Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, died after falling and striking her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, a close friend said. She was 58.
[from the AP via SeattlePI.com]
Much of the news coverage of her death -- and consequently of her life -- have pointed out, not inaccurately, that, as a black woman in a white male arena, she was a genuine pioneer. But she leaves a much more enduring legacy not just to the geek community but to the world as a whole. Her fiction, like her novels Parable of the Sower and Dawn, elevated SF to the level of literature.
It was, perhaps, a result of her extreme outside perspective on American culture: To be one of those weird science fiction readers at any time prior to the last ten or 15 years or so was to automatically be an outsider. But white male SF fans could at least pass for “normal,” were granted an entree into the mainstream by dint of their skin color and gender. But Butler’s view would have been from a very different standpoint, and the metaphors of her fiction (such as the relationship between the humans and the very alien aliens in her Xenogenesis series) cast us all into the position she must have perceived her own as. She made us all feel, in some ways, what it must have been like to be her. Science fiction is, as far as I’m concerned, a controlled experiment to discover what it means to be human -- how much can you change about our bodies, our minds, our lives, before we’re no longer human? Butler’s fiction, in some ways, changed the idea of what the control could be, made us turn around and look in a different direction for the starting point of humanity. It may seem like a small thing, but it isn’t.
SF writer Steven Barnes, quoted in The Seattle Times, says:
"I consider Octavia to be the most important science-fiction writer since Mary Shelley."
And he’s absolutely right. Shelley invented SF, and Butler made it art of a world-class stature.
