars like Susana M. Morris, who favor whiteness over pale vampire heroes. Butler introduces Shori, the protagonist of Fledgling, as a petite Black female Ina.

Source

Awards and honors

• 1980: Creative Arts Award, L.A. YWCA
• 1984: Hugo Award for Best Short Story – "Speech Sounds"
• 1984: Nebula Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"
• 1985: Locus Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"
• 1985: Hugo Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"
• 1985: Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"
• 1988: Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novelette – "The Evening and the Morning and the Night"
• 1995: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant
• 1995: Bloodchild a New York Times Notable Book
• 1997: Honorary Degree in Humane Letters, from Kenyon College
• 1998: Publishers Weekly Best '98 Books – Parable of the Talents
• 1998: James Tiptree Jr. Award Honor List– Parable of the Talents
• 1999: Los Angeles Times Bestseller – Parable of the Talents
• 1999: Nebula Award for Best Novel – Parable of the Talents
• 2001: Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist – Parable of the Talents
• 2000: Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the PEN American Center
• 2005: Langston Hughes Medal of The City College
• 2010: Inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame
• 2012: Solstice Award
• 2018: The International Astronomical Union named a mountain on Charon (a moon of Pluto) Butler Mons to honor the author, after a public suggestion period and nomination by NASA.
• 2018: Google featured her in a Google Doodle in the United States on June 22, 2018, which would have been Butler's 71st birthday.
• 2019: Asteroid 7052 Octaviabutler, discovered by American astronomer Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory in 1988, was named in her memory. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on August 27, 2019 (M.P.C. 115893).
• 2019: Los Angeles Public Library opened the Octavia Lab, a do-it-yourself maker space and audiovisual space named in Butler's honor.
• 2020: Ignyte Award for Best Comics Team for a graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower, adapted by Damian Duffy and illustrated by John Jennings
• 2021: Named as one of the women inducted to the National Women’s Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2021.