Her self-motivational notes can also be seen as the logical expressions of a writer with compelling personal drive. What a destructive assumption.’ Luckily these barriers didn’t keep Butler from pursing her passion. She wrote: ‘Should a woman who is black have to spend her writing life wondering whether the praise or criticism she is receiving comes because of her sex, or her color, or because her work is deserving of it?’ and ‘Why aren’t there more SF Black writers? There aren’t because there aren’t. Butler reflects heavily in her personal writings on the challenges of writing and the lack of support systems. While her mother did support her writing to some extent, a career as a science fiction author was largely unfathomable to anyone in Butler’s immediate community. Her self-motivation may also be a response to the lack of widespread support. While I would disagree, her self-motivation may be understood as a response to her own self-doubt, her interest in the mind, utilizing concepts of self-hypnosis to make things true or mantras to improve self-esteem. She considered herself of average intelligence and not particularly talented. She believed that persistence and effort, rather than pure imagination or waiting for ‘the muse,’ were the key elements to success as a writer. She offers warnings of the malignant possibles and contemplates solutions to these dire visions.īutler had no role model for what she was doing-a black, female, science fiction author-but was driven by her own ‘positive obsession.’ … This self-motivation can be understood from a number of angles. Hers is a voice that sought a path toward a better, more peaceful, more cooperative world. She is a storyteller, but she also recognized the power of science fiction to help us dream for the real world. She tackles issues like climate change and drought, the prevalence and testing of pharmaceuticals, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and sexual identity-all issues humanity still faces today-in thought-provoking ways.
Butler: Telling My Stories, a new exhibition of the pioneering author’s papers, reflects upon the meaning and urgency of these materials today.īutler’s works, though they may have been written 20 or 30 years ago, are incredibly contemporary and relevant. Here, Natalie Russell, assistant curator of literary collections at the Huntington Library in Pasadena and curator of Octavia E. It just turned out that it was called science fiction.” Butler herself did extraordinary things, and the story of her method of self-motivation and perseverance in the face of challenging odds, of her productivity, and of her excellence at creating worlds that reveal, and at times redress, truths about our own, is beautifully told through her archive.
She was also the first African American woman to gain recognition in the genre, though one of her more famous statements on the topic of her contribution to that particular field, uttered during more than one interview, is “I write about people who do extraordinary things. Butler was the first science fiction writer to receive a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Butler (1947-2006) inside the cover of a notebook in 1988-one of the manifestations the author jotted across her sketchpads and rough drafts, artifacts now housed in the collections of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA.
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