What might it feel like to be your own North Star? To envision and then doggedly pursue your own idiosyncratic course—despite a dearth of role models or sustained support?
MacArthur Fellow and science fiction trailblazer Octavia E. Butler’s life path illuminates a focused tenacity to carve a passageway where there once was none. Butler’s engine was something she termed “positive obsession,” a single-minded drive that carried her forward: “Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts.”
In her new biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, Georgia Institute of Technology associate professor Susana M. Morris trains a broad, bright light on Butler’s extraordinary evolution from a deeply curious but painfully shy Black child with working-class Southern California roots to an internationally renowned, barrier-breaking intellectual who was shaped by the roiling Cold War/civil rights/global warming culture through which she traveled. She saw the cracks in society’s surface, the trouble lurking just out of frame.
Butler died in 2006 at only 58 years old. Yet in her later years, as the new millennium dawned, Butler’s imagined futures, more and more, appeared to closely mirror that present. When asked about her keen predictive powers, she would often remark that she simply “paid attention”—and that we, to stave off worse, should too.
Morris’s cultural biography analyzes Butler’s bold vision along with that essential contextual connective tissue—elucidating not only Butler’s hows but also her whys.
Your book does what Butler did for herself: It mirrors her long-standing promise to herself to—as a Black woman—“write myself in.” With Positive Obsession, you are writing Butler in—into her contexts and influences. What made you decide to take this path?
I suppose it was for somewhat selfish reasons. I wanted to know more about her process and what shaped her. I believe there are many ways to tell Octavia’s story. You could situate her via her travels or through her correspondence with others or via her connection to Southern California. There are so many points of entry. But the more I read in her archive, the more I wanted to excavate Octavia’s evolution as an intellectual deeply engaged with and shaping the politics of her day. That laid the foundation for my path as her biographer.
You first read Butler as a teen, then later in college. Which Butler did you walk into the archive envisioning, and which one did you emerge with after?
Going into the archive, I had imagined the Octavia I thought I knew—the bestselling novelist, the MacArthur genius, the respected science fiction pioneer. And she was all those things. But after working on this book for several years, the Octavia I have come to know is less “larger than life.” Doing the research for this book, I felt I got to know a version of Octavia that the public didn’t get to see much. The Octavia that was at once prideful and doubtful, vulnerable and guarded, community-oriented and comfortably asocial. I got a glimpse into her inner world.
How do you think she is most misunderstood?
People often label Octavia as a prophet or an oracle, and I can see why. But, at the same time, this kind of language separates Octavia from the rest of us. And while she was a once-in-a-lifetime talent, the patterns that she draws out in her work are patterns that others can see and interpret. She was not a clairvoyant auguring the future for us. She was an ardent student of history, politics, economics, religion, and more. And we, too, can pay closer attention to our own actions and inactions as a society, as a species, and discover our own patterns. When we characterize Octavia as some sort of mystic, it can sometimes invite an abdication of our responsibilities as thinkers and doers.
You write, “Octavia’s earliest and most prevailing positive obsession was figuring the patterns of human behavior and using that to imagine possible futures for humanity.” Which of her other passions speaks most to you and why?
I really enjoyed learning about all the research Octavia did for her world-building. I’m the type of reader that enjoys a meticulously rendered world on the page, and Octavia was a master of that. It was great fun reading her notes and going through her newspaper clippings to see the wide range of sources she would engage just to make the worlds she built dance on the page.
What was it like for you to immerse yourself in her body of work in our current sociopolitical climate?
Working on this book for the past five years put the scope of what we’re experiencing both here in the U.S. and abroad into clear relief. Like so many others, I just kept thinking, Octavia tried to tell us. Or rather, she told us, but did we listen?
Community figures prominently in her work. She writes, as you cite, “All of my characters are in a community…or they create one.” While she saw the imperfections of humans, she also saw potential. Why is this framing of hers especially important now, in this political era of pushback?
It is understandably easy to feel resigned in this political moment. I get why folks are wringing their hands about the state of the world. But we don’t have the luxury of cynicism. I never want readers to lose sight of the optimism, as it were, in Octavia’s works. For every Doro, there is an Anyanwu, or a Lilith, or a Lauren. There are characters throughout Octavia’s works that have a long view of history and think that a better future is worth fighting for. That is one reason why we must discuss human potential as much as we shake our heads at our foibles. Octavia illuminated humanity in all our complicated glory.•
POSITIVE OBSESSION: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF OCTAVIA E. BUTLER, BY SUSANA M. MORRIS
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
