![]() ![]() ![]() The first Black woman to win both the Nebula and Hugo awards, Butler was the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur genius grant. She was prolific until her death, at only 58. Her first novel " Patternmaster" was published in 1976. She would go on to publish a dozen, along with a collection of short stories. She said the moment she decided to be a writer of science fiction was when she saw the 1954 B-movie " Devil Girl from Mars " as a 9-year-old. She loved comics, superheroes and sci-fi, loved a genre that took its time loving her back. ![]() Butler "never told an aspiring writer they should give up, rather that they should learn, study, observe, and persist." Butler could have been speaking of her own life, a writerly existence of fairly early publishing success but a consistent struggle for financial security and the uphill battle of being a Black woman in a genre dominated by white men.īutler is now considered a visionary if not the mother of Afrofuturism, which Ramtin Arablouei of NPR describes as "an open-ended genre combining science fiction, fantasy and history to imagine a liberated future through a Black lens." Butler was raised by her widowed mother, who worked for wealthy white women, and grandmother in Pasadena, California. In a beautiful essay in Vulture, published earlier this year, E. ![]()
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