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juushikaTitle: Octavia E. Butler
Author: Gerry Canavan
Published: University of Illinois Press, 2016
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 250
Total Page Count: 234,000
Text Number: 746
Read Because: fan of Butler, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A biography, seen through the Huntington Library collection as well as Butler's body of work, including readings of Butler's fiction which explore her reoccurring themes and tie them to her lived experiences as a black woman and an author. Canavan makes compelling arguments for a number of dichotomies: Butler's desire to write likable bestsellers, and the troubled, challenging pessimism that inspired her speculative fiction; the way her punishing perfectionism refined the themes of her work while unfairly limiting what reached the public eye; the things she was unable to achieve even as she revolutionized speculative fiction. His approach is, in a word, compassionate. I knew the broad strokes of Butler's story before picking this up, but Canavan reflects and elaborates and coalesces, integrating personal notebooks with published stories, and if the balance tips too far towards readings of Butler's fiction then I still found it engaging—and profoundly sympathetic. I love Butler; I didn't know how much, or that I could love a biography, too.
May! I read this in May! The books I love are the hardest to review.
Canavan's biography has also had me thinking a lot about the truly awful Earthseed poetry which "actually closely mirrored the style and form of the daily affirmations, self-help sloganeering, and even self-hypnosis techniques Butler posted around her home to keep her focused and on task"—like So be it! See to it!
but which is particularly upsetting because of the mixed effect of that desperate self-motivation: Butler was inspiring herself to write a universally loved bestseller, a YES-book, and berating herself for her failure to do so—a failure sometimes due to life circumstances, but mostly due to the fact that her background, inspirations, and all-consuming themes made for NO-books, they were confrontational and uneasy and came from a place of deep pessimism that was searching for a form of hope; but, of course, she achieved that longevity, even critical and semi-financial success—not despite but because of her NO-book inspirations and themes.
(But it was also the rewriting that made the books we have—earlier versions were more pessimistic, potentially less successful; all of Butler's work is in that balance, that conflict between optimism and pessimism.)
It doesn't particularly validate the use of those poems in the Parable books—they're still objectively awful—but it certainly tempers the instinct to find the affirmations in her notebooks empowering or validating, because they weren't, really, they were in equal part roadblock & motivation. Canavan's writes in the conclusion:
and ends, "like so many of her fans, I have to hope there are more and more unexpected stories to come."
#i don't know i just have a lot of feelings #(but one of those feelings is mostly 'same Canavan same') #it's that anxiety of pessimism/optimism that draws me to Butler's work—those twinned themes throughout her work— #but the effect it had ON her work & the effects and results of her perfectionism are heartbreaking—but perhaps also unavoidable #just. a lot of feelings.
It occurs to me that I am now one sequel, one standalone, and one collection of short fiction away from having read all of Octavia Butler's work, having only discovered her this time last year, and I'm not looking forward to that absences of new content.
Her books have been consistent 4 stars (such workmanlike prose; that presumed heteronormativity and gender essentialism which doesn't jive with the diverse and bizarre interpersonal dynamics), but a star metric is useless; something can be flawed but outstanding, and she was wildly creative, she was ruthless and discomforting and compelling, id-writing and social commentary and lived experience in one package. I admire the micro/macro focus of her work, everything fueled by these powerful, unsettling intimacies but working always within larger power structures.
The many artist deaths recently have left me at a distance; these figures weren't formative to my experience, so while I'm aware of their cultural impact and appreciate the roles they had in the lives of other consumers I feel no personal sense of loss. But it was people speaking about Butler's death in 2006 that put her on my "who is that, maybe I should read her someday?" radar, and now I am become a belated mourner and I don't regret it. (Finally watching Star Trek TOS this year made me feel likewise about Leonard Nimoy.) No time to celebrate an artist like the present—but also tell me about the ones you mourn, about how they changed your life then; because sometimes that influence is locked to its time period, but odds are good that I can discover them after the fact and be changed by them now.
Title: The Bards of Bone Plain
Author: Patricia A. McKillip
Published: Ace Books, 2010
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 330
Total Page Count: 234,330
Text Number: 747
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: In Beldan's history is the story of a bard cursed to an endless life without music—but events in the modern day intimate a truth behind the legend. This takes its central premise of bardic tradition, myth, and music and language as magic, and runs with it as far as it can. The surprising industrialization of the modern setting is a fun counterpoint to the historical underpinnings; the tone is playful and charming, set against an arcane heart—McKillip has a particular knack for transporting, resonant descriptions of magic. But this didn't quite grab me in the way that some of her other work has, perhaps because of the predictable plot revelation, moreso because the tone of the interpersonal dynamics doesn't mesh smoothly with the gravitas of the magic, nor did it make me invested in the characters. This is satisfying but not especially fulfilling.
Title: Jovah's Angel (Samaria Book 2)
Author: Sharon Shinn
Published: Ace, 1998 (1997)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 365
Total Page Count: 234,695
Text Number: 748
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: 150 years after the first book, rain and flood endangers Samaria; Jovah is growing slower and less likely to respond to the angels's prayers. The first book in this series is about advanced technology which is indistinguishable from magic only insofar as it's visible to the reader; it's background in the worldbuilding, not part of the plot. This foregrounds it significantly. Not always with grace—too many things are obvious to the reader but not the characters, so the reader isn't engaged with their discoveries and may instead find them obvious. But the characters's responses to them, and the dialog between science, magic, and faith, are compelling and accessible. Characters are likable, but have predictable arcs and Shinn doesn't handle disability well (I don't have much patience for suicidal disabled characters or cure narratives). The plot is smaller, and appears to have a larger place within the series, intimating ongoing and unresolved events; this work is tainted by such numerous references to the first book that those events feel like the only significant part of Samaria's long history. I wanted this sequel to develop the science fictional aspect; it does so generously, and so on that note I'm satisfied. But this isn't especially good by any other metric.
Author: Gerry Canavan
Published: University of Illinois Press, 2016
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 250
Total Page Count: 234,000
Text Number: 746
Read Because: fan of Butler, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A biography, seen through the Huntington Library collection as well as Butler's body of work, including readings of Butler's fiction which explore her reoccurring themes and tie them to her lived experiences as a black woman and an author. Canavan makes compelling arguments for a number of dichotomies: Butler's desire to write likable bestsellers, and the troubled, challenging pessimism that inspired her speculative fiction; the way her punishing perfectionism refined the themes of her work while unfairly limiting what reached the public eye; the things she was unable to achieve even as she revolutionized speculative fiction. His approach is, in a word, compassionate. I knew the broad strokes of Butler's story before picking this up, but Canavan reflects and elaborates and coalesces, integrating personal notebooks with published stories, and if the balance tips too far towards readings of Butler's fiction then I still found it engaging—and profoundly sympathetic. I love Butler; I didn't know how much, or that I could love a biography, too.
May! I read this in May! The books I love are the hardest to review.
Butler's science fictions typically pit power against justice and leave both utterly transformed. These are stories born from her own subaltern position in American society: "I began writing about power," she once told Carolyn S. Davidson, "because I had so little." In Butler's novels, power acts as it always does, rapaciously inflicting itself upon those without; it is the task of the powerless to turn the tables, or else survive in the gaps. Nearly every story in her oeuvre considers the inevitable struggle for dominance that occurs when two "alien" forms of life, with different capabilities, and different needs, encounter each other for the first time. [...]
But the politics of Butler's stories are never knee-jerk or obvious either; Butler is a deeply ambiguous thinker. Readers of her notes and journals in the Huntington are soon greeted by the strange shorthand aop that she used ubiquitously throughout her life, standing in for "as opposed to" - male aop female, white aop black, healing aop killing. It seemed very difficult for Butler to think of anything without immediately thinking also of its opposite(s) and of how all supposed opposites are dialectically intertwined. This extends even to the levels of her plots: very commonly, almost characteristically, she would wind up writing the opposite of the narrative she originally set out to write.
Consequently, there are no easy answers, no manifestos or utopias to be found within her pages. Frequently her heroes turn sour, or become suspect, or seem to cross unthinkable lines of ethics and integrity in the name of survival. Just as frequently as they fight back - her characters choose not to resist their invaders, but to aid them - or fall in love with them, or merge entirely with them. In biological terms, her most frequent metaphor is not individualistic competition but mutual interdependence: symbiosis. We need the Other to live (whether we like it or not). In "The Monophobic Response," Butler ultimately concludes that fantasies of "aliens" are ultimately borne out of this palpable "need" for otherness, and unquenchable desire for the union of differences that seem innate and insurmountable. That interplay of attraction and revulsion is the source of what is simultaneously most utopian and most disturbing about her stories. In Butler's fiction the violence of power is always matched by an erotics of power, an unexpected dimension of domination that retains an inescapable hold on her characters despite the fact that they did not choose it, do not want it, and often suffer grievously for it.
This last version [of her alternative draft of "Bloodchild"] is a story, I think, that Butler wanted to write but never found a way to, the story that in some sense she seemed to find untellable, the story of people who in the end do say "no," who refuse the instinct to live at whatever cost, the ones who refuse to compromise even if it means their destruction She was fascinated in her writing by the idea there might be some limit point past which life might actually become intolerable, past which survival wasn't desirable or possible - and seemed dedicated, in her delightfully grim way, of pushing her characters closer and closer to that line to see what might lie on the other side. Even her stories most devoted to reproductive futurity and survival actually end on this kind of gray or sour note, this moment of doubt, despite their surface optimism: the dead-end sterility of the Patternists, the toxic parasite-reproductivity of the Tlic aliens in "Bloodchild," the historical amnesia at the end of Kindred into which all the antebellum characters fall, and so on. Such ambiguous endings would become even more common in the later works, even those that (superficially at least) seem to end on an upbeat note; the optimism tends to fall away upon further inspection or reflection.
Canavan's biography has also had me thinking a lot about the truly awful Earthseed poetry which "actually closely mirrored the style and form of the daily affirmations, self-help sloganeering, and even self-hypnosis techniques Butler posted around her home to keep her focused and on task"—like So be it! See to it!
but which is particularly upsetting because of the mixed effect of that desperate self-motivation: Butler was inspiring herself to write a universally loved bestseller, a YES-book, and berating herself for her failure to do so—a failure sometimes due to life circumstances, but mostly due to the fact that her background, inspirations, and all-consuming themes made for NO-books, they were confrontational and uneasy and came from a place of deep pessimism that was searching for a form of hope; but, of course, she achieved that longevity, even critical and semi-financial success—not despite but because of her NO-book inspirations and themes.
(But it was also the rewriting that made the books we have—earlier versions were more pessimistic, potentially less successful; all of Butler's work is in that balance, that conflict between optimism and pessimism.)
It doesn't particularly validate the use of those poems in the Parable books—they're still objectively awful—but it certainly tempers the instinct to find the affirmations in her notebooks empowering or validating, because they weren't, really, they were in equal part roadblock & motivation. Canavan's writes in the conclusion:
There's much more to her career than the dozen or so books we know; out of the spirit of brutal perfectionism that drove her, she held a lot of interesting and worthy work back. [...] This material should not be left only to the small number of scholars who are able to make their way to the Huntington; much of it can see, and deserves to see, publication. These are not discarded scraps or abandoned, embarrassing mistakes; it's just more.
Butler's incredible productivity, coupled with her intense self-criticism, self-censorship, and perfectionism, has conspired to create a vast intertextual hidden archive of alternate versions and lost tales....
and ends, "like so many of her fans, I have to hope there are more and more unexpected stories to come."
#i don't know i just have a lot of feelings #(but one of those feelings is mostly 'same Canavan same') #it's that anxiety of pessimism/optimism that draws me to Butler's work—those twinned themes throughout her work— #but the effect it had ON her work & the effects and results of her perfectionism are heartbreaking—but perhaps also unavoidable #just. a lot of feelings.
It occurs to me that I am now one sequel, one standalone, and one collection of short fiction away from having read all of Octavia Butler's work, having only discovered her this time last year, and I'm not looking forward to that absences of new content.
Her books have been consistent 4 stars (such workmanlike prose; that presumed heteronormativity and gender essentialism which doesn't jive with the diverse and bizarre interpersonal dynamics), but a star metric is useless; something can be flawed but outstanding, and she was wildly creative, she was ruthless and discomforting and compelling, id-writing and social commentary and lived experience in one package. I admire the micro/macro focus of her work, everything fueled by these powerful, unsettling intimacies but working always within larger power structures.
The many artist deaths recently have left me at a distance; these figures weren't formative to my experience, so while I'm aware of their cultural impact and appreciate the roles they had in the lives of other consumers I feel no personal sense of loss. But it was people speaking about Butler's death in 2006 that put her on my "who is that, maybe I should read her someday?" radar, and now I am become a belated mourner and I don't regret it. (Finally watching Star Trek TOS this year made me feel likewise about Leonard Nimoy.) No time to celebrate an artist like the present—but also tell me about the ones you mourn, about how they changed your life then; because sometimes that influence is locked to its time period, but odds are good that I can discover them after the fact and be changed by them now.
Title: The Bards of Bone Plain
Author: Patricia A. McKillip
Published: Ace Books, 2010
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 330
Total Page Count: 234,330
Text Number: 747
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: In Beldan's history is the story of a bard cursed to an endless life without music—but events in the modern day intimate a truth behind the legend. This takes its central premise of bardic tradition, myth, and music and language as magic, and runs with it as far as it can. The surprising industrialization of the modern setting is a fun counterpoint to the historical underpinnings; the tone is playful and charming, set against an arcane heart—McKillip has a particular knack for transporting, resonant descriptions of magic. But this didn't quite grab me in the way that some of her other work has, perhaps because of the predictable plot revelation, moreso because the tone of the interpersonal dynamics doesn't mesh smoothly with the gravitas of the magic, nor did it make me invested in the characters. This is satisfying but not especially fulfilling.
Title: Jovah's Angel (Samaria Book 2)
Author: Sharon Shinn
Published: Ace, 1998 (1997)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 365
Total Page Count: 234,695
Text Number: 748
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: 150 years after the first book, rain and flood endangers Samaria; Jovah is growing slower and less likely to respond to the angels's prayers. The first book in this series is about advanced technology which is indistinguishable from magic only insofar as it's visible to the reader; it's background in the worldbuilding, not part of the plot. This foregrounds it significantly. Not always with grace—too many things are obvious to the reader but not the characters, so the reader isn't engaged with their discoveries and may instead find them obvious. But the characters's responses to them, and the dialog between science, magic, and faith, are compelling and accessible. Characters are likable, but have predictable arcs and Shinn doesn't handle disability well (I don't have much patience for suicidal disabled characters or cure narratives). The plot is smaller, and appears to have a larger place within the series, intimating ongoing and unresolved events; this work is tainted by such numerous references to the first book that those events feel like the only significant part of Samaria's long history. I wanted this sequel to develop the science fictional aspect; it does so generously, and so on that note I'm satisfied. But this isn't especially good by any other metric.
