Octavia E. Butler died on Saturday in Seattle. She was 58. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America called her “the most successful African American woman writing in the science fiction genre.” Butler publisher nearly 20 novels and books, including most recently, Fledgling. She was the winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, a Nebula and two Hugo awards.
Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. The writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park and died Friday, Howle said.
Butler was an ingeniously interesting writer, and her plots were feminist and humanist. She didn’t write lesbian works, per se, but her characters had a range of orientations and permutations. Butler’s work wasn’t preoccupied with robots and ray guns, but used the genre’s artistic freedom to explore race, poverty, politics, religion and human nature.
“She stands alone for what she did,” Howle said. “She was such a beacon and a light in that way.”Butler began writing at age 10, and told Howle she embraced science fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called Devil Girl from Mars and thought, “I can write a better story than that.” In 1970, she took a bus from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., to attend a fantasy writers workshop in East Lansing, Mich.
Butler described herself as a happy hermit, and never married.“Mostly she just loved sitting down and writing,” Seattle-based science fiction writer Greg Bear said. “For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the ’60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community.”
Former Ramblings of an Insane, Lesbian, Book Writing Crip
