More Random Thoughts on Writers

Authors, Part 2
Octavia E. Butler
The following is another part in what will, I hope, be a growing list of authors and books that I have found to be genuinely interesting. The list stems from my own tastes and experience, and as such it is, of course, entirely subjective. These lists of authors and books cross many genres and styles - from literary fiction to crime fiction, from science fiction and fantasy to biographies and nonfiction. These lists are designed simply to aide you, the reader, in the process of choosing your own reading material.

Ahh, science fiction. Like crime and romance fiction, the genre has always seemed relegated to the status of a ‘guilty pleasure.' The genre has certainly taken its share of abuse in the literary world - oft dismissed as ‘low' fiction, and unworthy of comparison with the best examples of literary works that are purportedly more sophisticated in theme, style, character, and - well, everything, essentially. I have always found such sweeping judgments - of any literary category - to be extraordinarily counterproductive. Good writers exist in all genres, and in a perfect world a truly wonderful writer would be able to leap over the glib and artificially constructed barrier of the ‘genre fiction' label to achieve a well earned degree of literary respect.

Octavia E. Butler was one of the writers within the sci-fi field that deserves to be more widely read. She certainly deserved more attention during her lifetime. She sadly passed away a couple of years ago, but she left a rich and interesting body of work behind. She was one of the only African-American women working in the genre. That fact alone would have made her novels significant, but to simply label her career in such a way would, I think, do Butler the writer a disservice. She and her books deserve better than such simple and easy categorization.

There were, and are, sci-fi and fantasy authors with a more sophisticated stylistic sense (Gene Wolfe and Le Guin are two that immediately spring to mind), but one should not underestimate what Butler achieved. Her books are (and here I use a hackneyed term I once swore I'd never use) compulsively readable. Writing books that are easy to read but that don't feel like fluff or intellectual drivel takes talent. Butler manages to work issues like race, religion, gender, ecology, and the dynamics of group behavior into her fiction without sounding preachy or dry. Tough task, that, but she pulls it off. She was one of my favorite sci-fi authors, chiefly because she could really write and because she usually had something legitimate to say about the world.

She left twelve novels and one collection of short stories. Her novel Kindred (which crosses sci-fi with historical fiction) is an excellent starting place for any reader unacquainted with Butler's work, as it encompasses many of the issues that would appear in her later work, and is a standalone novel unrelated to any of her series (the Patternist, Lilith's Brood, and Parable of the Sower series - all highly recommended).