"Radio Imagination": Octavia Butler on the Poetics of Narrative Embodiment

I realize that I have been writing about people for years and I've never seen any of them. I have the kind of imagination that hears. I think of it as radio imagination. I like radio a lot, better than I do television; and, really, I have to go back and try to imagine what characters might look like because when I began writing at age twelve, I couldn't. What I had to do was go back and sort of paint the characters in. What would I like them to look like? (Octavia Butler, Interview with Mehaffy and Keating) African American science-fiction author Octavia Butler's work is thematically preoccupied with the potentiality of genetically altered bodies--hybrid multi-species and multi-ethnic subjectivities--for revising contemporary nationalist, racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes. Yet a curiously polarized dualism has dominated the critical response to this thematics: while Donna Haraway and Amanda Boulter praise Butler's novels for the way that they consistently "interrogate reproductive, linguistic, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and gender," Charles Johnson dismissively cites Butler's fiction's tendency to "plunge so deeply into fantasy that revelation of everyday life ... disappears" (Haraway 179, emphasis added; Johnson 115-16). Is Butler's science fiction radically revisionary, as Haraway and Boulter propose, interacting with the anatomical idioms of, specifically, everyday contemporary representation? Or, as Johnson proposes, do its frequent otherworldly themes and characters, and subsequent classification as fantasy, render Butler's work socially disjunctive or, as even a more positive critique like Eric White's depicts it, race-blind science fiction? Our interview with Octavia Butler centers on several sets of questions having to do with the narrative embodiments inhabiting Butler's fiction: with the efficacy of science fiction as an ideology-bending genre; and with the possible connections between Butler's texts' unorthodox embodiments and her relative marginalization from the canons of US literature, both African American and "mainstream." Butler's relative marginalization within canonical contexts resonates as well in her work's peculiar position within the genre of science fiction. Recently, she has been the multiple winner of science fiction's highest awards, the Hugo and the Nebula; in 1995 she was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Award, popularly called the "young genius" award. However, Butler's work has never, as she related in our interview, "fit in" with conventional expectations for either canonical or science fiction literature. For many years, science fiction was written by, primarily, "white" men for "white" male adolescents. With very few exceptions, women of any color did not write science fiction, female characters were generally portrayed as sex objects, and men of color rarely wrote or appeared in science fiction novels or stories. Thus, Butler's entry into this genre represents an unusual and significant breakthrough. Her novels introduce strong female protagonists, usually African American, and characters of many colors. In this way her work complicates traditional science fiction themes--global and local power struggles, for example--by inflecting such struggles with the implications of gender, ethnic, and class difference. As Butler explains in another interview: It is a writer's duty to write about human differences, all human differences, and help make them acceptable. I think science fiction writers can do this if they want to. In my opinion, they are a lot more likely to have a social conscience than many other kinds of writers. (Harrison 33) Further, in a 1995 autobiographical essay, Butler addresses the challenges directed to science fiction's efficacy, as a genre, for representing struggles specific to African American history. She responds to the question, most often asked by African American readers, "What good is science fiction to Black people? …