Canavan, Gerry

English

epublications@Marquette

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEnglish Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of3-1-2014Missing Octavia: A Review of Strange Matings:Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, andOctavia E. ButlerGerry CanavanMarquette University, gerard.canavan@marquette.eduPublished version. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 41, No. 1 (March 2014): 223-225. DOI. © 2014DePauw University. Used with permission.223BOOKS IN REVIEWIt is, as they cite Hilary Rose, a “dream laboratory” for feminist sciencestudies. The authors point out how Haraway sees Octavia Butler’s work asdisruptive of the totalizing tendencies and boundary policing prevalent insociobiology. Interestingly, they also see in Haraway’s work the evolution ofa set of reading protocols that they compare to Samuel R. Delany’s. Finally,they compare her use of story in understanding nature/culture to Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), nicely setting up the finalchapter of the book.“Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others” isDonna Haraway’s generous contribution to the volume, a tour de force inwhich she weaves together acacia seeds and ants with Le Guin’s story “TheAuthor of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of theAssociation of Therolinguistics” (1987), essentially rewriting the story todemonstrate symbiosis between nature and culture, story and science, so that,as she concludes, “sympoesis displaces autopoesis and all other self-formingand self-sustaining system fantasies. Sympoesis is a carrier bag forongoingness, a yoke for becoming with, for staying with the trouble ofinheriting the damages and achievements of colonial and postcolonialnaturalcultural histories in telling the tale of still possible recuperation” (145-46). This rousing conclusion shows how—although she, like Le Guin, rejectsthe seminal story of the hero for the more generative one of the carrierbag—she is nevertheless a heroic figure for a great many sf scholars. Someone(or something) has to sow the seeds, and Margaret Grebowicz and HelenMerrick continue the propagation in this fine book.—Joan Gordon, NassauCommunity CollegeMissing Octavia. Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl, eds. Strange Matings:Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler.Seattle: Aqueduct, 2013. iii + 314 pp. $20 pbk.“The last Christmas card Octavia sent me had a photo of Mt. Rainier onthe front. Not only did she love that mountain, she resembled it. She toweredover everything ordinary; she made her own weather” (2), Nisi Shawl exultsin the introduction to her co-edited anthology Strange Matings, a melding ofpoems, remembrances, interviews, leaked emails, and academic essayshonoring the life and work of the late Octavia E. Butler. The sense of griefevinced by Shawl’s ecstatically mournful testimonial bears witness to Butler’slarger-than-life impact on both the field of science fiction and the lives ofthose with whom she was close; coming to press seven years after Butler’sunexpected death at the young age of 58, there is a sense that for the writersof Strange Matings—both for those who knew Butler personally and those whowere touched by her only through her work—this loss still feels very raw, asif it somehow happened only yesterday. As a still-grieving devotee of Butler(though I never met her myself), I feel utterly unqualified to speculate howthis book will come across to a more emotionally detached audience of casualfans or non-fans, if any such people would have reason to take up StrangeMatings in the first place. I can only say that, for myself, the book’s224 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 41 (2014)bittersweet mix of joy and tears has the necessary and wonderfully catharticquality of an Irish funeral. The book creates a space where fans of Butler’swork can grieve together with those who knew her well and with those whoonly wish they did; the acknowledgments page gestures towards this largercommunity of fans, scholars, and fan-scholars in its recognition of thecontributions of WisCon and the Carl Brandon Society to the project, alongwith individual supporters including Nalo Hopkinson, Lisa Yaszek, andCatherine Prendergast.This jagged charge of shared, collective grief makes Strange Matingsunlike any other scholarly book I can think of. Even the more academic essaysfrequently find themselves slipping into the rhetoric of personal witnessing, asone can see simply from scanning the titles: “The Impact of Octavia Butler’sEarly Work on Feminist Science Fiction as a Whole (and on One FeministScience Fiction Scholar in Particular”); “How a Young Feminist Writer FoundAlternatives to White Bourgeois Narrative Models in the Early Novels ofOctavia Butler”; “Growing (Up) with Octavia E. Butler”; “Octavia Butler,‘Speech Sounds,’ and Me.” As Holden herself admits in the introduction, sheand other writers in the book find themselves unable to hold to the academicconvention that would only call her “Butler” after the first use of her fullname; instead, she is always “Octavia,” even to those who never actually mether. Here then the book, only half-academic, becomes another kind of strangemating that speaks to the difficulty of really caring about something, andsomeone, in a discursive field that pretends to an ideal objectivity andemotional detachment from one’s research material—where “love” is at bestan embarrassment to be left unspoken and at worst a cause for suspicion oralarm. This is not to say that the book is purely or uncomplicatedly hagiographic,or that its interest is limited entirely to the emotional sphere. Although—orperhaps because—it was written and edited by those who loved Butler, we getglimpses of her full personality throughout the book: her shyness, herloneliness, her dark moods, her abiding pessimism, her tendency towardsbrutal self-criticism and abandonment of cherished projects, and her frustrationwith the speed and quality of her writing, especially as her health began todecline. Of course such moments take nothing away from her legacy orimportance; if anything, the complicating gestures turn her into even more ofa heroic figure, humanizing a writer whom fans and students commonlyencounter as a kind of holy person, almost a secular prophet. The overallmood of the text is not altogether unlike the aura surrounding Lauren Olaminain Butler’s own Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents(1998), a character Butler sometimes thought of as her best self, even hersuper-self—except that, unlike in the novels, there is no one here who can findone bad word to say about her. “Yes, she could have founded a religion,”writes Steven Barnes in his remembrance, “and its followers would have beengood, decent, aware human beings” (107). We see in Benjamin Rosenbaum’s“Goodbye My Hero” a sense of Butler as teacher through a recounting of hisexperiences at the Clarion Writers Workshop (where she herself got her start225BOOKS IN REVIEWunder the mentorship of Samuel R. Delany and Harlan Ellison); we see inother essays reflections on how Butler might help us to be better teachers toour own students; and we see in the memories of her friends a model forgenerosity, solidarity, and hope.While both the remembrances and the academic essays are exemplary—particularly those by Thomas Foster and Steve Shaviro, which draw outconnections between texts from disparate moments in her career—and the bookas a whole a necessary reference for anyone working on Butler’s career orsimply finding themselves missing her voice, for me as a fan-critic the mosttouching parts of the book were the short glimpses of Butler’s irreplaceablepersonality as seen through her own informal and casual utterances. In apreviously unpublished interview with Shawl that is threaded through thevolume, we find Butler gently teasing her friend, playing off the audience withan ease and confidence that belies the social anxiety that plagued her in othercontexts; in informal emails to Nnedi Okorafor, we see Butler responding to9/11 and the war on terror not as author or artist but as horrified citizen. InShawl’s interview, we see Butler explaining why the novel she somewhatfamously disavowed, Survivor (1978), went south, as well as a sardonicrecognition that telling people not to read it only made them desperate to doso; in a letter included in the volume as a facsimile, we see her trying toreturn her publishing advance for Parable of the Talents, which she veryregretfully concluded she would never complete. Still other contributions giveus a glimpse at the texts we have lost, including tantalizing hints of theunfinished Parable of the Trickster (now available in fragments at theHuntington Library in San Marino, CA), which Shawl suggests should itselfbe thought of as the Trickster of the PARABLES series, its haunting ghost alwayshalf-there and half-not. Tananarive Due, in her remembrance, similarly linksButler’s literary fictions to her life and death in a transcendent, quasi-religiousregister, one that encompasses the strange mating of joy and mourning andmemory and discipleship that runs through the volume as a whole: “Thankyou for sharing your spirit with us, Octavia. You left a great gift behind forus, but we were greedy. We wanted more. We thought we had more time.How could I have forgotten what you taught us? You tried to warn us allalong. You distilled it into words in Parable of the Sower. The only last truthis Change” (236).—Gerry Canavan, Marquette UniversityCritical Astigmatism. Gerald Alva Miller, Jr. Exploring the Limits of theHuman through Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. x +238 pp. $85 hc.Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction delves into sfas a form of critical theory ideally suited to exploring the “differentcharacteristics that define humans (i.e., identity categories, such as gender),the forces that motivate them (desire), the social formations that dominatethem (power structures such as discipline and control), the power of memoryand narrative that serve as humankind’s primary means for ordering realityand generating discourse, and humanity’s potential to evolve beyond the

Missing Octavia: A Review of \u3cem\u3eStrange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler\u3c/em\u3e

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Missing Octavia: A Review of \u3cem\u3eStrange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler\u3c/em\u3e

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