POSITIVE OBSESSION

A determined writer.

Drawing on correspondence, interviews, unpublished manuscripts, and archival material, queer Black feminist scholar Morris offers a sensitive examination of pioneering Black science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), whose many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship. As a child growing up in Southern California, Butler was a voracious reader of science fiction and comic books, aspiring, from an early age, to be a writer. The genre of science fiction and fantasy, though, was dominated by white males, and she was frustrated in placing her stories. Nevertheless, she persisted, working at low-wage temp jobs so she would have time for writing. Although her finances were precarious—once she had to pawn her typewriter—“she was fueled,” Morris sees, “by her positive obsession to write probing, harrowing tales of humanity’s hubris and hope.” At classes sponsored by the Writers Guild of America, she met the irascible science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who encouraged her to attend the prestigious six-week Clarion writers’ workshop, where he was teaching in 1970. Although she sold two stories during that period, for the next five years, she placed nothing—until, in 1976, she finally succeeded in publishing the first book of her five-novel Patternist saga, about a group of telepathic humans who change the course of humanity. Morris situates Butler’s career amid salient historical events and social movements, and she underscores the deep research that fueled Butler’s imagination, from reading slave narratives in Baltimore archives to studying precolonial West African, Nubian, and Igbo languages and cultures. Butler’s fictions—which Morris reads perceptively—convey cautionary tales warning against fascism, gender-based violence, and the consequences of global warming. All, Morris asserts, are driven by the question: What does it mean to be human?

A warm tribute to a pathbreaker.