Octavia E. Butler
Octavia E. Butler
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| (c) Patti Perret/The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens |
This post should start with with Octavia E. Butler. But it doesn't. Because I had never heard of her until last week, and I should have.
Like a lot of people I'm watching HBO's latest series "Lovecraft Country" and thoroughly enjoying it. Having long had an appreciation of Lovecraft inspired horror tropes, and as a fan of Jordan Peele, it ticks many boxes.
If you're not watching here's the gist: it's a sci-fi horror series set in 50s America confronting racial themes. Or it's a series exploring America's current racial crisis using 50's sci-fi horror conventions. There's a sort of anti-Easter egg in there as well as H.P. Lovecraft himself was a notorious racist. Something that's been overlooked quite happily in the recent revival of his work. The films “Mandy” and “A colour from outer space” both featuring Nicolas cage for example. Lovecraftian films isn't the tangent I want to go off on, but if you veer that way, see lovecraftzine.com/movies/mikes-recommended-lovecraftian-movies.
So, Lovecraft County. The series is televised from Matt Ruff's novel of the same name. Matt Ruff is white. The second most asked question I saw on Reddit and similar boards when the series was first announced, after "is it any good?" was "can a white person write about race?". I'm white and don't know enough about the realities to have an opinion, my interest was mainly for the giant squid monsters.
In a Venn diagram with HBO's Watchmen series there is a strong overlap — sci-fi and racial themes in an alternative history modern day America. Lovecraft Country has tentacles, Watchmen has capes.
The sci-fi TV series Watchmen about racism in an alternative history America is written by Damon Lindelof, a white person but only a third of the co-writers are white males. We digress...
The "can/should a white person write drama about racism" moral debate is an echo of the very same question Ben H. Winters's "Underground Airlines" — novel about a black bounty hunter hunting escaped slaves in an alternative history modern day America — raised. Ben H. Winters is white. So white he looks a bit like Buddy Holly.
The internet furore about his book is really about a review and nothing he actually wrote. The NY Times said “This is a white writer going after questions of what it’s like to be black in America. It’s a fearless thing to do.” Given he's a white male and already a popular (and talented) author he's in no real danger of harming his career or income.
To recap, as they say in the shows, Lovecraft Country is set in an alternative history 50s where contemporary hip-hop is played, and speculative fiction conceits exist. It's been added to the recent media storms about white people using sci-fi to discuss racism in America.
All good. But the strange thing is in all of this no-one mentioned Octavia E. Butler.
Why should her name have been dropped you might wonder. Between 1970 and 2000 she wrote a series of novels exploring racial issues, miscegenation, and slavery, using sci-fi, time travel and aliens as the vehicle for exploration for feminist and multicultural possibilities. She is credited with being a founder of Afrofuturism (again I didn't hear her name during the celebrations for the release of the Black Panther film).
She's acknowledged — when you find an article about her — as one of the greats, but in all these crusades about white male writing about racial identity and structural racism her name hasn't been brought up, when she wrote the blueprint. History repeating itself? It's not that she isn't acknowledged, she's won a fistful of awards, it's that she's not promoted. I've never seen her in the book pile at Waterstones as I have Asimov, Dick et al.
I'm a nerdy data geek and speculative fiction fan so clicking clicks deep into off-piste territory is what I like to do. If I hadn't I wouldn't have discovered Octavia E. Butler.
And as far as I'm concerned if Jordan Peele made Lovecraft Country into a TV series then Matt Ruff got it right.
Postscript: I bought my squeeze Octavia E. Butler's "Lilith's Brood" two days a go and I discovered this morning she had got up in the middle of the night to finish it and is already deep in the second book of the trilogy. I purchased for myself Butler's "Kindred", Matt Ruff's "Bad Monkeys", and Ben H. Winters's "The last policeman" and "Underground Airlines".
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