In recognition of her birth date (June 22), the Library of America posted a tribute to Octavia Butler that looked at her reflections on how race, identity, and imagination did (not) unite in science fiction, and how they should:
Octavia E. Butler, among the most brilliant and original voices in speculative fiction, was also one of the genre’s most astute critics. Born on June 22, 1947, her classic novels and stories mesh the vast scope and ambition of SF—alien civilizations with advanced technology, time travel, and telepathy—with an unblinking assessment of how women and people of color are marginalized not just in American society but also in its imagination.
In her essay “Lost Races of Science Fiction,” included in the LOA edition of Kindred, Fledgling, and Other Stories, she writes:
Science fiction reaches into the future, the past, the human mind. It reaches out to other worlds and into other dimensions. Is it really so limited, then, that it cannot reach into the lives of ordinary, everyday humans who happen not to be white?
Among the more succinct damnations of the color line that ran through much SF writing of Butler’s era, it also exposes a fundamental question about why authors conjure up fantastical, reality-bending stories to begin with.
The point is not, Butler insists, to draw direct parallels between Black inhabitants of fictional universes and actors in contemporary political struggles on Earth. Such connections are both too literal and feed into some readers’ assumptions that any character of color, even one engaged in space travel, is invariably acting as an agent of racial protest—a political instrument rather than a flesh-and-blood person.
The inability to see through this prevailing atmosphere of whiteness, unsurprisingly, has historically been a source of alienation for Black readers and writers alike, who, Butler says, “find a certain lack of authenticity in a genre which postulates a universe largely populated by whites, in which the power is in white hands, and blacks are occasional oddities.”
What we see in Butler’s work, by contrast, are individuals—deep-thinking, emotionally knotty, imperfect in their politics, and embedded in social realities that, even as they twist into extradimensional shapes, remain grounded in lived experience.
Butler continues:
More important than any technique, however, is for authors to remember that they are writing about people. Authors who forget this, who do not relax and get comfortable with their racially different characters, can wind up creating unbelievable, self-consciously manipulated puppets; pieces of furniture who exist within a story but contribute nothing to it; or stereotypes guaranteed to be offensive.
Reality-defying plots and places are no excuse for othering the human characters who inhabit them. The world we’ve created on Earth doesn’t vanish when we send people to the stars in fiction, but neither must it be uncritically reproduced, taken as a universal constant even as we press to the outer limits of imagination. Instead, as Butler and other visionary authors like Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany show us in their radical, riveting books, the zone of possibility opened up by the best SF is as unpindownable and unpredictable as a person’s life story.