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Feb. 26th, 2006 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupBefore it can rise from its own ashes
The phoenix
First
Must
Burn.
Requiescat in Pace, magistra.
Octavia Butler was a huge influence on me as a middle-teen, in particular Parable of the Sower, a signed copy of which is sitting in a box labeled "Keepsakes" in my closet. The above quote is from The Book of the Living, a volume of epigrams written by Parable's young, female, African-American heroine, a postapocalyptic messiah who founds a religion based on the idea of God as Change.
Butler, like Ursula LeGuin, was significant among SFF authors for her use of minorities in her work; Kindred, which in my opinion could replace Toni Morrison's entire collected works as a novel about the African-American experience, portrays a poor young black woman engaged to a white man in the 1970s. Dana, the heroine, periodically leaps backwards through time to the antebellum south, where she is enslaved as a "house negro".
I had the privilege of hearing Octavia Butler speak at a young writer's conference when I was fifteen, and I found her to be charming, amiable, kind, and very down-to-earth. What stands out most in my memory, aside from her deep, extremely expressive voice, is her answer to a question someone asked -- how did she gain her extensive knowledge of science and mythology?
"I read," she answered.
The phoenix
First
Must
Burn.
Requiescat in Pace, magistra.
Octavia Butler was a huge influence on me as a middle-teen, in particular Parable of the Sower, a signed copy of which is sitting in a box labeled "Keepsakes" in my closet. The above quote is from The Book of the Living, a volume of epigrams written by Parable's young, female, African-American heroine, a postapocalyptic messiah who founds a religion based on the idea of God as Change.
Butler, like Ursula LeGuin, was significant among SFF authors for her use of minorities in her work; Kindred, which in my opinion could replace Toni Morrison's entire collected works as a novel about the African-American experience, portrays a poor young black woman engaged to a white man in the 1970s. Dana, the heroine, periodically leaps backwards through time to the antebellum south, where she is enslaved as a "house negro".
I had the privilege of hearing Octavia Butler speak at a young writer's conference when I was fifteen, and I found her to be charming, amiable, kind, and very down-to-earth. What stands out most in my memory, aside from her deep, extremely expressive voice, is her answer to a question someone asked -- how did she gain her extensive knowledge of science and mythology?
"I read," she answered.
