![]() It's the story of Dana, a contemporary black writer hurtled backward in time to antebellum Maryland. Kindred, one of the books most famously associated with Butler, was published in 1979. Huntington Library, (c) Estate of Octavia E. It became part of The Patternist series the stories revolved around a group of elite beings with telepathic superpowers.Ĭover for the first edition of Kindred, published by Doubleday in 1979 ![]() ("The one good thing about all those jobs was they left her mind free to think about her characters," Russell says.) Butler's first book, Patternmaster, was published in 1976 and caught people's attention. She had short stories published here and there while she held what she called "lots of horrible little jobs" -warehouse worker, dishwasher, potato chip inspector. She went to Pasadena public schools, then got an associate's degree from Pasadena City College. "I don't recall every having wanted desperately to be a black woman fiction writer," she told Rose. And that didn't seem to hold Butler back one bit. That was astonishing, because the world was not full of well-paid science fiction writers, and with very few exceptions, all of those were male and white. After Devil Girl, though, Butler switched to science fiction, determined to make that her career. The drawings of horses that illustrated one of her early stories are on the walls at the Huntington. She often made them up while sitting on the porch at her grandmother's chicken farm, in the High Desert town of Victorville, Calif., where she dreamed about animals. And also, I was a strange kid who learned to stay by herself and make things up." "I had no idea how to get along with other children. "I'm an only child," Butler told Sci Fi Buzz. She was also shy, unusually tall for her age, and not particularly social. She grew up black and poor in Pasadena, Calif., when legal segregation was dead, but de facto segregation was very much alive. That encouragement was probably essential: Butler faced a lot of challenges. "Every day in every way I am researching and writing my award-winning books and short stories." The walls are hung with blowups of Butler's childhood drawings and the affirmations she repeated to herself: "I am a best-selling writer, I write best-selling books," one says. So is the one-page letter from the MacArthur Foundation notifying Butler she'd been chosen as a fellow in 1995. Early copies of her first editions are here. Large glass cases hold early notebooks and drawings, report cards from her days at Pasadena City College and notes to herself about character development. Butler/The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens It was important to her that the worlds she created be credible to her readers. ![]() Curator Natalie Russell went through some "8,000 manuscripts, letters and photographs, and an additional 80 boxes of ephemera" to create an exhibition that shows, in chronological order, how Butler's career was born and evolved, and what influenced her.īutler often posted reminders to herself when she created characters and worlds. "Octavia Butler: Telling My Stories" is an exhibit currently at the Huntington Library, in the Pasadena suburb of San Marino, Calif. "They don't call it that," she corrected him firmly "somebody probably made that up.") When she died in 2006, she was lauded as a pioneer, an icon and one of America's best writers. ("You have a Genius Grant," Charlie Rose said in a 2000 interview. Octavia Estelle Butler became one of the world's premier science fiction writers, the first black female science fiction writer to reach national prominence, and the only writer in her genre to receive a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. First: "Geez, I can write a better story than that!" And second: "Somebody got paid for writing that story!" If they could, she decided, then she could, too.Įventually she did exactly that. She was 9 years old and saw a 1954 B-movie called Devil Girl from Mars, and two things struck her. Octavia Butler used to say she remembers exactly when she decided to become a science fiction writer. (c) Patti Perret/The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens A lifelong bibliophile, she considered libraries sacred spaces.
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