Octavia Butler's sci-fi kept its focus on humanity

Octavia Butler was notable as a black woman writer of science fiction. Actually, her work was more what her friend and mentor Harlan Ellison called his writing — speculative fiction. It was about ideas, what ifs that explored who we are and whom we might become.

Butler, who died Feb. 24, conducted thought experiments on humanity in the laboratory of a well-informed, creative mind. At the Elliott Bay Book Co. a few months ago, I listened to her talk about herself and about writing.

She said that when she speaks to college classes they ask her to give her talks a title, but it takes her longer to come up with a title than it would take to give a speech, so she settled on a single title that would work for everything: "From Woe to Wonder."

Her father died when she was quite young; her mother had only three years of schooling. But Octavia created a place of significance for herself.

Writers, she said, use everything, every experience, and tend to feed more off the bad than the good.

She was a news junkie who brought what she read into her work. So much of the news is negative, "you have to find something to do with all of that," she said. And so she turned it into stories and novels.

She wrote about social hierarchies, economic collapse, political chaos, religion, racism, sexism, always from the perspectives of fully developed people with both strengths and flaws. Nothing was ever simple or simplistic.

I liked that about her work. It isn't really about the isms, but about the condition of being human, having a gender, a color, a community, about struggling against and working toward something.

There are the parable books in the '90s, in which she imagined where the United States would be if we continued the way we seemed to be headed. A generation ahead, her America is in chaos; poverty and lawlessness are unchecked. Her characters try to form a community built on trust when everyone else seems to be focused only on saving themselves.

Her lead character Lauren Olamina has a disease — hyperempathy syndrome — that makes her feel what other people feel. A lot of things would be different if we felt each other's pain.

Olamina creates a religion, something for people to focus on and to work toward together. She calls it Earthseed. Humans are destined to travel to the stars and seed new worlds.

Of course, a science-fiction writer would see a goal like that as unifying. But it is an idea that requires seeing ourselves in perspective, one species on a tiny speck in the universe with a common long-range goal — our ultimate survival.

In all of her books, the characters are as diverse as they are in real life. That shouldn't be surprising, but too many books, in any genre, are populated by one kind of people, or maybe two, depending on the topic. Everybody is home in her books, and not in a "Star Trek" kind of way — that is, they aren't idealized. People have rough edges and issues to work out.

Of course, even "Star Trek," as wholesome as it was, dealt with realities that most television shows of its time didn't even acknowledge. It aired the famous first interracial kiss on television. It was OK because an alien made the two characters do it.

The thing is, even the fluffiest science fiction sometimes goes places where supposedly more serious genres don't venture.

Butler, who was acclaimed as a writer of quality, was often asked why science fiction, and she'd say science fiction is fun because you can go anywhere with it.

Science fiction gives people a way to grapple with real demons, safely.

Television, a sure test of the public mindset, has been invaded in the past couple of years with a whole industry of science-fiction programs.

Sci-fi was popular in the '50s and '60s when we were dealing with the Soviets and the fear of nuclear annihilation, and it is popular now as we wrestle with other fears that the programs deal with indirectly.

Mysterious threats on "Lost" come from an unknown outside, but within the community everyone's background is suspect.

"Battlestar Galactica" is hugely popular. It has dealt with the treatment of prisoners of war, and the fear that the enemy could be the person next to you. It always asks, what does it mean to be human?

The new shows are less about gadgets and monsters than about human behavior in stressful times.

Butler was always trying to understand who we are and whom we might become. She was intensely shy with people, but intensely engaged with humanity.

"The time it takes to write a book is as long as you've been alive, and then some," she said that night at Elliott Bay, because her books were always about real life.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com. His column runs Thursdays and Sundays and is found at www.seattletimes.com/jerrylarge.