by Susan M. Morris
Amistad
8/19/2025, hardcover
SKU: 9780063212077
A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.
As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity--our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project--the nation's transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut--made possible by chattel slavery--to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.
In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler's story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women's liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler's personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler's stories.
Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. "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 dangerous. It's about not being able to stop at all."
Reviews:
"This book is a gift to all of us who benefit from the deeper understanding we gain of Butler as a visionary artist. Maybe I betray a belief in the time travel and telepathy that are major themes of Butler's work when I say that Susana Morris's careful work here is also a gift to Octavia herself. The depth of research and contextual insight in POSITIVE OBSESSION creates a unique biography where Morris not only accompanies the reader through Octavia Butler's work, lifetime and afterlife, she also offers Octavia the retroactive intimacy and care she always deserved and rarely received." -- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, PhD author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
"Drawing on correspondence, interviews, unpublished manuscripts, and archival material, queer Black feminist scholar Morris offers a sensitive examination of pioneering Black science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006)" -- Kirkus Reviews
"Dr. Susanna Morris presents to us a nuanced and extremely well-researched work that delivers greater insights into the mind and life of one of the most important American writers to ever live. Positive Obsession resonates with the reverberations of Butler's life and stories and shines with the luminescence of a brand new sun." -- John Jennings, Best-selling Illustrator of Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
About the Author:
Susana Morris is Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and was most recently the Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women's Literature, co-editor, with Brittney C. Cooper and Robin M. Boylorn, of The Crunk Feminist Collection, and co-author, with Brittney C. Cooper and Chanel Craft Tanner, of the young adult handbook Feminist AF: The Guide to Crushing Girlhood. She is the co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective and has written for Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan.com and Ebony.com, and has also been featured on NPR and the BBC, and in Essence and the New York Times.