What Does Potlatch Book of Honor Mean?
Many discussions, both informal and in panel form, at Potlatch 17 were related to Butler’s novel and its themes. Participants read from Butler’s work and discussed Butler’s life, her work in the context of speculative fiction and in the context of the world as a whole. Who Was Octavia E. Butler? Born in 1947 and passed away in 2006, Butler had nearly 1 million copies of her books in print and received many awards including the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards. She described herself in her back cover biographies (changing age and location as appropriate) as “a 46-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I’m also comfortably asocial–a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles–a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.” Butler’s work has been compared to that of authors such as Ursula LeGuin, Toni Morrison a
