By Pamela Bedore, Ph.D., University of Connecticut
None of Octavia Butler’s work fits perfectly into the categories of utopia or dystopia, or any category, really. Instead, each of her work is shot through with a utopian impulse as she imagines radically different worlds, always showing multiple perspectives and gesturing toward the importance of working toward social change. Why did she write about the need for social change?
Butler had described herself:
Who am I? I am a 47-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-old writer. I am also comfortably asocial—a hermit. A pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
Sadly, she passed away at the age of 58. It was expected that Butler would have a huge impact, not only as a role model for the small but growing group of black women science fiction writers, but also as a deep thinker who repeatedly used speculative fiction as a way to articulate some of our most pressing problems and to imagine some of their potential solutions. What solutions did she offer?
This is a transcript from the video series Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
From a Shy Teenager to an Award Winning Writer
Octavia Butler wasn’t a social activist, giving speeches or riling up crowds. Rather, as she wrote in Bloodchild and Other Stories, she was painfully shy as a teenager. As she says:
I believed I was ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless. I also thought that everyone would notice these faults if I drew attention to myself. I wanted to disappear. Instead, I grew to be six feet tall.
Butler had a great voice, a great presence, a great generosity in the way she answered questions. But still, it must have been hard for her, being on stage like that as an introvert, even despite all her success.
And there was much success. Butler received most of the major science fiction awards, including multiple Hugos and Nebulas, science fiction’s two highest awards. She is also one of the very few genre writers to ever receive the prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant. Her work has also prompted a lot of activism; such as Octavia’s Brood, a short story collection and activist project explicitly founded in Octavia Butler’s vision.
Utopia and Dystopia
Her utopian writing represents a turning point that moves us from the feminist utopian renaissance of the 1970s to the more complex negotiation between utopian and dystopian impulses that has helped shape the genres as they are today.
Octavia Butler has plenty of aliens throughout her body of work, and centres around intersectionality. This term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor, in 1989, but it wasn’t really popularized until sociologist Patricia Hill Collins used it in the 1990s.
Learn more about utopian thought and sexual politics.
Intersectionality and Species
Intersectionality is the idea that we can’t fully understand the experience of someone who is doubly othered, a black woman, for example, without considering both her race and her gender.
Intersectional thinking asks us to consider how multiple elements of personal identity—race, class, gender, sexuality—intersect in the way a person relates to issues of power.
Here’s what Butler does. She adds another category of otherness— species. This renders the narrative even more powerful. Let’s posit a straight, able-bodied, well-educated white man—the kind of guy one might see in the hero role of a different science fiction novel.
He might be a social activist or not, but either way, his understanding of what it means to be systematically disempowered is purely academic; he might know what it means, but he can’t know how it feels.
Learn more about negotiation between utopian and dystopian impulses.
Butler’s Take on Aliens in Science Fiction
Aliens are head and shoulders above this heroic white man in every identity category one can imagine, the aliens are smarter, stronger, and more knowledgeable about the world, which has changed dramatically. So, dramatically, now the man can barely even understand it. Further, the aliens have such a different worldview that they don’t even know they’re supposed to be impressed or intimidated by this white man. They are unaware of the response this man is used to getting regarding his race, class, and gender.
Alien encounters are pretty common in classic science fiction of the Starship Troopers variety. These usually end with the hero triumphing through personal ingenuity, strong leadership, good fortune, or sheer human will. In traditional science fiction, the human wins usually means the white male scientist wins on behalf of humankind.
Not so for Octavia Butler. Again and again, Butler puts her human characters—a wide variety of human characters representing differences in gender, class, race, age, and ability—into situations where they cannot triumph by being stronger or smarter or luckier or more persistent than the other.
For Butler’s characters, often, the only way to survive is to adapt. To adapt one’s expectations, one’s worldview, and ultimately, even one’s identity. For Butler, repeatedly, survival is change.
Common Questions about Octavia Butler and Intersectionality
Octavia Butler‘s characters have to adapt to survive. She puts her human characters—a wide variety of human characters representing differences in gender, class, race, age, and ability—into situations where they cannot triumph by being stronger or smarter or luckier or more persistent than the other.
Octavia Butler’s utopian writing represents a turning point that moves from the feminist utopian renaissance of the 1970s to the more complex negotiation between utopian and dystopian impulses that has helped shape the genres as they are today.
Intersectionality is the idea that we can’t fully understand the experience of someone who is doubly othered, a black woman, for example, without considering both her race and her gender.
