Beauty Micrometer

I think people get caught up in the glamour of awards and acclaim when they think of any famous person’s life. By no means am I saying I’m famous now and, indeed, I wouldn’t say I was famous in life by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, when people think of the name Octavia E. Butler, they think of the first sci-fi writer to win a McArthur Genius Grant. I’m not saying it’s not important; the first sci-fi writer to win a McArthur Genius Grant being a Black woman is of course important. It was even more so given the times I lived through even if it was awarded to me in 1995. When I was growing up, Black people still had to enter through the back door so the awards I won were no small feat, but I think people get too caught up in them.

By the same token, I think people get too caught up in their own fantasies and the ways that the media they consume serve to fuel those fantasies. The funny thing about people is that they are so focused on living for a future self that they torture their present selves and live in fantasies to escape that torture. Sci fi as a genre of course plays into that. At least most sci fi, but not my sci fi, a distinction I will make clear in a second. Most sci fi is focused on a distant and terrifying future that is a little too outlandish to be true. How that is escapist from a horrifying present for readers is ironic, but simple to comprehend: it shows that life could be worse and gives people the chance to self insert themselves as the hero of a dystopian life. It gives them power over a horrifying situation while they themselves have no power in their own real lives.

So then, how is my sci-fi different? I never wanted people to escape real life; I wanted them to think about it, to really ponder the reasons their lives were challenging and how they might be making life challenging for others. I didn’t write frivolous stories about aliens invading Earth and a random white man stepping up to save the day. No, my stories investigated the ways that real life affected women and Black people; how the powerful affected the powerless. There was no escaping real life, only an extension of it.