Non-Fiction Reviews
Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse
(2025) compiled by Chi-Ming Yang, Oxford University Press,
£22.99 / US$29.99, hrdbk, xxv + 289pp, ISBN 978-0-192-86235-8
This book is part of an eclectic series from Oxford University Press called ‘My Reading’, the aim of which is to offer ‘personal models of what it is to like to care about particular authors, to recreate through specific examples imaginative versions of what those authors and works represent, and to show their effect upon a reader’s own thinking and development’ (p. vi). Some elements of this series focus on particular works, such as Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea, but Chi-Ming Yang’s contribution represents the outcome of digging into Octavia Butler’s manuscripts, stored in the archives of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Organised in alphabetic order as a collection of essays on different themes, motifs and assorted ideas that feature in Butler’s juvenilia, the book is also threaded with Yang’s own reminiscences.
It opens with ‘A for Alias’, which looks at the different alter-egos, ‘human, superhuman, and nonhuman’ (p. 30), that ‘Estella’, as Butler was known at school, adopted in her writings. Covering her junior-high and high school years from 1958 to 1965, these afford ‘a fascinating glimpse into the development of a science fiction oeuvre built upon Black girl power’ (p. 33). Many of the characters and ideas from these early works reappeared in her published stories, particularly in the Patternist series published between 1976 and 1984.
In other cases, however, the connection is more tenuous, as with her youthful obsession with horses, considered in the essay ‘H is for Horse’ that gives the collection it’s title. Yang managed to track down the 1950s illustrated book of different horse breeds that Butler bought and from which she traced the pictures. Here it is suggested, not entirely convincingly, that ‘[p]erhaps tracing is also a form of time travel, and in this case, genre travel’ (p. 107). Curiously, Butler captioned these horse drawings with characters from Dicken’s David Copperfield, so a piebald pony is labelled ‘Mr Micawber’ and a rearing Palomino becomes ‘Emily’.
Butler’s apparent equino-centrism is also notably Black inflected and in ‘R is for Rex Macdonald’, Yang suggests that she would certainly have read about Rex, a real-life ‘Black Beauty’, and one of the most famous horses in American history, trained by the equally famous Tom Bass, a Black ‘horse whisperer’. Although Butler did not own a horse herself, the town of Altadena, just north of Pasadena where she lived, was ‘a locus of Black equestrianism’ (p. 177). Indeed, Yang argues, horses were Butler’s first aliens, which could not only talk and were smarter than most humans but could also shoot lasers out of their eyes (p.9)!
In this context, one of the more affecting essays in the book is ‘X for Xenogenesis’, referring to Butler’s trilogy from the late 1980s, republished in 2000 as Lilith’s Brood. As a child Butler had stated that one of her aims was to cure cancer and in her research for these novels, she consulted a wide range of books and scientific articles. Controversially, in the first of the trilogy, Dawn, cancer is presented as a gift, or talent, that the protagonist Lilith possesses, enabling her to save the life of one of the aliens. This is presented here in sharp and poignant contrast with Yang’s own account of her mother’s struggle with acute myeloid leukaemia (p. 231). Her remembrance of this episode and the toll it took resonates even more powerfully when she discovers a note in Butler’s materials labelled simply ‘Leukaemia’, in which the writer notes the poor prognosis for AML, with which Keira is afflicted in the novel Clay’s Ark (Yang’s mother fortunately survived).
Leaving aside the uneasiness some might feel when it comes to such insertions of a biographer’s personality, there is also the issue of what light, if any, such an examination of juvenile work casts on an author’s subsequent career. Do Estella’s teenage fantasies really illuminate the ‘sadomasochistic dynamic’ of Octavia’s later novels (p. 89)? At these points one can perhaps appreciate why some writers prefer to destroy such early writings. Nevertheless, as unorthodox a study as this is, it contains enough interspecial insights to satisfy most Butler fans.
Steven French
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