Necessary Interventions in the Face of Very Curious Compulsions: Octavia Butler’s Naturalist Science Fiction

Octavia Butler delighted in recounting the defining moment that inspired her to write science fiction: her viewing at the age of twelve of Devil Girl from Mars, a movie so bad that she was sure she could do better. Having previously specialized in magic horse stories, she threw herself into this grand new undertaking, sending out her first stories when she was thirteen. After a long period of rejection slips, and encouraged by the likes of Theodore Sturgeon, Samuel Delany, and Harlan Ellison, she succeeded in becoming the first—and only—African American woman science fiction writer of high visibility. She amassed over her too short career a James Tiptree Award for Clay’s Ark (1984), a Hugo award for “Speech Sounds” (1984), a Nebula for “Bloodchild” (1984), and in the next year a Hugo for the same story, a Nebula for Parable of the Talents (1998), the pen Lifetime Achievement Award for writing (2000), the Langston Hughes Medal (2005), and she was a 2010 Inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Most spectacularly, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995, the first science fiction writer so honored, and that prize positioned her squarely at the center of the science fiction universe.

Raised in a working-class, single-parent, fundamentalist home, Butler achieved such national and international recognition in the face of incredible odds against her success,¹ not the least of which was the still powerful white male supremacy complex in science fiction. There have always been women science fiction writers, of course, and by the time she emerged on the scene feminist critics were well on their way in marking out an alternate pantheon of writers worthy of study. Similarly, as Andrea Hairston elaborates, drawing upon Sheree R. Thomas’s work, there was a traceable tradition of African American extrapolative writing from which a Black science fiction might naturally develop, and, indeed, Samuel Delany had done so. It was Butler’s arrival on the scene, however, that changed the face of science fiction. As I will argue in the following pages, Butler’s aesthetic and critical agenda can profitably be viewed as a series of major interventions into compulsory practices in science fiction. These interventions, in turn, depend upon her decidedly naturalistic reading of the human species’ maturity and futurity. Throughout her work we see not merely scientific extrapolations of “what if” but of “what is” and “what will be” if there are no broad-based and consistent sociopolitical interventions that will dramatically alter our ways of being. Employing the vehicle of science fiction as a means of delivery for a determinedly naturalist worldview and set of warnings, Butler’s science fiction and fantasy scripts force us to confront our mindless repetition of a profoundly injurious set of compulsions determined in large part by our genetic signature and our incapacity to embrace change, chance, and community.

Her most immediately discernible intervention in science fiction studies is her writing of race into the genre, and a great deal of work has focused almost exclusively on these race matters. As Butler somewhat disingenuously remarked, it was natural that she write herself into her work. She repeatedly insisted, however, that foregrounding race was not her sole or even primary intention in the case of every racial or ethnic notation, and she argued against the critical compulsion to make that argument, noting in a phone interview with Gregory Jerome Hampton that her early “writing of anything but utter reality was considered some kind of, almost a betrayal, a waste of time at best. I was supposed to, according to some people, be contributing to the struggle and not writing things that weren’t real” (137). She would agree, then, with Gene Andrew Jarrett’s assertion, in his African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader, that not all works by African American writers are most profitably read primarily through the lens of Black literary forms such as the slave narrative or Black realism, and in the same volume Jeffrey Allen Tucker discusses at length critical interpretations of “Bloodchild...