A review by elliot_dw
Octavia E. Butler by Gerry Canavan

5.0

I had wanted to read this since it came out, and wow, I wasn’t disappointed! It’s less a biography of Butler, and more of an extended, chronological reading of her work, including loads of unpublished material in her archives. Canavan does a really wonderful job of dealing with the unpublished archival material - he uses it to find new insights into Butler and her work, while not pushing it too far or losing sight of its relationship to her published oeuvre. He talks in the introduction about trying to find a properly ethical stance towards her extremely rich and also deeply personal archival collection, and I think he succeeds at that. I also got a lot out of Canavan’s extended consideration of the cynicism and pessimism underlying many of Butler’s stories, and his application of the idea of “reproductive futurity.” I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has read Butler’s work, and wants to grapple with it and understand it more deeply.