Octavia Butler, 1947-2006
I was shocked and saddened to hear that veteran sf writer Octavia Butler had died, from a cause variously reported as a massive stroke or head injuries following a fall. She was only 58, and I'm sure she had a lot more stories to tell.
Her stories and novels, though many of them used old sf concepts like time-travel, psychic powers, or aliens taking over Earth, had such a unique perspective, clear style, thought-through implications, and intensity that they always read as fresh and new as if she had invented sf from scratch.
She returned to some of the same related themes and situations again and again in different contexts, which were slavery and the psychology of master-slave interactions, and how people live with insoluble problems and dilemmas where no choice will create a perfect world. Her stories could be depressing, but not always; they were always unsentimental, well-characterized, and smart.
My favorites of hers are two novels, Wild Seed and Dawn, and a collection of short stories, Bloodchild and other stories.
The latter is a must-read and also a good entry point to her work. It only contains five stories, but three of them are masterpieces, simultaneously more intense and more uplifting than her novels, and bursting with startling sfnal ideas. "Bloodchild" is horrific and moving novella about humans in a complex slave-symbiotic-loving relationship with their alien owners/symbiotes/family. It encapsulates her favorite themes, and is simultaneously a sweet love story and a intensely creepy horror story. "Speech Sounds" is a very brief story that punches way above its weight, the only story I've ever read in which humans lose the ability to communicate through written and spoken language. "The Morning and the Evening and the Night" is about the cost and unexpected benefits of a horrible genetic disease. I don't find these stories depressing or nihilistic, but they're all pretty disturbing in one way or another.
Wild Seed is an excellent sf novel set in Africa, about two "Wild Seeds": Anyanwu, a woman who can shapeshift, heal herself, and who seems immortal, and Doro, who switches bodies when he chooses or when the one he's in dies, killing his hosts in the process. Doro starts breeding people for psychic talents, a program which Anyanwu, at various times his enemy and his companion, tries to stop or ameliorate. The characterization is as vivid and believable as the landscape.
This features a common theme of Butler's, which is the unsolvable dilemma, and how people learn to live with it. When her novels set up a really big problem, they rarely have someone pull a scientific or any other sort of simple solution out of a hat. In this case, Doro cannot be killed, period, no escape clause, and is about Anyanwu's attempts to find a way to deal with an extremely powerful, immortal, and invincible enemy. There are chronological sequels which were written earlier and are not as good.
Dawn is about an alien takeover of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The aliens, their culture, their interactions with humanity, and the ways that the surviving humans try to deal with their situation are all beautifully depicted and cleverly imagined. The sequels to this one are good and worth reading.
The Parable of the Sower and its sequel, about a post-apocalyptic America and a female Messiah, are well-written but so close to reality that they are too depressing for me to re-read.
I have not yet read Kindred or Fledgling.
Her stories and novels, though many of them used old sf concepts like time-travel, psychic powers, or aliens taking over Earth, had such a unique perspective, clear style, thought-through implications, and intensity that they always read as fresh and new as if she had invented sf from scratch.
She returned to some of the same related themes and situations again and again in different contexts, which were slavery and the psychology of master-slave interactions, and how people live with insoluble problems and dilemmas where no choice will create a perfect world. Her stories could be depressing, but not always; they were always unsentimental, well-characterized, and smart.
My favorites of hers are two novels, Wild Seed and Dawn, and a collection of short stories, Bloodchild and other stories.
The latter is a must-read and also a good entry point to her work. It only contains five stories, but three of them are masterpieces, simultaneously more intense and more uplifting than her novels, and bursting with startling sfnal ideas. "Bloodchild" is horrific and moving novella about humans in a complex slave-symbiotic-loving relationship with their alien owners/symbiotes/family. It encapsulates her favorite themes, and is simultaneously a sweet love story and a intensely creepy horror story. "Speech Sounds" is a very brief story that punches way above its weight, the only story I've ever read in which humans lose the ability to communicate through written and spoken language. "The Morning and the Evening and the Night" is about the cost and unexpected benefits of a horrible genetic disease. I don't find these stories depressing or nihilistic, but they're all pretty disturbing in one way or another.
Wild Seed is an excellent sf novel set in Africa, about two "Wild Seeds": Anyanwu, a woman who can shapeshift, heal herself, and who seems immortal, and Doro, who switches bodies when he chooses or when the one he's in dies, killing his hosts in the process. Doro starts breeding people for psychic talents, a program which Anyanwu, at various times his enemy and his companion, tries to stop or ameliorate. The characterization is as vivid and believable as the landscape.
This features a common theme of Butler's, which is the unsolvable dilemma, and how people learn to live with it. When her novels set up a really big problem, they rarely have someone pull a scientific or any other sort of simple solution out of a hat. In this case, Doro cannot be killed, period, no escape clause, and is about Anyanwu's attempts to find a way to deal with an extremely powerful, immortal, and invincible enemy. There are chronological sequels which were written earlier and are not as good.
Dawn is about an alien takeover of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The aliens, their culture, their interactions with humanity, and the ways that the surviving humans try to deal with their situation are all beautifully depicted and cleverly imagined. The sequels to this one are good and worth reading.
The Parable of the Sower and its sequel, about a post-apocalyptic America and a female Messiah, are well-written but so close to reality that they are too depressing for me to re-read.
I have not yet read Kindred or Fledgling.