SOURCE: "African-American, Feminist Science Fiction," in Sojourner: The Women's Forum, Vol. 19, No. 6, February, 1994, pp. 12-4.

[Johnson is a writer and activist. In the following review, she traces Butler's portrayal of humanity in her Patternist novels and the Xenogenesis trilogy, and discusses with the author her Parable of the Sower.]

I read to escape. Oh, not as often as when I was twelve years old, but my favorite coping mechanism is reading. Mind candy usually. You know the stuff: mysteries, lesbian fantasy, and occasionally science fiction. But when life gets confusing or I am particularly in need of a vacation or a time of reflection, I turn to books that are more than fluff. Books written by authors whose insights stimulate and challenge me. Octavia Butler's books occupy a secure niche in this last and, perhaps, most important category of comfort reading.

Octavia Butler writes science fiction. She is the first African-American woman to write science fiction under her own name. She has written ten books and won many of science fiction's highest awards. Octavia Butler's people (human and alien) shift shapes, imagine they feel other people's pain, actually feel the death throes of people twenty years dead, travel through time and back into slavery, heal themselves and others in amazing ways, and possess a true third gender. They struggle with their own biology and the power it gives them. They struggle with the effect of their genetic tendencies on the world.

The majority of Butler's novels can be grouped into two thematic series. The first series is the Patternist novels. These include Patternmaster and Mind of My Mind (published in 1976 and '77 respectively and to be reissued this spring), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay's Ark (1984). These novels are set in Africa and the United States and follow the development of the Pattern, beginning with its long-lived parents, Doro and Anyanwu, to its full manifestation sometime in an unspecified and dangerous future. Patternmaster is Butler's first published novel. It chronicles our world in a future overrun by formerly human mutants known as Clayarks. The remnant of the human race is protected by the Pattern, a complex telepathic link that allows the Patternmaster to defend Patternist settlements from Clayark attacks. Nontelepathic humans are called mutes.

The Pattern started centuries earlier with Doro and Anyanwu. Doro takes and uses other people's bodies. In Wild Seed he has lived over 3500 years. His work is to build a community of telepathically strong people: to build a family for himself and a race. Anyanwu is younger, about 300 years old. They meet in Africa as Doro is gathering his people, the people he has bred, to take them to North America and away from the ravages of the slave trade. When we meet them again in Mind of My Mind, it is the late twentieth century and Doro is about to succeed in ways that he never imagined. Mary (Doro's daughter), making her transition from latent to active telepath, throws a psychic noose around the necks of five of Doro's most powerful people. The Pattern manifests itself for the first time:

Others, yes. Five of them. They seemed to be far away from me, perhaps scattered around the country. Actives like Karl, like me. People I had noticed during the last minutes of my transition. People who had noticed me at the same time. Their thoughts told me what they were, but I became aware of them—"saw" them—as bright points of light, like stars. They formed a shifting pattern of light and color. I had brought them together somehow. Now I was holding them together—and they didn't want to be held.

Butler's main characters are always Black women. They struggle with domination, and they struggle to understand their unique powers. Slavery is a recurring and related theme: the actual reality of slavery in the United States as imagined in Kindred, a novel in which the protagonist is psychically drawn from the twentieth century back into slavery, as well as the bondage people impose on each other through differential power relationships.

"White women must be protected," Doro said, "whether they want to be or not."

"As property is protected." Anyanwu shook her head. "Preserved for use of owner alone. Denice [Anyanwu's white wife who was afraid of having black children by Anyanwu] said she felt like property—like a slave plotting escape. I told her I could give her children who were not related to me at all if she wished. Her fear made me angry even though I knew the situation was not her fault. I told her my Warrick shape was not a copy of anyone … I could take the exact shape of one of the white men I had treated in Wheatley."

The exercise of power can save or destroy. Understanding and using The Pattern means agreeing to a kind of domination, initially by one young woman over more powerful others. Existing in that domination gives a disjointed and suffering people a community and ultimately the ability to preserve a portion of humanity.

In the Xenogenesis trilogy, Butler adds even more complexity to these themes. What if humans finally destroy themselves, or attempt to, by launching that final nuclear war? And what if humanity's only salvation is a totally alien species, one that sees themselves as genetic traders and humans as endlessly seductive potential slave partners? In Dawn (1987), Lilith awakens from a bewildering sleep to meet her "saviors," an alien race called the Oankali. Their bodies are covered with long, writhing, sensory tentacles, and they have three genders. Lilith has been chosen to awaken other humans rescued by the Oankali in the aftermath of nuclear destruction. She is to train them, build a group, and prepare them to meet the Oankali. Each heterosexual human pair is to meet their Oankali mates—male, female and ooloi—and return to earth. The Oankali know some humans will embrace the trade and others will resist, run away, as soon as they return to earth. The trade is not really a free choice. Resisters can leave, but their fertility has been taken away. The Oankali must breed with their new trade partners. They know humans would refuse this if left to their essential contradiction, intelligence at the service of hierarchy. They will not let human resisters reproduce and destroy themselves and the planet again. Humans who submit discover that great physical and sexual pleasure comes with partnership with the Oankali, as well as long life and freedom from pain.

Yes, Lilith was not free. Sudden freedom would have terrified her, although sometimes she seemed to want it. Sometimes she stretched the bonds between herself and the family. But she always came home. Tino would probably kill himself if he were freed. But what about the resisters? They did terrible things to each other because they could not have children. But before the war—during the war—they had done terrible things to each other even though they could have children. The Human Contradiction held them. Intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior. They were not free. All he could do for them, if he could do anything, was to let them be bound in their own way. Perhaps next time their intelligence would be in balance with their hierarchical behavior, and they would not destroy themselves.

Lilith is seen as a collaborator by the people she awakens. At times she hates herself because she has been seduced by her ooloi, Nikanj, and the pleasure it gives.

Throughout the rest of the trilogy, Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989), Butler imagines life on a seemingly primitive earth. Resisters are as long-lived as trade humans. They steal human-looking offspring of Oankali/Human matings. These children, called constructs, are the receptacle for all that is good and bad in both species. They are also the ultimate salvation for resisters and traders alike.

Science fiction has tended to represent people of color badly. The characters don't feel real or, more frequently, no people of color appear in the story. Butler's characters are African-American, mixed race, Asian, Native American, Latino; she chooses themes that allow her to struggle with the life realities of poor and oppressed people. When I read her books I discover new ways to think about psychic phenomena, violence and self-defense, the growing siege mentality of contemporary society, and the pervasiveness of slavery.

I avoided reading Kindred (1979) for years. In this novel, Dana and Kevin have just moved into their first house together when strange things begin to happen. Dana disappears from their living room for a few minutes and reappears soaking wet. She has just saved a boy named Rufus from drowning, a boy who turns out to be her kin and the slaveowner of her ancestors. In discussing this article with a friend, I realized the idea of a kind of psychic slavery was terrifying. Many of us have had relationships that seem to speak to us over time and space. What would happen if a relative, an ancestor, could not only make his or her presence psychically known but also draw us to them, whether we wanted to go or not? And what if that ancestor is a white man in the antebellum South? Of course this isn't possible, but it provides a vivid metaphor for evaluating internalized racism and domination in relationships.

I find The Parable of the Sower (1993), Butler's latest offering, more comfortable, in the way a nightmare is familiar. Set in 2025, it follows the coming of age of Lauren Olamina, a young woman living in a walled community in southern California. Walled communities are a fixture of Butler's literary architecture. Humans throw up barricades against assault, to keep out witch hunters, Clayarks, Oankali, and in Parable, hordes of desperately poor or drug-crazed people. The walls don't hold, could not hold for families like the Olaminas. They don't have the resources of the rich to buy truly deadly security. They don't seem to have the heart for inflicting that kind of harm. Lauren is on her own, on the road away from the enclosure for the first time in her young life.

Parable imagines the United States after poverty and despair create a truly physical class divide—the poor, naked and on the street; the striving working class struggling to protect the little they have behind inadequate walls; and the rich, with the sea at their back, shielded by armed guards all along the periphery of their lives. To what ends will we go to defend ourselves from each other? At what point does political activism and organizing fail, defeated by conditions we try not to imagine, even though we live with the seeds of that chaos today? Is anything new possible?

Octavia Butler describes herself as prone to pessimism. Her unflagging feminism, however, helps her to create an unflinching view of the best of ourselves and the worst. She shows us choices we might make in a totally alien environment of an Oankali space ship or the more familiar world of the walled cities of Southern California. In the end, her work allows a great escape from our own daily complexities and a fresh view of our lives when that escape comes to an end.

The following is an except from a wide-ranging interview with Octavia Butler. We talked about all her books. I want to share with you her responses about Parable of the Sower and its relationship to her other novels.

[Johnson:] Overall, your books tend to focus more on biology and psychic power than on technologies. Why is that?

[Butler:] Well, biology is just a personal favorite. I tend to prefer it because that's where my interests go. I follow my interests instead of imposing something on myself. What I'm doing in Parable of the Sower has less to do with biology and more to do with current events and a kind of extension of current events. I do use some of my love of biology in there [by inventing] some of the drugs that create some of the problems.

What struck me about Parable in terms of current events is the choices one makes around violence. What's self-preservation and what's the cost of survival? That seemed to me to be a theme throughout your books.

No, it's more like the need to adapt to your circumstances; I mean, I'm pretty explicit about it in Parable, but in all of my books there is some need for not only the character but generally the group that she lives with to make some changes. People don't tend to like to do that. As somebody once said, people want things to stay the same, but they want them to change for the better. They would love to get an increase in pay.

They don't like deteriorating conditions?

They don't like changes. Even important ones. For instance, they just tend to want things to stay the same. They're perfectly willing to get more out of it as far as money is concerned as long as nothing else changes.

In Xenogenesis did the Oankali further exacerbate the worst of human genetics—our tendency toward hierarchy—by taking away people's fertility and taking away people's choice?

Stress will do that regardless. You can see that happening right now. When people start to see hard times, they immediately look around for someone to blame, and some of them look around for something nasty to do about the problem. Here in California, we've got politicians advocating all sorts of things against foreigners: don't let them use the schools, don't let them use the hospitals, don't let their kids become citizens. All sorts of really dumb things, because they are bound to make for a permanent underclass of uneducated, not very healthy people who are certainly going to share their diseases with the rest of us. And who are going to be very resentful, as they should be, at the way they are being treated.

Parable takes that to its—

The governor can get a big rise in his popularity numbers by advocating denying citizenship to the children of immigrants. It wouldn't be that way, I suspect, or there wouldn't be as many people who thought that it was a good [thing]—and certainly no governor would advocate it—if times were better. But we are having a nastier time with the recession here in California than a lot of the country. People are eager to look around for a villain and then to punish that villain. And in the case of the humans and the Oankali, the humans were under terrible stress. They've got a very handy villain who is at least to some degree guilty. I mean the Oankali didn't plot the war that wiped out most of them, but the Oankali are certainly standing in their way for a long time.

Is Parable of the Sower the beginning of another series?

Yes and no. It is in the sense that I want to take the religion on to the destiny that the character is talking about, and I want to see the ways in which it changes and the ways in which the people change and the interaction. Also I want to play around with the society that grows out of this. So, it is the beginning of a new series in the sense that I want to go on with the ideas, but there are going to be big time gaps, so there are going to be new people.

The part of Parable that I found myself most preoccupied with in relationship to my everyday life was the idea of walled cities or walled neighborhoods, because it feels like that's beginning.

Oh it's more than beginning; here in the L.A. area, it's very common.

The mindset that allows it to happen—first you fence in your yard—then your neighborhood watch is almost inevitable—

It's not only inevitable, it's down right necessary. I used to be in a neighborhood where there was a neighborhood watch; it didn't become established until about half of us were burglarized. So people wind up acting in self-defense. Really what they wind up doing is about all they can do as individuals who are not wealthy or anything but live in a community where there are natural definitions in the community. There's not that much you can do. So you come together in a neighborhood-watch situation in the hope of at least helping each other.

It seemed in Parable that folks outside the walls never became totally alien to people inside the walls.

The people who are outside the walls may once have been inside walls that did not survive.

I have a friend who contends that Clay's Ark was written as a commentary on AIDS.

Oddly enough it wasn't. I didn't know about AIDS at that time. AIDS was around; I just didn't know about it. It was more me playing with biology again. The disease that I used to create the disease of Clay's Ark was rabies.

Rabies was the only disease that had a reputation for doing odd things—like the virus could hang around on things for long periods of time and then still infect someone with no warm human body or other body to keep it viable. And it was a disease that had that long incubation period, and also it tended to be an upper before it was a downer—it tended to make you more hyper, more excitable, more attentive before it made you crazy and dead. Not crazy exactly. There are descriptions of people dying of rabies that don't jibe with the idea of ravenous monsters out to bite everybody.

When you wrote Parable did you have to study up on the guns and things you write about?

Yes, I knew almost nothing. I had to clean out the library. More than that I think, I had to look at comparative religions. What I wanted to do was not to copy any existing religion or philosophy, but on the other hand, not to avoid a thing that I felt was true because it existed in some other religion or philosophy.

I had a lot of trouble writing this because I knew I would have to write about a character who was power-seeking. I didn't realize how much I had absorbed the notion that power-seekers were evil. I find it very difficult to write about a main character with whom I have no sympathy, so I had to find a way of getting around that. I had to come to the realization that like religion, power can be a tool. I mean, power, money, knowledge, religion, whatever is common among human beings, can be beneficial or harmful to the individual and is judged by how it is being used. And also, of course, by the entrenched interests doing the judging.

In Mind of My Mind you are dealing with a character who is eventually power-seeking.

No, she's not power-seeking in quite the same way. She has been bred to do what she is doing. She doesn't really have a choice, and when Doro tells her to stop doing that she just about dies. So I've done that many times—I put a character in a position where she must seek power or she must handle power whether she sought it or not. This is the first time I've written about a character who was actively power-seeking and didn't have to be. Whose life might even be better if she were not.