I think many artists, writers included, feel the pressure to conform to the fantasies of their consumers. They need to give them escapism through their art; they needn’t challenge the reader to critically consider their surroundings. There are of course many artists who don’t conform to such a standard, but that doesn’t negate the pressure they may feel in order to guarantee their success. In any case, I think art that doesn’t challenge the status quo very quickly loses potency and it was that potency that I wanted my art to have for readers. The intensity that comes with being unable to escape in stories about white men saving the world when you are not and cannot relate to a white man; I wanted my readers exposed to that. I never had the option of true escapism from my life in media because life’s challenges were always in every nook and cranny of my environment. I grew up a shy, tall, Black girl in Pasadena, CA. My father passed when I was quite young and so I was primarily raised by my mother. My mother worked as a maid and we were still being ruled by Jim Crow laws and segregation so every time my mother took me to work with her because she didn’t want to hire a sitter, I witnessed the mistreatment she faced at the hands of her white employers and white people in general. In fact, it would be these experiences that would inspire my most popular book, Kindred. I wanted readers to feel the pain that Black people had to endure both during history and during my time in order to survive. Beyond what I witnessed as Octavia the daughter, was my struggles as Octavia the student. I had dyslexia and though I was an avid reader, especially growing up, I struggled in school. Reading passages out loud was particularly difficult, but teachers weren’t sympathetic to my struggles with school--- most just assumed I was lazy. Being tall and shy didn’t aid me neither. I stuck out like a big Black tree and felt very self conscious about it. Nobody was writing for someone like me to escape my circumstances; no one was trying to help me make them better either. If writing was a way to communicate my views of the world to others, then I would rather they felt what I felt not to be tortured by my perspective, but to humanize my experiences.
In light of that, I would say I changed the sci fi genre. Not me alone, but I contributed. It wasn’t through awards or recognition though. In fact, people didn’t really recognize me while I was alive; it wasn’t until I was close to my death that people really started to pay attention, but I didn’t do it intentionally. I didn’t set out to change the genre; I set out to write about my experiences. I put my heart into my writing, waking up at the early hours of the morning just so I could write before working several odd jobs. At one point, I was a dishwasher, at another a telemarketer, I was even a potato chip inspector. All this in order to support myself while I lived out my own fantasy. As I stated earlier, I think people have a tendency to live for a future in a fantasy world while torturing themselves in the present and perhaps I did the same for much of my career. That may make me sound hypocritical, but I’ll close with this: living out your fantasies is not a bad thing on its own, but think critically about the fantasy you are constructing. Who is left out? Who is powerful? Who is powerless? How might you change that?
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