A Genre Writer Immortalized

Annamaria on Monday

 Genre writers are ordinarily ghettoized. In bookstores, there is a section for "Fiction" or "Literature." Genre books cannot be found there.  They are found in categories marked "Mysteries/Thrillers" or "SciFi and Fantasy" or "Romance."  The same applies when it comes to awards, kind of like the Oscars that go to techies without whom there would be no movies.  But in their case, they get an actual Oscar.  When it comes to books, segregation is total.  There is the National Book Award or the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer for "real" novelists. Genre writers are not welcome in that crowd.  We have the Edgar, the CWA Dagger, the Hugo, or the Nebula.

For genre writers to be taken seriously is rare indeed.  But this past week, one of the greatest was awarded, posthumously admittedly, with an honor that - to my way of thinking - surpasses all this year's other awards of any sort put together. NASA has named the landing place of their Perseverance rover on Mars the Octavia E. Butler Landing!

Here is what Katie Stack Morgan of NASA said when she made the announcement.

"Butler's pioneering work explores themes of race, gender equality in humanity, centering on the experiences of Black women at a time when such voices were largely absent from science fiction.  Butler's protagonists embodied determination and inventiveness, making her a perfect fit for the Perseverance rover mission and its theme of overcoming challenges. Butler inspired and influenced the planetary science community and many beyond — including those typically underrepresented in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] fields. The fact that her works are as relevant today — if not more so — than when they were originally written and published is a testament to her vision, genius and timelessness."

That Octavia E. Butler became a published writer at all seems nothing short of miraculous.  Born in 1947 the daughter of a house cleaner and a shoeshine man, she grew up in racially segregated Pasadena, California, dyslexic and so painfully shy that she could not freely socialize with other children. Her father died when she was seven.  Her mother and her maternal grandmother raised her thereafter.  By the age of ten, she began to pour her thoughts into stories, which she wrote first by hand and then with two fingers on a Remington typewriter.

She took advantage of what educational opportunities came her way. She attended community college at night while working temp jobs. She enrolled in a Writers Guild Mentor Program for minorities.

That NASA has chosen to memorialize her on Mars is more than fitting.  It was seeing a 1954 film on TV, Devil Girl from Mars that first attracted her to Science Fiction. She eventually attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop.  By 1971, she had sold her first short story.  By 1984, she had published six novels.  Her 1984 Speech Sounds short story won a Hugo Award.  She went on to win another Hugo, a Locus, and the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award for Best Novel. 

My Favorite of her books, Parable of the Sower also brings readers to Mars.  It's a dystopian story of a collapsed America, thanks to environmental disasters, uncontrolled corporate greed, and a runaway gap between the poor and the rich.  It takes place in Los Angeles in 2024, and though it was published in 1993, it reads it now like an ugly result of the current pandemic.  Butler's prose is clear, spare, and vivid.  Her story flows with such logic, such progression of ideas that it is effortless to read. In other words, she does what all great writers do. She makes it look easy.

The images are not easy. The concepts are challenging. Her characters are compelling and complex.  But nothing she says is hard to understand, because she presents her tale with such straightforward simplicity.  And though the events are fantastic, they seem and often are real.

Ottavia E. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58.  But as long as people care about the future, her works will live on.  And now her name is written on Mars!