The Grand Cultural Influence of Octavia Butler

Tomorrow, June 22, would have been legendary SF novelist and short story writer Octavia Butler’s 72nd birthday. She died in 2006—much too young, at only 58—already a certified genius who had a profound impact on many readers and writers across the world. Not surprisingly, this includes many of the best writers of SF, fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror working today, and so to celebrate Butler’s birthday, I’ve collected a few of their thoughts on her influence.

Of course, the writers quoted below are not the only ones to love or be influenced by Butler—not by far. That list might actually be infinite, and at least also includes Wayétu Moore, Rivers Solomon, Sarah Pinsker, Nalo Hopkinson, Lester Spence, Valjeanne Jeffers, K. Tempest Bradford, and Karen Joy Fowler. The below are simply missives from a few writers and artists whom I found discussing the great Octavia Butler’s influence—on their own work and otherwise—at length, to help us consider the lasting good she’s done for literature.

Nnedi Okorafor

In her introduction to the graphic novel adaptation of Butler’s Kindred, Okorafor writes:

I first came across Octavia’s work around 2001, when I was well on my way to identifying as a black female writer of speculative fiction. I was attending the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University, and the organizers had brought my group to the local bookstore. As I strolled through the aisles, something extraordinary caught my eye, something I’d only ever seen once before in the science fiction and fantasy section of a bookstore: a cover featuring a dark-skinned black woman.

I was staring at Wild Seed by Octavia Estelle Butler

There was only one copy of the book there on that fateful day. I grabbed it, clasped it to my chest as if someone was going to snatch it from me, quickly bought it, and ran to my dorm room to start reading.

That was the beginning of my bingeing on Octavia Butler’s works.

In the previous weeks at Clarion, I had just begun writing about an angry Nigerian woman in pre-colonial Nigeria who’d been run out of her village because she’d developed the ability to fly. I was one of two people of color in the writing group, and I was uncomfortable about workshopping my story. Plus, I’d never read a purely speculative story set anywhere on the continent of Africa that addressed womanhood and patriarchy bluntly.

When I look back, it’s clear to me that I discovered Octavia right when I needed her. Reading Wild Seed, a story that featured an ageless shape-shifting Nigerian woman, blew my mind. And there is nothing like seeing a story in print that is similar to what you are trying to write. In may ways, reading Wild Seed proved that what I was writing was okay, that people like me could be a part of this canon. This was a very big deal to me.

And it looks like Okorafor is going to take Butler’s influence even further: just a few months ago, we got the news that Amazon Prime Video was developing a series based on Butler’s Patternist series, to be co-written by Okorafor and director Wanuri Kahiu.

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Nisi Shawl

In 2017, Strange Horizons published a letter Nisi Shawl—who dedicated her first novel, Everfair, to Octavia Butler—wrote to Butler, excerpted from Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler. Here’s an excerpt:

In 2007, as soon after your fatal fall as I could bear to talk about you publicly, I organized a panel at WisCon, a feminist science fiction convention whose Guest of Honor you once were. The panel’s title was “Genre Tokenism Today: The New Octavia Butler.”

After the untimely death of the great writer Octavia E. Butler, some have asked who will take her place. A panel of African-descended women currently writing genre fiction addresses this question, talking about Octavia’s oeuvre and their own: similarities, differences, market forces, and the pressures to model their contributions to the field on hers. How many ways is this question just plain wrong? Who has a vested interest in there being “an Octavia,” new or old? What would a “new Octavia” look like? How does her literary legacy affect the field today, and how might it do so in the future? And how does this legacy relate to this disturbing question?

N. K. Jemisin, K. Tempest Bradford, Candra K. Gill, Nnedi Okorafor, and I started by telling our audience why each of us was in no way your replacement. Never could be. Never would want to.

But now, despite that, despite the endearment with which I opened this letter, it looks like we’re all going to have to be Octavias. All of us: women, and men, and every other gender as well; African Americans, Native Americans, and every other race—all of us. At least in this sense: we’re going to have to write change-the-world fiction, like you. We’re also going to have to bake change-the-world cookies and ride change-the-world horses and vote in change-the-world elections. We’re going to have to change the world. We’re going to have to do everything we can to maintain life on this planet.

We don’t have weapons but we do have numbers. And we have the memory of you, your pessimism and persistence. We have the path you were walking when you died.

Especially for science fiction authors of color, that path is easier to see now that you’ve walked it. Easier to see means easier to take. Also, taking it is way less lonely for people of color these days than it was when you first set out. As I said, we have numbers.

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Janelle Monáe

The genre-bending musician and actress has cited Butler—who has, after all, been described as the Mother of Afrofuturism, an aesthetic and philosophy that Monáe has helped to popularize—multiple times as both personal favorite and creative inspiration. In 2010, she told i09:

[Butler’s] work was first of all brilliantly written, and Wild Seed was the book that inspired me. I loved the characters, and the morphing. [Anyanwu] was just such a transformative character, and I look at myself as a transformative artist. Just the fact that [Butler] defied race and gender . . . You appreciated her work for being a human being.

And in 2011, she told MTV that Butler had directly inspired her album The ArchAndroid:

I started reading Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. I love the character Doro in there. She reminded me a lot of myself. She had so many dimensions—we all do—and there’s so many sides of me.

More recently, she explained her take on science fiction to Stephen Colbert:

Well, it has started out dystopian, and, you know, I try and give hope through those dystopian worlds. But I love writers like Octavia Butler. She’s incredible, she’s a black woman, and I love that lens. Because I am a black woman and I grew up in the middle of America, I love writing through my truths, and through the lens of a black American woman, and I think movies like Black Panther have deeply inspired me. And Afrofuturism is a term that allows us as black people to see ourselves in the future and know that we make it, know that we’re not the first people gone when something goes down.

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Tananarive Due

In a 2017 interview with Bitch, Due reminisced about her profound friendship with Butler, and the way her work has impacted both her reading and her life:

I knew her as someone who liked to laugh. [She] was very passionate about the world and trying to preserve it in every way she could think of and trying to warn us off our path of destruction with every book in a different way. I think that’s part of the reason why so many readers are embracing her now because more of us are consumed with the questions she was consumed with. I think the rest of us are just catching up with her and realizing how precarious our existence can be.

. . .

Honestly, it was literally Octavia’s Earthseed parables that got me past election day. The only lasting truth is change. Realizing that this is real, it’s cyclical, that we have to shake out of stupor and react. I couldn’t even process the election for days. It was almost as if it wasn’t real. It was a paralysis and Octavia helped me break out of that, through her words and her writing. For my own writing, it’s tough sometimes. I teach privately at two institutions, there’s Hollywood work from time to time, and I’ve been working on a novel for over three years. Sometimes writing makes me cry and the research makes me cry and it’s difficult, but fiction has a way of reaching people’s hearts in a way that the news can’t. It’s about empathy. That’s what works in fiction. The hope is that readers will be moved to some sort of action. Whether it’s educating people, donating to organizations, or calling a senator, but I hope that there’s something in everything that I write that will change a reader’s awareness of racial history and help spur them to create change. Maybe it’s [because I’m] the child of civil rights activists.

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Sam J. Miller

The author of Blackfish City has, like many of the others on this list, mentioned Butler’s work as personally important and formative in numerous places. In a 2017 interview with Locus, he explained:

Even though I don’t write a ton of horror, I want to write about what scares me. That’s always been the thing that as a reader has excited me the most. I want to read about what scares me. I love Octavia Butler—she’s one of my favorite writers—because her work is about what scares me. It’s about the scary shit, and the scary shit is as much about racism and misogyny as it is evil body-hopping in the world. My way into fiction has always been through what I’m scared of.

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adrienne maree brown

Much of brown’s work has engaged specifically with Butler’s—she discussed this and other things at length in a 2013 interview with Ada:

So many of the ways I look at the world were shaped by reading her work at a formative age so thinking about relationships as something that should be open and free rather than sort of locked into — you know, it’s only going to be this one way for all time. I think that that is multiple lovers or to choose not to have multiple lovers, but the idea that a relationship is not a place of ownership but a place of choice — she did so much presenting of that. I learned a lesson about writing that is this. Octavia’s work is not the most beautifully written work by any means and there’s a lot of writers I’ve read that have much more beautiful work or are more technically gifted writers and yet the ideas she was presenting were so genius and she was able to present them in such an accessible way that it didn’t matter that she didn’t write some kind of way. And I think for me as a writer that’s been a really important lesson: to go ahead and put my work out there and not worry about perfection so much as being honest and feeling like if there’s wisdom coming I need to let it flow through me and I feel like I’ve really learned a lot about what leadership looks like.

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N. K. Jemisin

In 2008, on Butler’s birthday, Jemisin included the following tribute on her blog:

[I]f she hadn’t become a writer, I’m not sure I would be writing today. It would’ve been all too easy to give in to the little voices in the back of my mind, or the not-so-little voices from doubters among my loved ones, who insisted that my dream was unrealistic at best, laughable at worst. She was my clarion call—the lonely beacon in the wilderness letting me know that I was on the right track, that someone had been along the path before me, and that it was possible to reach the end.

So—thanks, Ms. Butler. If memory is the only true immortality, then may you live forever.

But Jemisin has also been clear that Butler was not a literary influence, but a career one—an important distinction. Again, on her blog, in 2011, she wrote:

In almost every interview, I get asked how I feel about Octavia Butler—even when I don’t mention her as a literary influence. (She’s not, ya’ll. She’s a career influence; knowing she made it in this business made me realize I could do the same. But in terms of her subject matter and writing style? No.)