My life in books

Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal, is a collection of tributes, homages, memories, essays and other writings in honour of this vastly influential, respected and beloved author. It follows in the vein of other recent collections honouring James Tiptree Jr, aka Alice Sheldon, and Samuel “Chip” Delany.

Alexandra Pierce says in her Introduction to the collection:

“This book collects some of the ways people relate and connect to Butler, with each section’s title a quote from a letter or essay within it. The first section, ‘Your work is a river I come home to’, focuses on how Butler has inspired people: in their work, in their lives. In the second, which uses a line from Butler’s own essay ‘Positive Obsessions’, authors reflect on systemic and current political issues that Butler either commented on or would have, were she still alive. ‘Love lingers in between dog-eared pages’ includes letters and essays mainly interested in Butler’s fiction—from Kindred to Xenogenesis to Fledgling—with reactions, arguments, and reflections on her work. Next, in ‘I am an Octavia E. Butler Scholar’, are letters from some of the Octavia E. Butler Scholars: Clarion and Clarion West students who received the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, set up by the Carl Brandon Society in Butler’s honour after her death. The following chapter fits neatly after the Clarion one: ‘Forget talent. There is only the work’. It features writers reflecting on how Butler influenced their writing through tutoring at Clarion or otherwise. The subsequent section, ‘I love you across oceans, across generations, across lives’ includes, broadly speaking, love letters. They recount ways in which Butler and her work changed something about the writers in situations as individual as the people describing them. The book is rounded out with a memorial that appeared in Science Fiction Studies in 2010, highlighting Butler’s many contributions to science fiction as well as examining how Butler has been studied. And we end with Octavia Butler’s own words, in an interview with Stephen W. Potts from 1996. It was important to us we allow Butler to speak for herself.”

Butler’s work has always been important to me; like so many others, I count her as one of my favourite authors, someone whose work has not only entertained but challenged and inspired me. One of the most important things to me about Butler’s work is how unapologetically political she is, in the broadest sense of examining existing power relations and social injustice, and imagining ways to survive, resist, oppose, change, create a more just and community-oriented world. That’s a feeling shared by many of those who contributed to this volume.

Mimi Mondal writes in her Introduction about the experience of editing this volume in the aftermath of the 2016 US elections, of being an immigrant from India, who had seen the country of her birth elect a “right-wing religious demagogue” in 2014.

“I remember staying curled up in bed way past daytime on November 8, trying to grasp for a reason to get up and finding none, absolutely none. My landlord at the time, an otherwise extremely active and optimistic gay man in his early fifties, was lying crumpled in the other bedroom. My mother, on the other end of a cross-continental phone call, was advising me to stay indoors, in case there was backlash in the streets. Where was I going to go now? What was the point of doing anything, writing anything, believing anything? Someone like me wasn’t wanted anywhere—not back at home, not even in this other country which had taken so much of my faith and love. Once again, I was back to being a number: the gunk that needed to be drained out of the swamp, denied visas to stay or work, turned back from airports, put on the other side of a wall, and made to pay for it too.

It was through this endless numbness that I walked into this project. I felt barely functional, but I took it up because I had read and loved more of Octavia’s work in the meantime, because I had never stopped feeling grateful for the scholarship, because I had to keep my brain and my hand going. I had been an editor before. Even on a really bad day when nothing else made sense, I could mechanically line-edit pages and pages of text. I did not expect this anthology to hold me together, make me cry tears of gratefulness, help me draw strength and hope, through the next few months as wave after wave of bad news kept hitting. I expected these letters to fondly reminisce about a favourite author whom some of the writers may have met, but I did not expect unrestrained conversation about politics, or avowals of continued resistance and solidarity. I expected to help create a tribute volume, something elegantly detached and intellectual that went well with the muted shades of libraries and halls of fame, but the letters in this anthology are alive, bleeding, screaming, urgent—in a way that reflects my own state of mind at these times.”

These are the things that Butler calls forth from us, the passions for justice, for resistance, for struggle, for speaking and writing and performing truth in the face of unbridled arrogance, privilege and power.

In essays and more personal narratives, writers such as Andrea Hairston, Nisi Shawl, Karen Lord, Katheen Kayembe, Rachel Swirsky, Steven Barnes and Nnedi Okorafor - to name only a few - discuss Butler’s work, and talk with passion about what Butler meant, and means, to them. In turn, their words help the reader to clarify and expand on what Butler and her work mean to us.

She was genius, and giant, and she left us such generous gifts.

Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, edited by Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl, is a collection of essays and other works exploring communication, contact, power, community, boundaries, sexuality, reproduction and related issues in Octavia Butler's writing. As Constant Reader may recall, Butler is one of my 'touchstone' writers, the ones whose work I keep thinking about and seeing influences and traces of her in other works, so you would expect me to be excited and delighted when Aqueduct Press released this; and you would be correct.

In their introductory essay to the collection, "Strange Matings and Their Progeny: A Legacy of Conversations, Thoughts, Writings, and Actions," Holden and Shawl explore the many meanings of Butler's boundary-crossing matings:

"A mating between a human and a dolphin is far from the strangest of the strange matings in the fiction of Octavia E. Butler. Butler writes about matings between humans and a large variety of other beings, such as blue-furred aliens, tentacled aliens of three different sexes, insect-like aliens whose eggs hatch inside human hosts, and perhaps strangest of all, matings between all the varied categories of humans that we have divided ourselves into.

What is most significant about all of the matings in Butler’s work, however, is not their strangeness, but what such matings produce or lead to — and the necessity of those matings. For Butler’s characters, the inevitable crossing and blurring of boundaries such matings entail often bring with them physical and emotional pain. Still, Butler shows us that these matings are key to her characters’ survival, both for the individual and for the group. Sometimes that survival is raw, as in Dawn, when Butler’s human protagonists mate with aliens in order to avoid extinction, and in Kindred, when slaves mate with their masters in order to preserve their own lives. And sometimes it is much more, as in the celebration of survival that Anyanwu engages in with her dolphin mate above.

Butler herself crossed many boundaries — perhaps to ensure a certain kind of survival for herself and her ideas of what we might become. In the most obvious of these boundary crossings, she, an African-American woman, crossed into the then mostly white, male arena of science fiction in the 1970s, demonstrating that women of color could successfully inhabit the worlds of science fiction. At the same time, she refused to let either herself or her writing be solely defined by her race or her gender — though both affected her subject matter and overall themes. In this way, she also crossed into the mostly white, middle class arena of 1970s feminism."

The bulk of the pieces in this collection are critical explorations of Butler's work - there are essays devoted to the Patternist books, Kindred, the Xenogenesis trilogy, the Parable duology, and some that explore multiple facets of her work. There are also reminiscences by friends and colleagues, selections from an interview conducted by Nisi Shawl, and some creative responses in dialogue with her work. It's a good mix of the academic and the anecdotal, the formal and the personal.

The essays do an exceptional job of elucidating Butler's themes and ideas - for her books are, unabashedly, novels about ideas, novels to make the reader uncomfortable, to make her think about such weighty issues as gender and race, power, coercion and choice in a world of oppressors and oppressions, community, change, and the future of humanity. As Steven Shaviro writes in the essay "Exceeding the Human: Power and Vulnerability in Octavia Butler’s Fiction,"

"Butler’s novels produce feelings that exceed the human and that therefore imply new, different forms of subjectivity than are recognized in ordinary life (or in ordinary, “mimetic” fiction). They offer little hope of release, transcendence, or liberation. They sometimes flirt with religio-ethical responses to the traumas they depict (this is most notable in the two Parables ); but they always also emphasize the fictiveness of such responses. Butler’s novels often envision the posthuman, the transhuman, and the hybrid-no-longer-quite-human; but they never portray these in the salvational terms that white technogeeks are so prone to. Above all, Butler’s novels never pretend to alleviate the pain that they so eloquently describe and evoke: in this sense, they are utterly, shockingly clear as to the forms of domination and oppression that are so often taken for granted in our (post)modern, highly technologized, and supposedly enlightened world. They bear witness to the intolerable, to how much of our social life today remains intolerable. This makes them indispensable, both aesthetically and politically. I think that we still have a lot to learn from Butler’s texts: about how to understand human limits and constraints without turning such an understanding into an apologia for the current ruling order; about how to construct a politics of the Other; and about how to think about the posthuman, the no-longer-merely-human. And above all, Butler’s novels teach us about a politics of affect — not a politics of emotions against reason, but one that rejects such binary alternatives altogether."

At the same time, the personal reminiscences by friends and colleagues give the reader a sense of the person, gifted and gracious but often struggling to refine her voice, that Butler was - and how deeply she affected and influenced a generation of writers who knew and studied with her, and how much she has been missed within the science fiction community.

This collection is many things - an introduction to critical thinking about Butler's work, a glimpse into the way her community saw her, and a tribute to her memory. And in my humble opinion, it's essential reading for serious Butler fans.

Fledgling, Octavia Butler

This was Octavia Butler’s last published work, and I am deeply saddened that there will be no more new books. She left us far too soon, with so much more to say.

In Fledgeling, Butler takes the body of vampire legend and literature and turns it completely upside-down, turning the mythos of the predatory and solitary night stalker into a tale of an ancient and complex society of long-living, blood-drinking humanoids called the Ina and their at least nominally willing human symbionts.

Many of the topics that Butler has examined in her earlier works – among them identity, kinship, sex, gender, race, relationships between individual peoples, races and species, change and transformation, power, coercion and free – are strong themes in this book.

The story begins with a single, self-aware being, alone, in pain, and without memory of the past or knowledge of origins, with little more than the urge to survive as a guide to self-definition. These twin instincts – self-preservation and self-identification – drive the narrative as the protagonist seeks her identity, her past and her future, struggling all the while to discover who it is that has robbed her of so much of her past, and why.

In terms of identity, what you see is most definitely not what you get – the protagonist, Shori, appears, in human eyes, as a weak and traumatised black, female, human child, but she is instead a powerful, decades-old near-immortal who lives by exchanging intense, erotic pleasure for human blood. As she begins to form her own family of human symbionts, the narrative travels into uncomfortable places, depicting a sexual relationship between an adult white male and a black female child – who is actually older, stronger, and not human at all, and whose saliva contains substances that are both addictive and beneficial to humans, offering them improved health and longer life in return for their blood.

Shori, we discover, is the future – or at least one possible future – of the Ina, her melanin-rich skin (the gift of a mixture of genes from a black human) giving her the ability to walk by day as none of her Ina cousins can. And yet this human “taint” marks her as an outcast and potential target among those of the Ina who reject change and value “pure blood” over new potentials, tradition, no matter how limiting, over technological advances that bring greater freedom..

Triply Other – black among whites, Ina among humans, genetic experiment among Ina, Shori is kin to both species but welcomed by neither, and must find her own sense of who she is.

And that’s just the stuff that’s easy to put into words.

Thinking about this book after reading it, I wondered what Butler might have been saying about the history of black Americans in this story. Our initial view of Shori seems in so many way like the situation of black Africans brought to America as slaves, cut off from families and societies, their history torn from them, struggling to survive in physical bodies marked by their new world as weak, childish, not fully human – yet all the while, bearing within greater strength and power, and ancient traditions and wisdoms. I may be completely off the wall here, but I think I see in Shori’s quest for identity, family, security and recognition some sense – nothing so obvious and crude as allegory – of the issues faced in the journey of black people in North America toward all of these things.

And it seemed to me as I finished reading that Shori’s journey wasn’t over. Maybe Butler intended to give us more, or maybe she intended us to think about it ourselves. We likely will never know.