The first line of the back cover blurb describes this book as a "cultural biography" and that's very important. It doesn't dig as deep as biographies tend to do into the life of the pioneering science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, but it provides a heck of a lot more context than they usually give. While the author downplays traditional claims that Butler was a prophet who foresaw the future by explaining how carefully she studied history and extrapolated from it to what she saw as being inevitable, this book sometimes reads like Butler herself was inevitable, a black woman writing in a genre untypical for her race and gender but, through talent and perseverance, what she called "positive obsession", paved the way for a burgeoning crop of diverse genre writers.

The author, Susana M. Morris, is a university professor who has taught classes on Butler and her work and it's not hard at all to see that. This isn't close to being a dry textbook but there's a good deal of repetition, as if to drill the points home to students, and everything is annotated. In fact, I felt this going in because I worked through what felt like five introductions before I could begin. It probably isn't fair to include the publisher's PR sheet accompanying the ARC because that's not a thing most readers will see, but the back cover blurb, the author's note, the introduction and the beginning of the first chapter cover very similar ground.

The weakest aspect to the book is the traditional one for a biography: who was Octavia E. Butler. We're given plenty of details, starting with her tragic youth, but many of them are easily seen on Wikipedia or any number of other websites. She was a fifth child but the first to live. She lost her father at a young age. She lived with her mother, who worked as a live-in maid to a white family. She was dyslexic and neurodivergent. She was unusually tall for a girl, six-feet in height at twelve. And her exposure to culture suffered from Charismatic Baptist restrictions.

So she read. She practically lived in the library, reading authors from science fiction's golden age. One favourite was Zenna Henderson, which is telling. I haven't read her in far too long but I adore 'The People' books. And she wrote. She had a typewriter at ten, the same one on which she wrote many of her later stories and novels. She started to send those stories out to magazines from the age of thirteen. These are all good facts to know, but they're not hard ones to find. The ones that seem most pertinent are the ones that provide context to the time, like how the family they lived with talked down to her mother and she just took it without complaint.

And that's the strongest aspect to the book. It doesn't just provide a history for Octavia Butler, it provides a history of the country that she grew up in. What made Octavia the person she became were cultural details in a time of change. I was surprised to find that 'Devil Girl from Mars' is one, but less surprised at rampant racial inequality; segregation and the simple idea of "separate but equal"; and comic books. Later, the Clarion writing workshop would be crucial to her writing, with the appreciation of Harlan Ellison. It was here that she sold two stories, one of which was printed, but then she suffered five years of rejections.

As a neurodivergent writer who has figured out various methods to trick my brain into producing what I want when I want (for the most part), I found it fascinating that Butler escaped this rut by doing much the same thing. The details are completely different, but the idea is the same. In her case, she moved away from short stories that weren't selling to novels that were, by effectively building them out of chapters that were short stories. It's a brain hack. Then again, come to think of it, it's not a long way from how I build non-fiction books out of chapters that are reviews. What I'm getting at is that I wanted a lot more of the same. Morris taught me more about how Butler researched her books than about how she actually wrote them.

With 'Patternmaster' sold for $1,500, suddenly things clicked into place and the novels that were camped out in her brain for the past couple of decades started to flow onto the page and a major career started to build. However, even here, Butler was isolated from the logical communities her work ought to have invited her into. Science fiction didn't have a heck of a lot of black writers and it didn't have a heck of a lot of female writers, but it only had one black female writer: her. There was a growing number of black female writers and Butler did find some connections to them, but they were generally writing very different material in other places and she felt isolated there as well.

That probably didn't help Morris much as she wrote this book. She freely admits in advance that she never met Octavia Butler, though she was a fan of her work—something very clear from the excellent analysis she provides for each of Butler's novels, even better for including the cultural context that flavoured them—and she did read her copious diaries. However, this book is almost devoid of personal memories. Morris did interview Linda Addison, who knew and admired Butler, but there are only a couple of lines to reflect that. Samuel Delany didn't provide any. Was Butler so isolated that there was nobody else who could talk about her: no family or friends, publishers or peers, people who influenced her or were influenced by her?

I never met Butler either, but I do know Linda Addison and had the opportunity to chat with her about 'Positive Obsession' at TusCon 52 in-between reading this book and writing this review. She certainly knew Butler personally and saw her as an immense influence. Now I've put my thoughts down on virtual paper and neither of us is in a hotel lobby with responsibilities imminent, I ought to revisit that conversation and see what else she has to say. I'll certainly ask her who else would have been an appropriate interview subject.

What's more, I should point out here, given that I haven't done it already earlier in the review, I haven't actually read any of Butler's novels. I have a bunch on the shelf and I've been meaning to ensure that I acquire whatever's missing so that I can read through them all in order. I should do that soon. I'm especially intrigued because of what I learned here about her 'Parable' books. The reasons she's so often deemed a prophet aren't restricted to that series but, if you're in the U.S. right now, you're living in a future she detailed far in advance. Remember, she died in 2006, after writing books about how this country would be led in the 2020s by a charismatic fascist under the slogan of "Make America Great Again". She seems to have nailed the climate crisis, the economic crisis and the rights crisis, all in the same books. Clearly I'm long overdue for reading them. ~~ Hal C F Astell