To mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, we’re cataloging 25 objects that define the country’s history.
Every storyteller has a tool: a notebook, a camera, a microphone. For legendary author Octavia Butler, it was a powder blue typewriter. On it, she wrote some of the most influential American science fiction novels. Her stories explored race, power and what it means to be human.
That typewriter is now in the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum, and acting curator Jennifer Sieck explained Butler’s influence on the country’s history.
4 questions with Jennifer Sieck
Octavia Butler was born in Southern California and died in 2006. She’s known as a “Grande Dame” of sci-fi. Can you tell us about her journey as a writer?
“Octavia Butler was interested in writing as a child, even as young as 10. And at a young age, she begged her mother for a typewriter. So she kept very focused on this passion and developed that through the years. She was very disciplined about her work.
“Along with the typewriter, she also gave the museum six replacement ribbons, and I think that speaks to her discipline. She encouraged other writers to develop good habits and write every day as she did. And this typewriter, which was made around 1976, was one of several typewriters that she had. She wrote her first 10 books on typewriters. You can almost see, though, the adumbration of the personal computer coming into play with its shape.”
Is there a work of hers you’re particularly drawn to?
“I’m fascinated by ‘Kindred,’ where the protagonist — who’s an African American woman writer — travels in between California in the mid-1970s and pre-Civil War Maryland. She explores what it’s like to be enslaved and wrestles with that, and readers can get a sense of what that might have been like.
“Readers also might consider ‘Parable of the Sower,’ which takes place in 2024. And so we can read a science fiction novel that’s now in our past. She envisions a lot of challenges that we’re dealing with in the present, including with the environment and with wildfires. Her protagonist, an African American woman, finds hope in building community.
“That book was so prescient. It hit the New York Times bestseller list more than two decades after it came out. And there’s an opera that’s been inspired by the novel and Butler’s emphasis on community. It’s been called a congregational opera because of that focus.”
How did Butler change science fiction?
“Previously, the genre was dominated by white male writers, and she brought her whole self into that genre and really changed it. She brought not only African American protagonists, but also the beginnings of what we would now call Afrofuturism, melding science, technology and even drawing on African folklore and mythology.”
What did Butler’s work reveal about America?
“Octavia Butler was interested in, and did, bring worlds into being with her words. And in some ways, that’s an American project.
“The Declaration of Independence brought a new world into being, and that world was visionary. And yet it still excluded some people such as African Americans and women. However, Butler wrote herself into American history, and she showed us that we can all write ourselves into American history. That’s a profoundly hopeful act in the same way that declaring independence and envisioning a new world was also a profoundly hopeful act.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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Will Walkey produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Walkey also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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