In a beautiful essay in Vulture, published earlier this year, E. Alex Jung writes that Octavia E. Butler "never told an aspiring writer they should give up, rather that they should learn, study, observe, and persist." Butler could have been speaking of her own life, a writerly existence of fairly early publishing success but a consistent struggle for financial security and the uphill battle of being a Black woman in a genre dominated by white men.
Butler is now considered a visionary if not the mother of Afrofuturism, which Ramtin Arablouei of NPR describes as "an open-ended genre combining science fiction, fantasy and history to imagine a liberated future through a Black lens." Butler was raised by her widowed mother, who worked for wealthy white women, and grandmother in Pasadena, California. She said the moment she decided to be a writer of science fiction was when she saw the 1954 B-movie "Devil Girl from Mars" as a 9-year-old. She loved comics, superheroes and sci-fi, loved a genre that took its time loving her back.
