Octavia E. Butler

October 31, 2016
Canavan supplies a cogent analysis of the works and career of legendary science fiction and fantasy author Octavia E. Butler. Drawing upon Butler’s vast archive at the Huntington Library, Canavan unearths a timeline of how Butler’s work fits together and how it evolved. The book begins with Butler’s death from a fall (or possibly a stroke) at age 58 in 2006, and then goes back in time to examine how her writing and publishing career unfolded. Starting with her earliest published stories, Canavan shows that virtually all Butler’s work is conceptually linked together. He reveals that one of the keys to understanding Butler’s writing is seeing how the strands of one particular series, the Patternist novels, thread their way through her other works. Butler eschewed utopias and challenged racial stereotypes in her fiction, demonstrating, according to critic Greg Tate, how “black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine.” An appendix includes Butler’s groundbreaking essay on race and science fiction, “Lost Races of Science Fiction.” Though she herself died young, Butler’s most complex and enduring characters are—like her novels—destined to endure. This excellent, comprehensive study sheds new light on the process and philosophy of one of the most important authors of our time.

October 15, 2016
A deep reading of the work of the late science-fiction master.If readers outside the realm of science fiction haven't heard of Octavia Butler (1947-2006), Canavan (Literature/Marquette Univ.; co-editor: The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, 2015) suggests that they should have: "She was never, perhaps, quite the household name she had once hoped to be--but she was widely and deeply beloved." Best known for her 1979 novel Kindred, she was "a legend in her field, one of the best writers of her generation," and was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship and a PEN lifetime achievement award. This is no book for those needing an introduction to the futurist, anti-utopian vision of a black female author in a field dominated by white males. Full appreciation for these analyses requires not only a deep familiarity with her fiction, but also of the academic interpretations and arguments it has spawned. Here is a representative sentence: "Against the tradition of Butler criticism that has emphasized a postcolonial politics of cosmopolitan hybridity and that has consequently tended to view the [fictional] Oankali as legitimate benefactors to humankind, then, I feel I must insist on the extent to which the Oankali turn out, in this reading, to be genuinely monstrous after all." Such analysis is targeted at those for whom reading a text is a precursor to "unpacking" it. Canavan provides plenty of plot description and analysis of fiction that has never been published since Butler's published work (12 novels, one story collection) "is really only the very tip of a vast iceberg." There remains a "vast intertextual hidden archive of alternative versions and lost tales that will, I hope, reinvigorate the study of her work." Butler is a significant, influential author, but this study best serves those who already recognize her significance and influence. Scholarship for science-fiction scholars.

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