The Female Touch

I just looked over the story recommendations I've made for the first couple months of this new feature, and I discovered that of the eight different authors I've picked so far, seven have been women. This was not at all deliberate. I have just been tossing out stories I liked as I came across them, and the authors' gender never crossed my mind.

I believe this is just a statistical oddity, not a reflection of any unconscious bias I have in favor of women authors. Certainly if I were to put together a list of my all-time favorite writers it would be a male-dominated lineup, although Ursula LeGuin and Connie Willis and Octavia Butler would feature prominently.

Still, it demonstrates how many outstanding female authors there are in the field today. As more of these women work their way up the ranks, I suspect the recent underrepresentation of women in major award nominations will become a thing of the past.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

We complete our tribute to Octavia E. Butler with the hardcover first edition of Kindred (1979, cover art by Larry Schwinger). I've bemoaned the fact that Octavia Butler was underappreciated due to the mainstream's disdain of science fiction, but Kindred is an exception. Over the years, Kindred has come to receive significant attention outside the science fiction genre, and is now required reading in many black history courses. Kindred tells of a modern black woman who travels back in time to the antebellum South and encounters her ancestors, one of whom is a white slave-owner. It is Butler's novel most overtly informed by her experiences as an African-American girl, watching her widowed mother work as a maid to support her family, entering houses through the back door, politely suffering employers' bigoted comments about "colored people."

Kindred was Butler's fourth novel but her first breakthrough success, and was thus published before she had developed much of a fan base. Because of that, and because Kindred has become famous both inside and outside the science fiction genre, the first edition is very rare. This book is one of two recent prize additions to my collection. The other will be next week's Book of the Week.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler

We continue our tribute to Octavia E. Butler with the first paperback edition of her first book, Patternmaster (1976). Patternmaster is set in a distant future in which humanity has substantially evolved, but people neglect the potential benefits of their new abilities in favor of using them to dominate and enslave one another. Butler went on to write four more novels set earlier in the history of this bleak "Patternist" world.

Incidentally, for all my Rodney Dangerfield gripes about how science fiction and fantasy get no respect from the mainstream, this book is an example of how SF publishers have greatly contributed to the problem with the ridiculous covers they put on their books. Here is a book by a talented young (at the time) African-American woman, whose elegant writing explores important issues of morality and race relations. What does the publisher put on the cover? Mutant baboon Rambo.

While the collector in me loves covers like these, since garish covers tend to enhance books' and magazines' value to collectors, the SF fan in me detests them (no offense to cover artist Clyde Caldwell, who sure draws a good mutant baboon Rambo). Thankfully, SF publishers have been toning down the cover art in recent years. If you check out Octavia Butler books in the bookstore today (which I encourage you to do), you will see much more appropriate cover art. Hopefully, this trend will give SF fans a fighting chance to win over converts from the mainstream. With luck, next week you will see an Octavia Butler book that has been very well received by mainstream readers.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

Continuing our tribute to Octavia E. Butler, the Book of the Week is Butler's Parable of the Talents. This is the sequel to Parable of the Sower, in which a determined young black woman named Lauren Olamina fights to survive a ruined future America, and ends up creating a new religion and planting the seeds of America's resurgence. In an amusing twist, the sequel Parable of the Talents is narrated by Olamina's daughter, who deeply resents that Olamina neglected her family while she was busy saving the world. You just can't please everyone.

Published in 1998, Parable of the Talents was awarded the Nebula Award for Best Novel by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The Nebula Award and the Hugo Award are the two most prestigious awards in science fiction. The writers vote to decide Nebula winners, while the fans attending the World Science Fiction Convention vote on the Hugo. Not surprisingly, the writers and fans often have different tastes, but Octavia E. Butler was one of 20 authors to date in the history of science fiction to write fiction with broad enough appeal to be multiple winners of both awards. These 20 names read like a who's who of modern science fiction. (And they all have something else in common: not one of them appears on the list of ten favorite books of Dave Itzkoff, the New York Times Book Review's new science fiction columnist. For more on this jackass, see my two previous posts on this blog.)

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler

The Book of the Week is Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler. We are putting our history of the pulp magazines on hold to pay tribute to Ms. Butler, who died on Friday when she stumbled and hit her head on the walkway outside her Seattle home. She was only 58.

Octavia Butler was one of the finest writers of the past generation, but received far less attention than her work merited because of prejudice--ironically, not prejudice against her as a black woman, but prejudice against her as a science fiction writer. But while mainstream critics and academics are slow to recognize literary quality when it comes from the science fiction genre, the SF community knows a good thing when it sees it. Within the SF field, Octavia Butler was honored with two Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards, and was regarded as one of the field's elite and one of the two greatest African-American SF authors ever, rivaled only by Samuel R. Delany. She was also a recipient in 1995 of a $295,000 "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, although she complained that the award was given in error, since no one tested her IQ.

Butler preferred writing at novel length--she wrote a dozen novels and only a handful of short stories--but the short fiction she did write was among her best work. Bloodchild and Other Stories collects most of her short fiction, including her novelette "Bloodchild," which won a Hugo and Nebula Award, and her short story "Speech Sounds," which won a Hugo Award. The Book of the Week is the first edition, published in 1995 by Four Walls Eight Windows. I wrote a review of this book several years ago for Fantastic Reviews, which you can find here: Bloodchild and Other Stories

Butler struggled recently with writer's block, but last year she completed Fledgling, her first new novel in seven years. Readers hoped it signaled the end of her writer's block, and that more books would soon follow. That we will now never be able to enjoy those works is a terrible loss.