Having picked up both the Library of America editions of Philip K. Dick's work and Ursula K. Le Guin's, I just began collecting almost all of their editions of classic sf writers, which brought me to Octavia E. Butler. This is the first of what I guess will be four volumes collecting all of Butler's work; it contains all of her non-series fiction: Kindred, Fledgling, and all of her short fiction except for one Patternist story. Kindred I had read twice before, a couple of the short stories once, and everything else here was new to me. As I often do, I chose to read it in (mostly) original publication order.
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| Collection published: 2020 Contents originally published: 1971-2014 Acquired: July 2021 Read: December 2021 |
Kindred is a great book, and I don't really have anything to add to that summation. It's a harrowing look at the mentality of slavery, of how it changes the way you think, be you master or slave, by plunging a black woman and a white man from the 1970s into a situation where they must adapt or die. Lots of details that feel right.
Fledgling felt like minor Butler, probably the weakest novel I've read by her (though I certainly haven't read them all). The basic idea is sound and, as I'll get to below, pretty typical Butler: a species with an unusual means of reproduction that requires human cooperation. It's a decent enough take on vampires. But the book spends more time explaining the premise than doing anything interesting with it, and the trial sequence is a plod. You never feel any suspense, and one feels that the complexities of this situation have largely gone explored. Alas that there never was a sequel.
The short fiction was the big discovery for me here. Butler didn't consider herself much of a short story writer, but it's clear that when she wanted to write a piece of short fiction, she could by and large knock it out of the park. "Speech Sounds," "Bloodchild," "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," and "Amnesty" are all great, well observed, somewhat unsettling tales. Weird worlds that you can apply to our own, but not obvious or pat metaphors, either. The only one I didn't like was "The Book of Martha," which to be honest, felt like the kind of thing a beginning writer might come up with and wouldn't have been published if it wasn't by Butler.
Reading a bunch of one author in succession lets you see their themes and interest; the idea of people being biologically compelled to do something, especially reproduce, runs across almost everything in this volume. Often it's a compulsion that was externally injected in some way. Is this a violation of free will? Butler's stories seem to posit, no: if you don't think of your own compulsion to have sex and reproduce as a violation of free will, why should you think of these ones that way... no matter how distasteful they seem to us? Which of course encourages us to reflect on the biological drives we already have. In what I've read of her work, I think this theme reaches its peak in Xenogenesis: Dawn, but you can see it here, too. You could even claim it's what underlies Kindred: Dana must ensure reproduction, or she will die, even if it involves a rape of an innocent woman.
In light of Butler's own biography, it feels particularly interesting: no romantic partners, no offspring. Some have posited that she was asexual or aromantic, and if so, that might inform our understanding of all this. To her, human sexuality and reproduction may have been as alien as Tlic reproduction was to us! She makes us see it from the outside through science fiction because that is how she saw it herself.
As far as apparatus goes, this is the best Library of America volume I have read. Gerry Canavan provides a range of useful, enlightening material: I got more out of his twelve-page chronology of Butler's life than I did from the entirety of A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky, and he is a genuinely great writer of end notes. They don't just give you dictionary definitions, but explain why a reference matters in a way the enhances your understanding of the stories; a good example of this is when he doesn't just tell you what The Atlantic is, but tells you why Butler might have picked it as a literary journal to mention (p. 765). It was kind of funny to see many ordinary facts of 2006 life explained in the Fledgling notes, though. It's the past now, I guess!
So far no future Butler volumes from LOA have been announced, but I am hopeful for ones covering Xenogenesis, the Patternist series (in complete form, I pray), and the Parable novels. Based on this one, they will be well worth it.
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