Octavia Butler, Myth-Maker for the 21st Century

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

Octavia Butler is dead (in 2006, actually), long live Octavia Butler. There are few authors who have taught me more about what it means to be human.

Her stories don't teach with luxurious literary language or complex psychological portraits. The earlier novels are a little bit wooden, with characters that sometimes seem like cardboard cut-outs. But rarely have I found stories so LOADED down with ideas that there's barely time to explore one before the next one bursts upon me. Her stories teach through the ancient arts of analogy, metaphor and parable.

She has given me so many images of human-ness, refracted through her prism of fantasy and science fiction. Here are a few that I still ponder, years after reading them:

That adolescence is a life-threatening "transition," and not all beings survive the intensity of the transformation. All need, though not all receive, the intense, focused, physical presence and mentoring of an adult who has successfully navigated the change, and still remembers how hard it was.

In Fledgling, the heroine, Shori, is a black, female, amnesiac, child-sized vampire with some human DNA, as well--how many more levels outside the "norm" could she be? Her journey to learn who she is and what she believes in is a beautiful analogy for each of our search to define ourselves, what we can tolerate, who our tribe is, and how we can stand up against injustice.

Speaking of heroines, Butler has left us a gallery of fascinating, powerful-yet-disempowered female beings, all of whom have to live with enormous physical danger, as well as profound social inequality. Every time I read her stories I learn more about how it feels to live as the victim of social injustice and racism, and also what it means to cleave to your own values and vision. So many of our contemporary myths are manufactured by white, male-dominated Hollywood.

Here's a glimpse of Butler's gallery of heroes:

*A vampire with the ability to sustain a web of complex, interdependent symbiotic relationships that include multiple mates (polyamory) and inter-species love;

*A super-hero whose gift is an almost unimaginable level of--get ready now--not strength, not speed, not the power to destroy, but--empathy.

*A nurturing, insect-like creature with multiple arms that serves as a gestational pod for humans.

In The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of The Talents, Butler suggests that the only way to keep the human race from destroying itself through tribal warfare is to find a vision--a narrative--big enough to harness everyone's energy and turn it outwards. Butler proposed a "space race" as an example of an expansive-enough vision to provide that focus. I wonder if saving this planet could serve the same purpose, and provide more obvious and immediate rewards: like survival.

It was also in the Parables that she painted a portrait of a society in which only the ultra-rich could afford the gasoline and bodyguards necessary to drive (are we there yet?)--everyone else used the super-highways as enormous sidewalks, where the strong preyed on the weak and no one was safe.

What will I do now that I've read all her books? It's simple: Start re-reading them.