Kindred Author Dies

I read my first Octavia Butler book in 1989. It was called Kindred it was one of the best books I've ever read. While I haven't read all of her works, I also read two of her books from the 90s: Parable of The Sower and Parable of The Talents. I also was able to attend one of her readings at the San Francisco Book Festival in 1995 or so. I recently recommended Octavia Butler to some people who claim they don't like Science Fiction because I think they have the wrong idea about what the genre really encompasses. I know everyone has their time to go and I guess this was hers. But, I am still shocked and sad.

Her father was a shoeshine man who died when she was a child, her mother was a maid who brought her along on jobs, yet Octavia Butler rose from these humble beginnings to become one of the country's leading writers - a female African American pioneer in the white, male domain of science fiction.

Butler, 58, died after falling and striking her head Friday on a walkway outside her home in Lake Forest Park. The reclusive writer, who moved to Seattle in 1999 from her native Southern California, was a giant in stature (she was 6 feet tall by age 15) and in accomplishment.
Octavia Butler
Zoom Joshua Trujillo / P-I
Octavia Butler was one of the Northwest's most prominent science fiction writers.

She remains the only science fiction writer to receive one of the vaunted 'genius grants' from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a hard-earned $295,000 windfall in 1995 that followed years of poverty and personal struggles with shyness and self-doubt.

'People may call these 'genius grants,' ' Butler said in a 2004 interview with the Seattle P-I, 'but nobody made me take an IQ test before I got mine. I knew I'm no genius.'

Butler's most popular work is 'Kindred,' a time-travel novel in which a black woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. The 1979 novel became a popular staple of school and college courses and now has more than a quarter million copies in print, but its birth was agonizing, like so much in Butler's solitary life.

Of all of the articles/reviews I read about Octavia and from the bit she did tell about us about herself at the reading I went to, I never knew that her father was a shoeshine man. Why was that the opening paragraph of this obituary.