Book Review: Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler Susana M. Morris

 

 

Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler Susana M. Morris

272 pages, Hardcover

Published

August 19, 2025 by Amistad

Octavia Butler shares a few things with my guy Phil, a prophetic SF author whose fame grew mostly after death. I was excited to get to know Butler through a well-researched biography.  The author Suzanna Morris has done a wonderful job bringing Butler’s life to us. I am a sucker for Writer bios because I like to know what was going on in an author's life when they wrote the books I love. 

Octavia Butler’s position in the SF canon is assured at this point, but sadly her output compared to some authors is thin; the power of the works we have is undeniable. This book does look at her life, and has wonderful glimpses of her process, but it also does a nice job of showing Butler’s impact. One of the nice ways Morris does this is to tell stories of the time she herself was taught a Butler story or novel, and the many times she taught Butler’s work herself. 

Morris went deep with the research, not only reading the text, letters, and interviews but also drafts and unfinished work.  Learning about how Butler traveled and experienced places during her research phase made sense. 

I am sure that several reviewers will complain about the focus on her work more than her life. There were some gaps, like more interviews; it seemed Morris did not to interview anyone who knew her, and that could have added a lot to the project, but I suspect Morris is more interested in the fiction of Butler and how her process fed into the final product.

Yeah, I would like to understand a bit more about her students at Clarion thought of her as a teacher, and how she coped with her dyslexia. I have my own dyslexia strategies,  so comparing them would have been cool. But the reality is that I read The Parable Books around the time she died, and I suspected her life would be a mystery. Many women who wrote genre fiction from CL Moore, Andre Norton, and others, are hard to find information about.  Catherine Moore is often remembered for her husband, Henry Kuttner, or her letters with Lovecraft, when her biography, for example, is just as interesting. 

I think we should be very happy this book exists.