Octavia E. Butler
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
