Octavia Butler, Remembered

Since I've blossomed into an "adult" no other author has moved me like she did.  Part of growing up is throwing off the compulsions of your youth.  No more reading juvenilia into wee hours.  No more morning-lighters spent beside bowls of chocolate chips coated in Christmas colored jimmies.  Once you're an adult you don't read like that anymore.  Or so I thought.  See I had spent years reading like an academic.  Academics read with clear heads in strong light.  They don't prop their eyes open because sleep seems unessential compared to the novel in their hands.

They study.

They don't love.

I should know. 

But I loved Octavia Butler.  I never met her, as some of my other favorite writers have, but I read her like I thought I was dying of cancer . . . and that was a year before I'd ever taken the thought of dying of cancer seriously.  So I sat down to write this with all her novels arrayed on my desk.  I wanted to scavenge each one for the passages which most moved me.  But I don't want to scavenge anymore.  Butler's prose bordered on the pedestrian.  She was no natural stylist.  Her prose bore the markings of craft . . . like Steinbeck in every other chapter of The Grapes of Wrath. 

But the ideas.  The interaction. 

No one could stage complex social interaction like she could.  To think that she died alone after striking her head on the pavement outside her home or on the operating table some hours later—accounts differ on whether a stroke caused the fall or the fall caused the stroke—belies imagination.  For someone so concerned with community to die in its absence offends what little sense of universal justice I've retained. 

Her death angers me.  If I'd known how frail she'd been I would've been up there tri-colored headband-in-hand and put her through the paces.  She owed the world the brilliance.  She lacked the right to leave us.  She should be couped in a room right now writing the final installment in Lauren Olamina's saga. 

Instead she waits in state in a Seattle science fiction museum.

As I said earlier she's the first favorite writer I've lost.  Take this sorrow as a recommendation. 

Read her. 

She was a force.

UPDATE: A reader informs me that the sequence of her novels can be confusing.  It certainly can.  Here's the order I'd recommend reading them:

Patternmaster
Clay's Ark
Wild Seed
Mind  of My Mind
Lilith's Brood
Kindred
Parable of the Sower
Parable of the Talents

I understand this ordering may be controversial, but remember that I work on evolutionary theory before lambasting me for underestimating Kindred.

Comments

[Ancrene Wiseass]

That was lovely, Scott. And so true: I've flown through most of Butler's work since I finally allowed myself to start reading her this summer. I thought I'd lost the capacity to lose myself so completely in a book, and it was pure joy to reconnect with that capacity over and over.

I'm in shock, too. Every once in a while for the past two days, I think "Octavia Butler's gone" and feel grief.

She had so many books left in her. They were books I really wanted to read. More importantly, they were books the world needed.

[kermitthefrog]

Scott,

Thanks for the lovely memorial. I've only read a couple of her books, further down on your list, but I'm looking forward to reading some of the Patternist ones. Can I ask why you recommend them in that particular order (as far as I can tell, neither the original order of publication nor the order of events in the novels)?

[Beth Black]

Damn! I've been so busy with personal trials that I hadn't heard about her death. I read on one book jacket that she lived in Pasadena, which is a stone's throw from my old home. I was hoping to drive up there and look her up. This is a shame.

[Beth Black]

Well, in double-checking my facts, I see she moved to Seattle. Still would have popped in for a visit.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Kermit,

The sequence of the Patternmaster novels up there is odd. It's the furtherest in the future; then the next furtherest in the future; then the furtherest in the past; then the one in the present. I like circling around to the present: first you see where it ends up; then you see how it ended up there, i.e. where the clayarks came from; then you see what Doro's up to, knowing where it will head, makes everything in Wildseed and Mind of My Mind all the more poignant.

AW,

I'm with you on mourning the novels we'll never read. And it's so strange to think like that since I have such clear expectations of what most of my favorite novelists have produced . . . because they're already dead.

Beth,

I like the initiative, if not the timing. I'd never have been able to talk to her without a bag of marbles in mouth.

[darkdaughta]

Your first writer to die on you?

She was the second visionary I felt anything about in about 14 years.

The last passing I marked and grieved was Audre Lorde back in 92 when I was a young(er) Black dyke all full of passion and hope.

I felt as if there was work to carry on after Audre died.

With Octavia's passing, I cried and felt hopeless, as if the work was failing those who needed it to continue.

I had to work at putting a positive spin on my grief, had to work to remember that all is not lost and that forces are just amassing spiritually in other locations.

I'm still struggling.