Positive Obsession

Octavia Butler was the first Black woman to write and publish science fiction consistently, and this cultural biography traces her life and work. Susana M. Morris places Butler alongside the historical and social currents that shaped her, among them the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women's liberation, queer rights and Reaganomics, and shows how they left their mark on her personal and intellectual path.

Butler's fiction imagines the decline of the American empire as a way of looking at the best and worst in people: ingenuity and innovation on one side, greed, ambition, violence and hierarchy on the other. Her stories follow the country's journey from provincial backwater to capitalist powerhouse, built on chattel slavery, and on to an overextended imperial superpower close to collapse. Her cautionary tales warn of fascism, gender-based violence and climate chaos, and they offer alternatives to conventional ideas of religion, family and the way we relate to ourselves.

Butler put Black women at the center of the futures she imagined, and her characters are tough, flawed, intelligent and complicated rather than saintly martyrs. Morris also looks at what drove her to write. Butler recalled wondering who she was to be heard, and noted that nearly all professional science fiction writers at the time were white men. She kept writing anyway. The book takes its title from her phrase for that drive: a positive obsession, the refusal to stop despite fear and doubt.