Octavia e. butler faith12/3/2023 “Her subjects and ideas and expressions were deep and complex. “Harlan that she wasn’t a very good screenwriter, which doesn’t surprise me much,” recalled friend and fellow sci-fi writer Vonda McIntyre. In 1969, she was discovered by well-known science fiction writer Harlan Ellison at a screenwriting workshop in Los Angeles. Instead, “ Butler approached askance, choosing to write self-consciously as an African American woman marked by a particular history,” write literary scholars De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai. Of course, the world of science fiction was (and still is) dominated by white, male authors. “Gradually I learned that that wasn’t the way I wanted to write.” “I didn’t know what good writing was frankly, and I didn’t have any particular talent for writing so I copied a lot of the old pulp writers in the way I told a story,” Butler told Callaloo. She began trying to sell her science fiction writing when she was thirteen. “Butler approached askance, choosing to write self-consciously as an African American woman marked by a particular history.” She devoured everything from Theodore Sturgeon to Robert A. It didn’t matter,” she said in a 1996 interview published in Science Fiction Studies. “I read a lot of science fiction with absolutely no discrimination when I was growing up-I mean, good, bad, or awful. She would later attempt to resolve these feelings in her most popular novel, Kindred.ĭespite her dyslexia, the young Butler read voraciously. “I was around sometimes when people talked about as if she were not there, and I got to watch her going in back doors and generally being treated in a way that made me… I spent a lot of my childhood being ashamed of what she did,” Butler remembered in a 1991 interview with the journal Callaloo. Her mother did domestic work, an experience that would shape Butler’s writing. She was twelve years old and thought: “ Geez, I can write a better story than that.” Octavia Estelle Butler was inspired to write science fiction after watching a schlocky B-movie, Devil Girl from Mars.
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