Positive Obsession

Susana M. Morris writes a cultural biography of Octavia Butler, the first Black woman to write and publish science fiction consistently. Morris follows Butler's life alongside the historical and social moments around her: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women's liberation, queer rights and Reaganomics.

The book traces how those currents shaped Butler's personal and intellectual path, and the ideas at the center of her fiction. Butler wrote stories imagining the decline of the American empire. In them, the country rises from a provincial backwater to a capitalist power built on chattel slavery, then becomes a bloated imperialist state close to collapse. The same stories set human ingenuity beside greed, ambition, violence and hierarchy.

Morris also looks at what Butler's cautionary fiction warns against: fascism, gender-based violence and climate chaos. It offers different ways to think about religion, family and a person's relationship to the self. Her futures place Black women at the center, as tough, flawed, intelligent and complicated characters rather than martyrs.

The biography asks what drove Butler to keep writing in a field then made up almost entirely of white men. It draws on her own words about self-doubt and about the habit she called positive obsession, the refusal to stop writing even when afraid. It suits readers curious about Butler's life and the world that formed her work.