Octavia Butler, Science Fiction Writer, Dies | Women Lifestyle, Fashion, Health, Beauty and Personality

Octavia Butler, Science Fiction Writer, Dies
Category : Women Gossip, Women Personality

Octavia Butler, a truly phenomenal woman writer and unique science-fiction novelist from Seattle, has died, a close friend said Sunday. She was 58.
The writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park and died Friday.

Octavia Butler dreamed up fantastic worlds and religions, made-up creatures and futuristic plots. Then, in her stylistic prose, she used them to tackle the social issues she was most passionate about.
Those who knew Ms. Butler agreed that, in many ways, she was a contradiction. She kept to herself but was easy to talk to. She was tall and imposing, very warm and charming, but there was gravitas in her.

Butler’s work wasn’t preoccupied with robots and ray guns, but used the genre’s artistic freedom to explore race, poverty, politics, religion and human nature. She was was one of the first black women to explore the genre and the most prominent. But Butler would have been a major writer of science fiction regardless of race or gender.

Her first novel, Kindred, in 1979, featured a black woman who travels back in time to the South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, Fledgling, an examination of the Dracula legend, was published last fall.
In 1995, she won a $295,000 MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “genius grant.” In 2000, she received the Nebula Award for her novel “Parable of the Talents.” The Nebula award is science fiction’s highest prize.

What Ms. Butler was writing for the first time was a kind of woman’s-eye view, a very smart woman’s-eye view, of say, ‘Brave New World’ or ‘1984.’ Another of his best writing is “Parable of the Talents,” a futuristic story about a utopian community ravaged by civil war, explored modern-day issues of intolerance, the growing gap between rich and poor, and environmentalism. In her first novel, “Kindred,” she plunged into racial issues when a modern-day character was transported into the body of a pre-Civil War slave.

“Mostly she just loved sitting down and writing,” Seattle-based science fiction writer Greg Bear said. “For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the ’60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community.”