

Why aren't there more SF Black writers? There aren't because there aren't. Her mother was treated poorly by her employers. She accompanied her mother to her cleaning work where, as workers, the two entered white people's houses through back doors. Growing up in the racially integrated community of Pasadena allowed Butler to experience cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of de facto racial segregation in the larger society. She was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in what she would later recall as a strict Baptist environment. Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, the only child of Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshiner. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library in Southern California. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public, and awards soon followed. She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author to be able to write full-time.

While participating in a local writer's workshop, she was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, then held in Pennsylvania, which focused on science fiction. She attended community college during the Black Power movement. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. Extremely shy as a child, Butler found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. īorn in Pasadena, California, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

Octavia Estelle Butler (J– February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction author and a multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula awards. Butler signing a copy of Fledgling in 2005
