Octavia Butler – The Best Science Fiction Writer You’ve Never Heard Of

I remember the sight of my first Octavia Butler book clearly: I was perhaps 11 years old, rummaging around in my mother’s office. A science fiction reader and writer herself, my mother had many long-forgotten gems on her bookshelf.

One book had the most intriguing cover I’d ever seen. An African woman appeared in profile against the backdrop of a cracked stone wall. Her face was beautiful and proud; her skull, from above the hairline, took on a cacaphony of colors and patterns, showing the eye of an elephant the face of a cheetah and a bird, the ears of a zebra and the wings of a butterfly. The title? Wild Seed.

Octavia Butler exploded onto the science fiction scene in the 1970s. She was unique, in my experience as a reader, in the way she tackled scientific concepts like alien life and genetic mutation: one thing you’ll notice about other groundbreaking authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke is that they make you think about these subjects. Octavia Butler makes you feel them.

The strength of her protagonists stands out. Where Asimov’s and Clarke’s sometimes seemed like formulaic cookie-cutter characters, their attributes neatly laid out for the reader to see, Butler’s seem like real people – deeply complex and wounded people, no less.

Her Wild Seed series tackles the subject of human evolution – only insofar as it asks how it would effect human relationships, if some of us began developing natural abilities beyond the wildest dreams of our current science.

How would a person react to realizing, after being born in prehistoric Africa, that they could not die? How would such a person ever form lasting relationships? How would he relate to mere mortals?

Her Lilith’s Brood series, similarly, focuses on the questions of extraterrestrial intelligence – mostly by focusing on the question of how an intelligent race may feel and think quite differently from us.

What if humans discovered that we were quite the oddballs among intelligent life in the universe? What if we were visited by an alien species that was infinitely more powerful than us – and had fundamentally different psychological needs from our own?

Where her other series cover protagonists who are hated, feared, and outcast because of their abilities, or their association with alien intelligence, her Earthseed series features protagonists who are outcasts for much more mundane reasons – because of poverty, religious differences, and the color of their skin.

If America went to Hell in an economic handbasket, who would save us? What is strong enough to overcome poverty, crime, hopelessness, and fear of each other?

What distinguishes the volumes in all of these series is not just the concepts contained therein, but the writing. Her Wild Seed mutants are completely believable as children of past eras whose remarkable abilities, rather than uplifting them, have isolated them from the rest of humanity; her Lilith’s Brood aliens see the world in a way that is fundamentally different from our own – yet which flows so naturally from their emotions that the reader soon finds the human characters to be the alien-seeming ones. Her Earthseed heroes are deeply flawed and sometimes make glaring mistakes, but their tenacity in the face of hardship shows us how we may accomplish change in even the most hopeless of real-world circumstances.

I’d have to name Lilith’s Brood as my overall favorite of her series. The concepts presented by the arrival of aliens are so new, and yet so fascinatingly natural, that I cannot get enough of her aliens and the humans who come to love them.

The book Wild Seed as a stand-alone is a close second for me; it plays the triple role of science fiction, compelling romance, and historical drama.

Her Earthseed series, on the other hand, has the potential to answer questions which are important to our here and now. I’ll say nothing more beyond that it bears certain resemblances to Interstellar and Tomorrowland.

And all of these books make us not only think, but feel differently about our place in the Universe that gave birth to us.

What will be your favorite Octavia Butler book?