Positive Obsession
The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
Published on 9. October 2025
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-06-321207-7 (ISBN)
Description
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."
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 / Votes
"It's not simply that Positive Obsession brilliantly explores the threads of the life of Octavia Butler; it's the way Susana Morris artfully unwinds this life, creating a kind of almost gothic, futuristic, mystery as much as it is biography. I thought I knew Butler and her work. Morris showed me, in the most profound ways, that I knew neither." - Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir"Susana Morris is a queer Afrofuturist feminist visionary. Her work helps us all to see that new worlds really are possible, and she does it with a signature narrative fierceness that makes you want to work hard to bring that world into existence right now." - Brittney Cooper, author of the NYT bestseller Eloquent Rage
"Positive Obsession is the book you should read, re-read, and then read again. Each reading reveals something new about the inimitable Octavia Butler as it unlocks an unexplored dimension of the imagination. Susana Morris masterfully coaxes Butler's life from the archives, allowing Butler's brilliance and passion to guide her exploration of culture and craft, power and politics. This is more than a biography of one of the greatest writers to ever put words to page. It is a testament to Black women's enduring genius. I want to gift this book to every woman in my life!" - Tanisha C. Ford, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement.
Susana Morris' pen is tender, precise, and rich with care. She brings us into the intellectual and emotional world of Butler, tracing the life of a mind that continues to shape our movements for justice and our visions of liberation. Through Morris, Butler is not only made real-she is made eternal. - Dr. Bettina L. Love New York Times Bestselling Author of Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal.
"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
"Morris powerfully frames Butler's work and career through her politics and personal struggles, including the way poverty 'threatened to crush her spirit.' The result is a moving study of the life and creative pursuits of a literary pioneer." - Publishers Weekly
"a tender cultural biography of the inimitable Octavia E. Butler...Morris's prose is devoid of any of the stuffiness of a scholar's biography and sometimes feels like memoir or fiction...We can, and certainly must, take Butler's life as inspiration for creating our own resistance."
- Chicago Review of Books
"My only wish for this empathetic and insightful biography is that it were longer, so I could spend more time in Butler's, and Morris's, company." - 4Columns
Morris' earnest exploration is not only fortified by the deep research into Butler's extensive journals but also provides insightful commentary on the novels and short stories that have cultivated countless devotees... Positive Obsession is as keen in its literary insight as it is an exultant survey of a towering literary figure. - Booklist
"The great writer has been gone nearly two decades, but this look at her life will bring her genius back to the forefront. Morris shows how Butler's work was shaped, and from where her stories sprang. There were always important lessons inside her tales, and they are more relevant now than ever. Read this biography, then go back and enjoy Butler's work anew." - Miami Times
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 153 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
412 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-06-321207-7 (9780063212077)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
08/2025
HarperCollins
€20.42
Available for download
Person
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.