Mutual Adaptation as a Guarantee of the Future: Octavia Butler’s Works

Abstract

The article investigates works by Octavia E. Butler (1947 –2006), an African-American writer who had a significant impact on the development of science fiction in the USA and the world. The paper provides an overview of Butler’s works and reveals the relationship between the problems and language / style of her prose, the latter being determined by the former. The first part of the paper examines the main topics of Butler’s works and focuses on the problem of survival. Being a disappearing minority, Butler’s heroines are usually isolated from others and, consequently, in order to survive they have to adapt to the circumstances, since resistance is impossible. However, for Butler the survival of an individual is less important than the preservation of the humankind. For Butler’s heroines it is the reproduction of the genetic and/or cultural memory of mankind that make the future possible and guarantee the survival. In the second part of the paper Butler’s works are analyzed in the context of Afrofuturism and it is pointed out that although Butler has much in common with other representatives of this movement, she deals with the projects for building an ideal society in a different way: Butler is skeptical about utopia as a project of a conflict-free society. The final part of the paper examines Butler’s language and style, noting that for her language serves as an impersonal, objective tool of analysis of human behavior. A special attention is paid to Butler’s latest novel Fledgling (2005), in which language serves both as a tool for expression and a topical issue.