Salon.com Books | Remembering Octavia Butler

Salon.com Books | Remembering Octavia Butler

Science fiction writer Karen Joy Fowler discusses Octavia Butler and her fiction in an article on Salon this week. Fowler describes several of her favorite Butler stories, and discusses what they meant to her. Part of her discussion implies (and the posted comments explicitly consider) how intimately you should know and think about the writer when reading a piece of fiction. I dunno; I'm sort of split on it. One of the reasons I bolted the study of literature as a career was because I felt there was too much emphasis on dissecting pieces of work using bits of the author's biography. In the 1970s when I was in school, we were supposed to use an author's bio to seek out meaningful references in the work--even if (maybe especially if) the author wasn't aware of the meanings. This kind of a one-upmanship of a hard-working writer creeped me out badly. So I bailed.

But on the other hand, one of the reasons I loved Octavia Butler is that she was a female African American science fiction writer (and a lesbian, although I wasn't aware of that until after her death). I thought Butler had some interesting things to say that the largely white male scifi establishment didn't (said with loving respect, however, to Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury and that stinker Harlan Ellison, among many others).

So, maybe there's a happy medium. We can take pleasure in an author's difference without dissecting his or her work. I vote for that; or at least I'm going to be doing that, thank you very much.

Tags: Octavia Butler, Science Fiction, Archaeology, Literature, Gender