Paul Lewin — Convergence (acrylic on wood, 2022)
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🕊When dove returns, so does peace. 🕊⚪️
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Parable of the SciFi Nerd
Octavia Estelle Butler, named for her mother Octavia Margaret and her grandmother Estella, is the triumph of the Black Girl Nerd.
The shy, bookish daughter of a family a mere one generation removed from sharecroppers, was born in Pasadena, CA in 1947. From a young age, she used books as an escape, even carrying around a pink journal where she would write down her dreams and short stories. “I usually had very few friends, and I was lonely,” Butler said. “But when I wrote, I wasn’t.”
In her pursuit of literary escape, Octavia discovered science fiction. Through the works of authors like Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin and Frank Herbert, Octavia found refuge in a childhood full of bullying and isolation. When she was 12, she saw this truly heinous film called The Devil Girl From Mars and proceeded to write what I can only assume was a fix-it-fic inspired by it (really what she said was the the movie was so bad, she was certain she could tell a better story, but come on...she wrote proto-fanfic. She was probably down with FFN and LiveJournal). When she discovered that she could actually make money with her writings, the fuse was lit.
Octavia Butler would go on to write 12 novels and a collection of short stories, including Kindred, The Parable series, and The Patternist series, which includes my personal favorite Butler work, Wild Seed. Octavia Butler would become the first black woman to have a scifi novel published, and is hailed as the Mother of Afro Futurism.
The world lost a shining talent on February 24, 2006 when Octavia died of what has alternatively been reported as a stroke or a head injury resulting from a fall. Although in her lifetime, Octavia's work had been underappreciated, more and more people are encountering her work and several adaptations of her novels have been planned, starting with Hulu's Kindred adaptation, which was released in December 2022.
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