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August 24 - August 31, 2025
Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
A chance viewing of a B-movie science fiction film ignites a creative spark in twelve-year-old Octavia. She begins crafting her first science fiction stories, planting seeds that would later blossom into her groundbreaking Patternist series.
A supportive teacher recognizes Octavia’s talent and encourages her to submit her work to science fiction magazines—a crucial vote of confidence for the young writer.
1968 In her final year at Pasadena City College, Octavia takes her first Black literature class—a pivotal moment in her developing literary consciousness.
Here she meets influential writer Samuel R. Delany and strengthens her connection with Harlan Ellison.
Studying under Theodore Sturgeon at UCLA further refines her unique voice.
Her essay “The Lost Races of Science Fiction” boldly challenges the field’s entrenched racism, establishing her as not just a creative force but a crucial voice for change.
The deeply personal essay “Positive Obsession” (first published as “Birth of a Writer” in Essence) offers readers insight into the mind and heart behind the stories.
1995 In a watershed moment for science fiction, Octavia becomes the first writer in the genre to receive the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant”—a $295,000 award that acknowledges her extraordinary talent and vision.
This conviction—that imagination coupled with careful observation and steadfast action and collaboration could help shape our collective future—lies at the heart of why her work matters so profoundly.
To be remembered Long after your death Is, inevitably, To be lied about.
I was inspired to call this book Positive Obsession because Octavia called her deep, unmitigated desire to write and share her work a “positive obsession.”
I didn’t talk much about my doubts. I wasn’t fishing for hasty reassurances. But I did a lot of thinking—the same things over and over. Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is
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Octavia once wrote in her journal, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
Usually, she preferred solitary jobs like cleaning office buildings where she could be grumpy all by herself and just get her work done and go home,
She once wrote of herself, “I am a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old-writer.”
Throughout her life her family called her “Estelle,” but her mother sometimes called her “Junie.”
The Butler home knew tragedy, and the air in the house was heavy with loss, as four infant brothers died before Estelle’s birth.
The fire that consumed her grandmother’s farm in 1951 would also loom large in her imagination, most pointedly in the description of fires in Parable of the Sower.
and though she was a slow reader, she gravitated toward it and was persistent. Later she self-diagnosed herself with dyslexia and decided she was more of an auditory learner, someone with a “radio imagination.”
It wasn’t that she was undisciplined, lazy, or unproductive; instead, Estelle was what today we would call neurodivergent.
Naturally timid, young Estelle often found social interactions baffling and later recalled, “Among my earliest memories is not knowing how to respond. Uncertainty. Fear.”
Her first stories were about horses and dogs, like her 1958 short story “Silver Star.”
She read all the “golden age” science fiction classics, from Robert Heinlein to John Brunner to Theodore Sturgeon, and later fell in love with Frank Herbert’s Dune, but works by women writers particularly resonated with her. She would read all of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series. Ursula K. Le Guin’s work was another favorite. But young Estelle was a zealot for Zenna Henderson—so much so she would buy cheap copies of Pilgrimage from the Salvation Army and pass them out to people because she wanted someone to discuss the book with.
Although Estelle’s family encouraged her voracious reading, they generally viewed her writing with bemused skepticism. “Negroes can’t be writers,” her aunt had told her.
(her first purchases were a book about outer space and another about horses).
Octavia Estelle called her mother and grandmother her heroes and always cited them as the inspiration for the work she did.
It was Octavia Margaret who gave her daughter the spark to even consider a writing career. She saw her quiet, bookish ten-year-old daughter writing, saw the delight on her face as she created, and asked her what she was doing. Estelle replied that she was writing a story. Her mother remarked, almost offhandedly, “Well, maybe you’ll be a writer.”
Twelve-year-old Estelle sat down in front of her family’s black-and-white television and saw that Devil Girl from Mars was on again.
Devil Girl from Mars was initially released in 1954, seven years after Estelle was born. This was the same year that the Supreme Court overruled the mandate of “separate but equal” through the ruling Brown v. Board of Education.
She became fascinated with how human beings—especially those who didn’t have much power—could empower themselves and others and change the world.
Besides her frequent trips to the library, Estelle read and collected comic books, going into secondhand shops and scooping up cheap back issues. In fact, at one point, Octavia Margaret was worried that Estelle was too obsessed with comics and ripped all her comics in half.
She just could not keep up—probably because of her youth and neurodivergence.
She also mused that the closest thing to a utopia would be a socialist or communist society, although she did not think a utopia was possible because people “will not live together without taking advantage of each other if they possibly can. They will not stop considering themselves better because their skin is light.”
In her fiction, such as Survivor, Dawn, and the Parable series, she would feature tall, androgynous Black women characters who are not only strong and resilient, but desired and desirable.
In another creative writing course her freshman year, the professor, an older white man, advised students to avoid using Black characters unless they were absolutely necessary. She would later reflect that “the presence of blacks, my teacher felt, changed the focus of the story—drew attention from the intended subject.”
She soon learned to mask her interests, performing a kind of literary code-switching. In a class called “Writing for Publication,” she “discovered that there is one kind of writing that does not go over well with publishers and that was the kind English teachers seem to like.”
“Write every day” eventually became her consistent advice to wannabe writers, besides instructing them to read widely and voraciously.
Thematically, her work had more in common with that of Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin—then fairly new authors themselves—than Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
Ellison had a reputation for being abrasive, combative, and litigious, characterizations that he himself supported. Octavia recalled, “Whatever you wrote he would go over it and talk to you about it and you might go home feeling like you didn’t much like him but it was the kind of criticism I needed.”
In fact, she sold nothing between 1971 and 1976—five years of steady rejection letters. These were dismal years professionally and personally for Octavia.
Besides her mental anguish, she was also plagued with expensive and painful dental issues and was often in physical pain from her backbreaking day jobs. She stuck to a grueling writing schedule, often writing from 2 to 5 a.m. and then working a full-time job.
“I think I have not trusted myself to settle into anything other than the writing. I’ve fought everything else. I still do. I say again and again, all I care about is the writing. Every other thing, job, social situation, whatever, must give way. Body and mind must remain healthy and intact so that my attention is not drawn from the writing.”
In 1975, Octavia sold her first novel, Patternmaster, to Doubleday publishers for seventeen hundred and fifty dollars. After years of laboring in the vineyard, she was finally going to be a professional writer.
Octavia’s earliest and most prevailing positive obsession was figuring out the patterns of human behavior and using that to imagine possible futures for humanity.
In an interview for Poets and Writers Magazine in 1997, Octavia observed, “Even when people are the most absolutely homogenous group you could think of, we create divisions and fight each other.”
she came up with the idea for Patternmaster when she was twelve, for Mind of My Mind when she was fifteen, and for Survivor when she was nineteen.
Rather than the future world being big and complicated, sometimes speculative authors purposely shrink the world-building in a way to reflect the narrowness of the society. This is the world of Patternmaster and a possible future for humankind.
They perfect the worst rationales of human society to make their own world, another of Octavia’s commentary on Black communities internalizing the logic of white supremacist thought. She once admitted, “I don’t think that black people have made peace with ourselves, and I don’t think white America has made any kind of peace with us. I don’t think we really know how to make peace at this point.”
Survivor has the curious distinction of being a novel that Octavia singularly loathed. She derisively referred to it as her “Star Trek novel” despite her love for the series as a whole, because it prominently features alien races encountering each other, not unlike the common theme of the original famous science fiction series.
