She was perhaps the purest writer I've ever known, investing more of herself in her work than any other sane person I've ever met, and she was deeply sane. She remains the only science fiction writer to receive one of the vaunted "genius grants" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a $295,000 public acknowledgement of what those of us who knew her understood: she was truly one of a kind, in the very best sense of the term. Her father was a shoeshine man who died when she was a child, her mother a maid who brought her along on jobs. She lived in relative poverty before that MacArthur grant, and was roiled by personal and professional doubts. I suspect that early rejections by her peers (she was six feet tall in her early teens, with a slight speech impediment, and children can be terribly cruel) drove her deep into the recesses of her own heart and mind. There, she lived in fantasy. When she looked for fantasy worlds in the books and movies outside herself, they never positively reflected her own ethnicity, so she began to write. I think we all take some similar journey†”we have something that we wish to communicate within us, and are stifled. In Octavia's case, it was her beauty, intelligence, her warmth and courage. She could not communicate these things directly: when she wrote of slavery, publishers rejected it. When she wrote of blackness, publishers put green people on the covers of her books. She had to learn to speak in metaphor, or risk starvation. : Octavia's most popular work is Kindred, a time-travel novel in which a contemporary black woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back into slave times. Initially rejected by publisher after publisher, the 1979 novel is now a standard work in high schools and colleges, with over a quarter million copies in print. After her Parable of the Talents, winner of one of her two Nebula Awards in science fiction, Octavia found it difficult to complete or invest in projects, and seven years passed before the publication of her final novel, Fledgling, a vampire novel that deals, as is typical of her work, with racial and gender identity, as well as social power issues.
Bearbeitet von yiyippeeyippeeyay, 14 Mrz 2006 - 10:54.
Locusmag.com hat es ebenfalls sofort nach ihrem Tode gemeldet, falls Du das Englische vorziehst. Ich war nur interessiert, um herauszufinden, warum diese Informationslücke - die hier in Diskussionen immer wieder auftaucht -, denn existiert, obgleich die Infos zur Verfügung stehen (und unser Newsletter ist spamfrei und auch nicht aufdringlich, da muss man nicht einmal ins Internet...).
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und ich finde den Ton von Diboo auch aggressiv ... 
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