Octavia E. Butler

by Gerry Canavan

Overview

"I began writing about power because I had so little," Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman—an alien in American society and among science fiction writers—informed the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction.

Gerry Canavan offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, Canavan tracks the false starts, abandoned drafts, tireless rewrites, and real-life obstacles that fed Butler's frustrations and launched her triumphs. Canavan departs from other studies to approach Butler first and foremost as a science fiction writer working within, responding to, and reacting against the genre's particular canon. The result is an illuminating study of how an essential SF figure shaped themes, unconventional ideas, and an unflagging creative urge into brilliant works of fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252082160
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	10/31/2016
Series:	Modern Masters of Science Fiction
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 16.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Gerry Canavan is an assistant professor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature at Marquette University. He is a coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction .

Editorial Reviews

10/31/2016
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. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Canavan is an excellent critic and formidable researcher, and this book, written in accessible, quick-moving prose, is rich with perspectives and ideas. The best sections detail the stories Butler didn’t publish or complete, using those fragments to dive deeper into the texts that she finished. Like all good criticism, the book is both authoritative and invitational. Read it and you’ll marvel at the arguments and feel invited to develop your own." —New York Times


"For those of us who cannot make the journey to the archive, Octavia E. Butler serves as a more-than-adequate substitute and entry into this treasure trove of Butler's writings."—Los Angeles Review of Books


"A must-read for scholars of [science fiction], Canavan's scholarship is both a work of sharply dedicated research and a loving tribute to one of [science fiction’s] most creative geniuses. Highly recommended."—Library Journal

"This book deserves a place of honor on the shelf of every fan or scholar of Butler's work and should be acquired by every institution with the resources to do so, from the smallest local library to the most heavily endowed research university."—SFRA Review

"Both fans and scholars will appreciate this vivid in-depth study of an internationally acclaimed science fiction author's life and work."—Shelf Awareness

"A deep reading of the work of the late science-fiction master."—Kirkus Reviews


"Canavan delves into Butler's personal papers, housed at the Huntington Library, in order to illuminate the muses behind this groundbreaking author whose limited public persona was typically described by words such as shy and awkward. Canavan's careful and even reverent handling of Butler's journals and diaries, notes, drafts, and revisions reveals a lonely woman most at home in worlds of her own making, a woman whose drive and passion were not just to write, but to sell what she wrote." —Resources for American Literary Study
"This excellent, comprehensive study sheds new light on the process and philosophy of one of the most important authors of our time."—Publishers Weekly

"[An] intense critical biography."—Times Literary Supplement

"A compelling and intimate portrait of one of the century's most important writers. Canavan's thorough archival research introduces us to new aspects of Butler’s life and thought and provides the first comprehensive overview of her career. He writes with grace and passion that is equal to the stature of his subject. Highly recommended."—Sherryl Vint, co-editor of Science Fiction Studies

"There are great depths to Butler's work, and Canavan has given us a torch in order to better see those depths. There's a lot of valuable analysis of how Butler's fiction ties in with her personal life. Because of the personal nature of the book, what we have here is anything but a dry academic exercise."—Michael Levy, coeditor of Extrapolation

"Sensible and well organized. A book that situates Butler's fiction at the junction of biocritical and genre studies, showing how Butler's experience of blackness in America led her to explore and exploit the 'messiness' of science fiction."—Lisa Yaszek, coeditor of Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction

From the Publisher

2016-09-26
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.

Kirkus Reviews