Timeless Sci-Fi: Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler

Fanboy post here… I have to give a shout-out to Octavia E. Butler. She has quickly become one of my favorite authors. I've known about her for years as one of the Grandmasters of Science Fiction, but admittedly, I've only started reading her books in the last year or so.

Masterful Hooks

Butler is a master of hooking the reader from the get-go. She doesn't use whizbang action or melodrama to do it, either. Instead, she presents fascinating ideas and situations that pull the reader into the story.

Take Kindred, for instance, which is my current read. I was hooked straight from the first page. The protagonist wakes up with her arm missing and is questioned by the police. I had to keep flipping pages. I must know what happened! I've read about a quarter of this yarn, and I still don't know exactly how she lost her arm, and that's okay because there's plenty to keep me interested.

But it's more than the hook that keeps me reading; it's the timeless quality of Butler's stories.

Timeless Sci-Fi

Recently, I finished Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Both novels have a timeless quality, as does Kindred. How is this possible? Kindred was written 46 years ago, and the newest, Parable of the Talents, 25 years ago. For one thing, Butler eschews relying heavily on technology to create her story world. I can't help but think Star Trek feels dated when the communicators come out.

Also, her stories lack the male chauvinism found in some sci-fi classics. Partly, this is due to Butler being a woman and a minority. Additionally, her works aren't as old as some classics that often contain anachronisms.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are eerily plausible dystopians. In fact, an authoritarian leader uses the term "Make America Great Again" in the latter. I think part of what makes Butler's stories so enduring is that the themes she explores—climate change, poverty, sexism, authoritarianism, class division, religious zealotry, and dreaming of the stars—are as relevant today, if not more so, as when she first wrote about them.