Octavia Butler

Introduction

Octavia Butler

Male pregnancy? If you read Octavia Butler’s story “Bloodchild,” you can find out all about that along with a planet inhabited by insects that implant their eggs into humans. Butler is one of the few African-American women to write science fiction. The inspiration for her earliest work is drawn from the bad sci-fi movies she watched as an adolescent. Butler thought she could write better stories, and she without a doubt succeeded, specializing in sci-fi serials such as the Patternist series, the Xenogensis trilogy, and the Parable of the Sower series. In 2006, a scholarship was established in her name to help writers of color attend the Clarion workshops that so greatly helped Butler become successful.

Essential Facts

1. Octavia Butler was the first science fiction writer to be granted a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.
2. At one point, Butler went seven years without writing a new book. She broke through her writer’s block by penning the vampire novel Fledgling.
3. Butler wrote the story “Bloodchild” to help cure her fear of bot flies.
4. Interestingly enough, Butler did not consider her most popular book, Kindred, to be science fiction at all. It follows a modern day African-American woman as she travels back in time to meet her slave ancestors. No scientific explanation, however, for the time travel is ever given.
5. There is a discrepancy as to how Octavia Butler died. Some reports say that she hit her head on her walkway, but the cause of death is most often reported as a stroke.