Eugene Fischer

Tag: Octavia Butler

Reading 2016: March

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The start of April was so busy, I forgot to ever post this.

  1. Hawkeye vol. 2 by Matt Fraction and David Aja – The conclusion to their run on the title. The deaf issue was really amazing, but it had been too long since I’d read the previous volume to remember some of the identities in Kate’s branch of the story, and I just muddled forward rather than going back to review. Not having ever been a Marvel reader or knowing there was precedent, I was legit surprised when Clint Barton was deafened.
  2. Miracleman: The Golden Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham – My first time reading Gaiman’s contribution to the title. He followed up the mythic grandeur of Moore’s conclusion in probably the only way that would work: by telling a series of small, human stories in a still-fresh utopia. It lets the story take a breath, builds room for new kinds of narrative consequence to form, which we perhaps see only the very beginning of in this volume. I look forward to seeing the arc completed.
  3. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Joey Comeau and Emily Horne – The Kickstarted best-of book for A Softer World, which I will miss. Every page made me want to claim the words as my own and pretend to be cleverer than I really am.
  4. Hugo and Nebula Award Winners from Asimov’s Science Fiction edited by Sheila Williams – I picked this out of my parents’ library to read after “The New Mother” was nominated for a Nebula. It has a lot of old favorites, like “Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler, “Bears Discover Fire” by Terry Bisson, and “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress. I think my favorite story here that I hadn’t read before was “Barnacle Bill the Spacer” by Lucious Shepard.
  5. The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott – I’d been looking forward to Elliott’s debut novel ever since I read her debut collection The Wilds last year, and it did not disappoint. It’s a story of artificial intelligence enhancement, in conversation with Flowers for Algernon and Camp Concentration, but with a southern gothic humor and occasional satirical edge that I found delightful. I nominated it for a Hugo award which it will certainly not win because it isn’t well-known enough within the genre. But on merits it deserves that kind of attention.

Changing the World Fantasy Award Trophy

The trophy for the World Fantasy Award is a bust of H. P. Lovecraft, a man who, it’s undeniable, was hugely influential on the body of fantastic literature. He was also an exceptionally hateful and unabashed racist. When Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2011, she wrote a thoughtful blog post about winning an award bearing the image of a man who, in life, would have detested her based on her skin. Since then, discussion of the propriety of having Lovecraft on the award statue has grown. Today Daniel José Older (who recently made a great video about why he doesn’t italicize Spanish words in his fiction) put up a Change.org petition to change the World Fantasy Award to a bust of Octavia Butler.

My initial response to this idea was excitement. Octavia Butler is among my favorite writers, and the author of my all-time favorite short story. She was also a woman of color who wrote about issues of race with as much nuance as anyone ever has. So with regard to addressing the things that make Lovecraft a troublesome figure to have on the statue, it’s hard to imagine anyone better. With regard to representing the fantasy genre, though, Butler is an odd choice. She almost never wrote it.

Butler published, by my count, 21 pieces of fiction during her life: 12 novels and 9 shorter works. Of those, there are only two that seem to me to be works of fantasy. Her short story “The Book of Martha” is clearly fantasy; the story is all about the titular character having a conversation with god about how to construct an utopia, given a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. The rest of her short works are all either science fiction or realism. Of her novels, the only one that is arguably fantasy is Kindred,1 in which the main character jumps through time between the 1970s and pre-Civil War United States, for no reason that is ever explained. (Daniel José Older obliquely references the book in his petition.) While this fantastic premise is perhaps enough to qualify it as a work fantasy, this book itself is far more concerned with investigating the social structures of slavery than it is with the fantastic element. The time travel, for all that it powers the plot, gets very little focus. And in terms of tropes and rhetorical structures, the novel has much more in common with historical fiction than it does fantasy. In bookstores I’ve seen it shelved in “literature” or “African American fiction” more often than I’ve seen it in “science fiction and fantasy.” So even if Kindred is fantasy, it’s not very representative, or in-genre influential fantasy, wonderful book though it is. And that still puts Butler’s fantasy output at less than 10% of her oeuvre.

If the choice is between Lovecraft and Butler for the World Fantasy Award, then obviously I’m on Team Butler. But if the choice instead is Lovecraft or Not Lovecraft, then I think I lean toward a different sort of Not Lovecraft: I’m on Team Nobody. Why does the award have to be a person? It isn’t named for a person, it’s named for a genre. No one–not Lovecraft, or Dunsany, or Tolkien–encapsulates an entire genre. I think I’m with Nick Mamatas, who proposed that the award be changed to something symbolic of fantasy. His suggestion was a chimera, which I like. In discussion on Twitter, Kurt Busiek spitballed the idea of a globe with fantastic maps, which could be nice too. The convention could have a design competition, like there is every year for the base of the Hugo award (the trophy for which, it’s worth noting, isn’t a bust of Hugo Gernsback). Doing so would undoubtedly produce a great, artistic design, and it would nicely unify a family of closely related awards: the Hugo is a rocket ship, the Nebula is astral bodies, and the World Fantasy Award would be… something fantastic.

  1. Fledgling has vampires in it, but treats them in a throughly science-fictional, biologically rigorous way. There’s nothing fantasy about it. ↩

Unfinished Writing in the Octavia Butler Archives

Gerry Canavan, a literature prof at Marquette University, has been studying the Butler archive and published an article in the LA Review of Books, “There’s Nothing New/Under the Sun/But There Are New Suns: Rediscovering Octavia Butler’s Lost Parables.” In it he outlines the many different options Butler was considering for the third book in her Parables series, Parable of the Trickster.

Nearly all of the texts focus on a character named Imara — who has been named the Guardian of Lauren Olamina’s ashes, who is often said to be her distant relative, and who is plainly imagined as the St. Paul to Olamina’s Christ (her story sometimes begins as a journalist who has gone undercover with the Earthseed “cult” to expose Olamina as a fraud, and winds up getting roped in). Imara awakens from cryonic suspension on an alien world where she and most of her fellow Earthseed colonists are saddened to discover they wish they’d never left Earth in the first place. The world — called “Bow” — is gray and dank, and utterly miserable; it takes its name from the only splash of color the planet has to offer, its rare, naturally occurring rainbows. They have no way to return to Earth, or to even to contact it; all they have is what little they’ve brought with them, which for most (but not all) of them is a strong belief in the wisdom of the teachings of Earthseed. Some are terrified; many are bored; nearly all are deeply unhappy. Her personal notes frame this in biological terms. From her notes to herself: “Think of our homesickness as a phantom-limb pain — a somehow neurologically incomplete amputation. Think of problems with the new world as graft-versus-host disease — a mutual attempt at rejection.”

Over at io9, Annalee Newitz has published an extended email correspondence with Canavan, asking about Butler’s plans for sequels to Fledgling.

And then there were a few tantalizing hints of a novel set a generation or two later, when many more of the vampires can go out in the sun like Shorri, and what they might do when they had no weaknesses and there was nothing stopping them from taking over the world. This is the one that I’m most interested in because it suggest Shorri as a somewhat darker figure than we might have thought — she really is disturbing a delicate ecological balance with her power to walk in the sun, which could cause a lot of problems down the road when played out to its logical conclusion…

Much gratitude to Mr. Canavan for this insight into Butler’s plans and process. I hope to have the chance to look at these papers myself some day.

The Next Twenty Books of 2014

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When I did my roundup of the first 20 books I read this year, I noticed that only three of them were written by women. I wanted to even up that ratio a bit, so made a point of bumping books by women to the top of the stack for this group.

  1. Technopriests: Supreme Collection by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Zoran Janjetov, and Fred Beltran. This was the last major branch of the Jodoverse that I hadn’t read. Jodorowsky remains one of my favorite writers, for his sheer bonkers extravagance, and having recently re-read the Jodoverse books added an extra layer of delight when I recently saw Jodorowsky’s Dune.
  2. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. For such a slim volume, I loved the tonal breadth of this collection. These were stories originally published in Swedish and translated by the author, and they are weird and wonderful. A brief, delightful read.
  3. Crash by J. G. Ballard. I found this difficult to finish. For about the first 80 pages I was engaged, but it became punishingly repetitive by the end. The fetishistic novelty wore off long before the book ended, and there was little else to recommend it. Many people whose opinions I respect are fans of Ballard, but I’m still trying to cultivate an appreciation for much of his work.
  4. Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine. I read this on an airplane and hardly noticed the time passing. It’s kaleidoscopic steampunk with gorgeous images on every page, fragmented into short chapters that build momentum like an avalanche. Genevieve’s second book is coming out tomorrow, and I can’t wait to read it.
  5. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delany. This book is… odd. Good, thought provoking. But very strange. It’s surprising to me–in a positive way, mind!–that it’s considered a classic of science fiction. I doubt though that I’m going to be revisiting this book as often as I will Nova.
  6. Saga, vol. 3 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. It’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about an ongoing comic series as I am about Saga. Each new trade is an insta-buy.
  7. The Adventures of Alyx by Joanna Russ. I’m glad I read this, though on the whole I enjoyed it less than I thought I would. A couple of the pieces here I found compelling, but the majority was coldly intellectual with an efficiency of prose that I found tiring even as I thought it admirable. I liked We Who Are About To better, but will still be reading more Russ.
  8. The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne. Monica is a Clarion classmate of mine and a dear friend, and so it is a delight to report that her first novel is an explosive debut. Ambitious and engrossing. I consumed it in two days and then spent the next week of my life thinking about it, wandering store aisles and taking unconscious inventory of the provisions I would need if I woke up in the future Monica created. It’s not so far away. We all might wake up there yet.
  9. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I’d been meaning to read Shirley Jackson’s novels for years, and decided to start here. Ho-lee shit. It’s as brilliant as everyone said it was.
  10. A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s a teacher of mine and a friend, so it was a pleasurable but unusual experience to read his first foray into memoir. He has evoked the seventh grade so keenly that I felt my own bubble up as I read, which, as I later told him across a lunch table, put me in the weird position of feeling possessive of someone else’s childhood.
  11. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch. I think, were it not for Flowers For Algernon exploring some of the same ground first and more accessibly, this would be considered a classic. I thought it an excellent book, though one for which I had to look up many words. I also felt unsure about the ending. It was convincingly rendered, but somehow didn’t fully satisfy. Still, I recommend the book. I think this is the most fully-imagined 1st person voice of increasing intelligence I’ve read.
  12. Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler. I’d been waiting years to read these stories, and finally getting to do so was both thrilling and bittersweet. This was, so far as I know, my last unread Butler fiction. I wrote about it more here.
  13. Blame by Michelle Huneven. Though she was never one of my teachers, Michelle was on faculty at Iowa when I applied, and is I think one of the people responsible for me getting accepted there. This is the first of her books I’ve read, and I greatly enjoyed it. It’s a novel that sprawls decades and resists tidiness, catching something that feels very true in its tangles. On the strength of this book I’ll be picking up her new one soon.
  14. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. My first time reading Wyndham. He was clearly brilliant, and the book is good, but I’m not sure I approached it from the right frame of mind. As is sometimes the case with classic apocalyptica, Triffids belabors ideas that have, since it was published, become cliche. The combination of that and the antiquated, one-note masculinity of the main character kept me from enjoying the novel as much as I otherwise might have. There’s a lot to appreciate here, but I wish I’d gone in with a more historical literary curiosity.
  15. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s a great book that I had problems with. I wrote about them at some length.
  16. Liar by Justine Larbalestier. After The Sparrow I was in the mood for some YA. This hit the spot. It’s like a young person’s introduction to the unreliable narrator. Great fun.
  17. The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi. I got an ARC of this novella at the Tiptree auction a couple of years ago. When I read it, it was immediately obvious how I would want to use it pedagogically if I ever teach my Fantasy Writing class again.
  18. Osborn: Evil Incarcerated by Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios. I enjoyed this, but suspect I would have liked it more had I been previously familiar with the characters. With the talent at Marvel these days, having been a DC kid is feeling more and more like having backed the wrong horse.
  19. The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman. More YA, and more wonderful reading. This book is like Octavia Bulter’s Kindred, but for young readers.
  20. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. I had read stories from this, but never the whole thing. As I recently wrote some fiction in the second person, I wanted to finally fix that. A deservingly famous collection.

New Stories by Octavia Butler

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Well, old stories really, but previously unpublished! Open Road Media has produced an ebook of two previously unavailable Butler short stories, available for pre-order now, hitting e-readers on June 24. The collection is called Unexpected Stories, and contains the stories “A Necessary Being” and “Childfinder.” Per the Publisher’s Weekly review, the former is a short story prequel to Butler’s out-of-print novel Survivor (the text of which is easy to find online). The latter is a story set on Earth during the Patternist cycle, about racial tensions between telepaths.

“Childfinder” was bought by Harlan Ellison for Last Dangerous Visions, after Butler wrote it during his week at Clarion. Curiously, the story seems to have been removed from the Clarion archives. In 2008 I went to the special collections library and pulled the stories from Butler’s year, eager to read “Childfinder,” but there were only two of her pieces in there, both very short and unremarkable. “Childfinder” was nowhere to be found.

I’ll get to read it soon, though. Here’s a link to Open Road Media’s ebook page for Unexpected Stories. 

EDIT: Sam Miller informs me that, as of 2012, “Childfinder” is back in the archive. I have no explanation for this. It definitely wasn’t there in 2008.

Two Exciting Forthcoming Books

Martin Millar blogs that he is under contract to deliver a sequel to his novel Lonely Werewolf Girl, provisionally entitled Queen Vex.  I just read Lonely Werewolf Girl last week and I thoroughly adored it, saying that it should be made into a television miniseries immediately.  I even spent some time after I finished it writing, with an eye toward emulation, about interesting things Millar does with tying character motivation to dialog.  My only complaint about it was that it didn’t end as neatly as the the other Martin Millar novel I’ve read, the also excellent Good Fairies of New York.  So I welcome news that the story is going to continue.

The other exciting news, which I comes via Nalo Hopkinson, is that Beacon Press, the publisher of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is in the process of recruiting an illustrator to produce a graphic novel adaptation for the 30th anniversary of the book’s publication.  Graphic novels and Octavia Butler novels are two of my favorite things in the world; I can’t wait to see how these tastes go together.