“Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much su...”
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Author detail
An American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. [Comment by Tricia Sullivan, on The Guardian][1]: Octavia E Butler (1947–2006) > I was teaching in New York when I came across Octavia E Butler's Kindred in a secondary-school catalogue of novels recommended to support diversity. It caught my attention because Butler was described as a science-fiction writer. I thought I was familiar with science fiction, but I'd never heard of her – nor have a great many other readers, I suspect. For many years, Butler was the sole African-American woman novelist in science fiction. Kindred tells the wrenching and unforgettable story of a young black woman who time-travels and saves the life of her slaveholder ancestor, but it is, in Butler's words, "a grim fantasy", not science fiction. > Beginning in the 1970s, Butler wrote three sequences of novels: the Patternist books, the Lilith's Brood series and the Parable novels (incomplete at her tragic death in 2006). Critically respected, she won the Hugo and Nebula awards, received a Clarke nomination, the PEN lifetime achievement award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. A serious writer working in a field that is seldom taken seriously, Butler addressed biological control, gender, humanity's relationship with aliens, genetics and even the development of a fictional religion. Her narratives leave space for the reader's involvement while exploring the nature of change. They gaze unflinchingly on power dynamics. "Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles," Butler stated, "and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together." Butler's writing is courageous, stimulating and infused with a rare purity of intention. Crushingly, she died at the height of her powers. [Bloodchild and Other Stories][2] is a good place to begin discovering her work. [1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice [2]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL35621W/Bloodchild_and_other_stories
Quotes
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“Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much su...”
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“While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fi...”
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“A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in f...”
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“Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their...”
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“The major tragedies in life, there's just no compensation. But the minor ones you can always write about. It's my way of dealing, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The sto...”
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“Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.”
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“The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.”
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“How dull it is to have people defining you.”
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“Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?”
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“I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.”
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“Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.”
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“I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'C...”
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“Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.”
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“As a black and as a woman, I didn't think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. I would have spent more time struggling ju...”
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“Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something whe...”
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“Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.”
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“Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.”
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“If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?”
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“But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.”
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“And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.”
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