Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris is a tender cultural biography of the inimitable Octavia E. Butler. The first Black woman to primarily and consistently write and publish science fiction, Butler is a trailblazer in more ways than one. Morris takes care to limit the scope of the work in her author’s note, reminding us that “no biography can claim to capture the complete essence of a life so richly lived.” Positive Obsession seeks specifically to ground Butler’s fiction in the time and place it—and its author—came to be.
Given the current political landscape, the work of Octavia Butler is never far from my mind. Her novel Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, is about a young Black woman and her community’s struggle for freedom against a tyrannical autocrat in an on-fire LA in 2025. Morris notes with a reverent awe that the novel’s themes were prescient at the time of Parable’s publication and nearly prophetic today. For all that Octavia Butler’s work has done for the fields of science fiction and Black feminism broadly, fewer books about her life, creative process, or work exist than about her contemporaries. With Positive Obsession, Morris attempts to both explain and ameliorate this lack.
The book opens with an introduction in the form of a heartfelt essay about the impact Butler’s work has had on Morris’s life and career. At times, it feels more like a prayer than a biography. It is a moving tribute, an affirmation that Butler’s work found exactly the audience she intended, the star of many of her stories, young Black women. Morris’s love and deep respect for Octavia E. Butler more than shine through even without overly reverent language.
The ensuing chapters focus on periods of Butler’s career and life, each centered loosely around her best-known works. Morris’s lens is inherently intersectional. Butler’s contributions to the field of science fiction cannot be understated, but Positive Obsession is far more interested in the use of science fiction as a means of delivering powerful social commentary and working out the stickiest philosophical questions. Morris is particularly interested in Butler’s views on hierarchical social structures, a theme that is ever-present in the work.
Morris examines closely the impact of the Black Power and feminist movements on Butler’s work, all of which burgeoned around the same time. Butler differed from other Black women writers of her time with her focus on speculative fiction and from the speculative fiction world by being a Black woman. Morris traces the way Butler’s race, gender, neurodivergence, and working-class background impacted both her opportunities for success and her creative output.
Morris’s contention that Butler’s work should be more widely read is irrefutable. Despite all of the challenges she faced in her life as a double-marginalized writer of hard genre, Butler is a literary giant. Her passion for creating literature for and about Black women in a genre so unwelcoming is nothing short of extraordinary. It is odd, then, that Positive Obsession occasionally slips into a defensive tone, as though explaining away perceived shortcomings in Butler’s career. Butler became the writer and human she was because of the personal and structural adversity she faced, not despite it. Without her experiences, she would likely not have been able to see the cracks and flaws in human civilization that made her such a visionary.
Morris’s prose is devoid of any of the stuffiness of a scholar’s biography and sometimes feels like memoir or fiction. It’s an extremely smooth read, but the presentation of Butler’s interior thoughts occasionally muddies who is speaking, fusing Butler and Morris into one mind.
Morris reminds us often that the tyrannical figure in Parable of the Sower used a slogan stolen directly from the Reagan administration Butler so detested: “Let’s make America great again.” That the current administration has returned this slogan to the cultural zeitgeist casts a different light over this examination and celebration of Octavia E. Butler: a gentle nudge to view a life and creative oeuvre like Octavia’s as a roadmap to navigating similarly tenuous circumstances. We can, and certainly must, take Butler’s life as inspiration for creating our own resistance.
NONFICTION
By Susana M. Morris
Amistad
Published August 19, 2025
