Octavia E. Butler Biography:

           Octavia Estelle Butler was born June 22, 1947 and died February 24, 2006 due to a stroke. She was an African American science fiction writer. Her mother was a housemaid and her father a shoe shiner. Butler grew up in a racially integrated community. She was able to experience cultural and ethnic diversity even though there was racial segregation going on in the country. Being painfully shy while growing, Butler spent her time at the library reading fantasy and writing. She attended college during the Black Power Movement and attended the Clarion workshop which specialized in science fiction. Butler worked temporary jobs that gave her freedom to write her stories. At the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop, she sold two of her stories Childfinder and Crossover. For 5 years Butler worked on a series of novels called the Patternist series: Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Survivor, Wild Seed and Clay’s Ark. Her series touches on the themes of society’s flaws hierarchy system. While creating her series she wrote Kindred. Octavia Butler found success in 1984 with Speech Sounds and won a Hugo Award for the story and a year later Bloodchild won a Hugo, Locus, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award.

What I enjoyed about the piece:

           Compared to Asimov’s science fiction piece, Butler’s story was not all that futuristic. The setting was present day and it was not the typical sci-fi I was thinking of. There were no super computers or flying entities.  It just seems like a present-day dystopian society. Butler gives the citizens a disease that affects their ability to talk and communicate. I think she’s trying to show how disconnected and how we can’t understand each other, and we pass that down to our children. At one point in the story she mentions that the kids would be “chasing one another and hooting like chimpanzees” signifying that we pass down the same ignorance through the generations. Without proper communication skills society will fall apart. Giving Rye a voice opposed to the men is to show the role women have in society and how significant they are, and that women’s voices need to be heard.

Questions:

1.    Why did Butler choose to give Rye voice and not Obsidian?

2.    What do the children signify for Rye?

3.    Why do you think Butler decided to end the story with the line: “I’m Valerie Rye,” she said, savoring the words. “It’s all right for you to talk to me.”