The Mother of Afrofuturism
grew up in segregated Pasadena. Never learned
to drive. Her mother, a domestic worker. Her father,
a shoe shiner, died when she was seven.
Though Pasadena now honors Octavia Butler, offering
walking tours of her haunts, Vroman’s Bookstore,
her schools, the local library, she was a shy only child,
dyslexic, bullied & when her height shot up
to six feet, bullied more. She began writing
early on, then turned to science fiction when she saw
The Devil Girl from Mars (1954) & thought:
‘I could write a better story than that.’
College didn’t help much with her vocation
‘Can’t you write anything normal?’ but she found
a class with Harlan Ellison who urged her to travel
to hot & humid Clarion, PA for a sci-fi workshop.
Even loaned her money for tuition. Once there
she sold her first stories, but didn’t sell another
for five years. Butler would start writing at 2 a.m.
then go work a menial job, something where
she ‘didn’t have to smile.’ Slowly, over decades,
more readers found her. Her protagonists,
Black, female, empowered, community-spirited,
inspiring. Butler said she loved science fiction
because there were ‘no walls.’
Her books, prescient. Parable of the Sower (1993)
imagines a 2024 society unraveling: global warming,
violence, hunger, walled towns, addicts setting fires.
The story’s told from the diary of Lauren, a 15-year-old
Black ‘hyperempath’ who develops a new religion
to save humankind. Butler called it a cautionary tale.
