My Beloved Fearless Pioneers of Sci-Fi: Sigourney Weaver and Octavia Butler
Two women united by the incredible power of passion and fearlessness.
How It All Started, Defying Odds and Destiny
In a world of uncertainty and arbitrary hierarchies, two women dared to defy the constraints imposed upon them by the limits of their society. Sigourney Weaver and Octavia Butler, pioneers in science fiction, faced unique challenges as women navigating a domain that their male counterparts dominated and that had artistic standards firmly established. Yet, precisely through their outlier status, these two formidable figures have left an indelible mark on the landscape of science fiction, demonstrating the power of the individual in the face of adversity.
Let's examine the similarities and shared experiences between these two women. We may glean insights into the nature of their respective strengths and legacies.
Sigourney Weaver, born Susan Alexandra Weaver, emerged from a lineage of creatives, with her father a television executive and her mother a renowned British actress. The young Suzan often felt overshadowed by the success of her family within the entertainment field and longed to differentiate. But how?
People called her Suzie, which is a cute little name, but Sigourney didn’t feel cute or little. Early in her childhood, she was very tall. Soon, she didn’t feel like being a Suzy anymore, but she didn’t feel grand enough to be called Alexandra. She adopted a new name after a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to establish a more androgynous and unique persona, since Sigourney was not a popular name.
This slight act of defiance would come to define her career. The name Sigourney was a perfect fit. She recalls saying to herself. (6:00). ”I’ll just take care of this name.”She remembers Ms. Hunt, one of her teachers at her school in Connecticut, as the one person who truly encouraged her love of writing, and reading plays and who actually gave her the feeling that she had something different to say, something unique to bring to the art world. This support was thrilling to Sigourney and possibly the most significant element that ignited her passion.
After completing her degree at Stanford, where she studied English, she was still attracted by everything related to theater and seized the chance to enroll in Drama school at Yale. But this experience was not what she thought it would be. The atmosphere was very heavy, joyless, and hyper-competitive. Though she never felt encouraged by her teachers. ”I was just trying to survive,” she later said in an interview; hopefully, she was surrounded by classmates who became her friends with a shared deep passion for theater, and so she did survive. Overall, though, she doesn’t have a great memory of art school, on the contrary. Despite graduating with her Master in Fine Arts in 1974, she often felt discouraged.
For all the hardships she experienced, she continued to evolve toward a career in acting, landing roles in the Broadway avant-garde theater scene as well as in plays created by some of her talented and passionate writer friends from Yale. “They saved me as an artist,” she later said. (20:29’). She loved those on-the-edge unconventional plays, and was starting to display an idiosyncratic way of seeing art and acting, which I’m convinced has contributed to her major success. She also needed money, and those plays weren’t bringing in much, so she started looking for an agent.
Writing Above Everything
In contrast, Octavia Estelle Butler was born into abject poverty. A single child, she grew up in Pasadena, California, immersed in the racially integrated community that allowed her to experience cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of de facto racial segregation in the larger society. Her father's untimely death left her alone with her mother, who was a maid, a situation that made her intimately understand the value of hard work and determination; she remembers her mother saying, “If you don’t want to be like me, better get that education…”
Octavia was a very introverted child, experiencing an almost paralyzing shyness made it difficult for her to socialize with other children. She believed that she was "ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless. As a result, she frequently spent her time reading at the Pasadena Central Library. She also wrote extensively in her "big pink notebook."
She sought solace in the world of literature, voraciously consuming everything she could find, including abandoned books found around her home. Those readings, however, were not satisfying her, so she was creating new stories, in her head, and started to put stories on paper at the age of 10. One day, after having watched a science fiction movie, she said to herself, “This was not very good. I can do better than that, and I will.” Even with all odds stacked against her, she decided on the spot to become a writer. Happily ignorant of the obstacles that a black female writer could encounter, she had uncertainty introduced for the first time at the age of 13, when her well-intentioned aunt Hazel said: "Honey... Negroes can't be writers." But Octavia persevered in her desire to publish stories and even asked her junior high school science teacher to type the first manuscript that she submitted to a science fiction magazine. Developing an iron-clad discipline as a young writer, she started to live by her creed, “Waste not, want all.”
Being affected by dyslexia, Octavia never dared to drive; the buses environment and long trips became the norm, and she had to take advantage of all that time; armed with a notebook that she never parted with, she would observe people, nature, entire neighborhoods, the sky and the mountains, and would learn to describe everything with unparalleled precision. This practice of deep observation would nurture her stories and help her see the world and create worlds through radically different lenses.
During the Open Door Workshop of The Writers Guild of America West, a program designed to mentor minority writers, her writing impressed one of the teachers, the appreciated science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison. He encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania. At 23 years old, she somehow found the courage to leave for the other side of the country, alone and with barely any money. This trip, however, proved invaluable for her. She started refining her style and met amazing people who shared her passion, and some became close friends. She also sold her first stories: "Childfinder" to Ellison for his anthology “The Last Dangerous Visions”, and "Crossover" to Robin Scott Wilson, the director of Clarion, who published it in the 1971 Clarion anthology.
Surreal Breakout To Enduring Success
Sigourney's breakout role as Ellen Ripley in Ridley Scott's film Alien helped her earn a unique and near-mythical place in science fiction history. Her portrayal of a strong, resourceful female protagonist was groundbreaking at the time, shattering preconceived notions of gender roles and carving out a space for women in the genre. When she accepted the lead role, she was delighted that it was not a Hollywood production subject to the stupid Hollywood rules, and the team was therefore allowed to envision totally different ways of doing things. As a woman performing in Alien, she didn’t have to act second-guessing herself or be sympathetic (which she is definitely not in Alien, to my great satisfaction as well). “This was simply revolutionary and exciting,” she recalls. (34:00’)
From there, she performed an impressive number of roles in top-of-the-line productions, becoming one of the most prolific actresses in the world. As a matter of fact, she is still acting today at the highest level at age 73. Sigourney's dedication to her work extends beyond acting. She is known to extensively research her roles and immerse herself in the characters she plays. For instance, when preparing for her role as primatologist Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist, she spent time with the mountain gorillas in Africa to better understand Fossey's work and passion for the animals. This level of dedication and intensity is a hallmark of her career and has contributed to her incredible success as an actress.
Sigourney has been nominated for multiple Academy Awards and Golden Globes. She has won several awards, including two Golden Globes for her performances in Gorillas in the Mist and Working Girl.
After making Gorillas in the Mist, Weaver became a supporter of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and is now its honorary chairperson. She was honored by the Explorers Club for this work and is considered to be an environmentalist. In October 2006, she drew international attention through a news conference at the start of a United Nations General Assembly policy deliberation. She outlined the widespread threat to ocean habitats posed by deep-sea trawling, an industrial method for catching fish. On April 8, 2008, she hosted the annual gala of the Trickle Up Program, a non-profit organization focusing on those in extreme poverty, mainly women and disabled people. Through her actions, she increasingly endorsed a leadership role, showing commitment to her values way beyond the artistic field. She doubled down on science fiction roles more recently through the blockbuster series, Avatar, by James Cameron, films that also show a commitment to the respect of nature and all non-human life forms, which conforms to Sigourney’s values.
“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns” - Octavia E. Butler
Three years before Alien appeared on cinema screens, Octavia had her first significant novel published, entitled Patternmaster. She brought a distinct voice to the world of science fiction that would challenge prevailing attitudes and assumptions about race, gender, power, spirituality, and beyond.
Octavia directly made it clear that she didn’t belong to any specific genre, that she wasn’t interested in playing by the rules, and that she would always push the limits.
She strongly rejected racial inferiority, gender norms, and everything that could have restricted her, no matter what the status quo and present culture. As a true free thinker, she wasn’t hesitant to question assumptions such as identity, gender, sex, and hierarchies. Remember that in the 70s and 80s, ideas around gender fluidity and queer sex were very far from mainstream, but she wasn’t interested in the mainstream anyway. Her writings turned out so powerful that some readers really started to see themselves differently and see the world in new ways after reading her novels and short stories. Her books gave tools to people and changed them.
She was researching social issues, economic realities, and even climate change before people were even talking about it. That’s when her visionary talents hit their paroxysm, and she wrote her iconic novel, Parable of the Sower, Octavia became a phenomenon, close to a prophet. Octavia has a growing group of ‘ideological children’ who are writers, thinkers, scholars, and activists and see themselves as her philosophical descendants. She is still leading after her death. Some even don’t hesitate to say she has created a new literary style: “Visionary Fiction,” and her novels are her case studies.
Some started to call her the mother of Afro-futurism, as she seamlessly combined science fiction, fantasy, and history. She was the first black woman to receive both the Nebula and Hugo awards. The highest honor in the science fiction and fantasy genres. She was the first science fiction writer to win a Mc-Arthur Genius grant, solidifying her place as a science fiction pioneer. She was highly prolific from the 1970s up until her death in 2006. She was so visionary that many people are only reckoning with her genius right now. She made it to the New York Times Fiction Bestseller list for the first time in 2020 and was published by The Library of America in 2021. Multiple films, TV shows and adaptations of her books are currently in the making.
For each dire warning in her novels came a sign of hope, something to help keep us going, and something to believe in. At a time when high levels of divisions and culture wars wreak havoc in society, it is astounding to notice what Octavia and Sigourney have in common, in terms of messages and engagement to make the world evolve in a better direction. They were a million miles in advance of their time.
Infinite Legacy
Both women faced considerable hardship early in their lives. Sigourney, a tall and imposing figure, struggled to secure roles befitting her stature. Octavia grappled with dyslexia, a condition that might have deterred many from pursuing a career as an author. Yet both women discovered the fortitude within themselves to persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Sigourney and Octavia both demonstrated unshakable fearlessness in their will to venture into unknown territory, both in terms of the stories they told and the characters they inhabited. Sigourney's roles in films such as Avatar and its sequels attest to her commitment to embracing new challenges, as evidenced by her transformative performance in Avatar: The Way of Water, where advanced visual effects were utilized to represent her as a teenager. Octavia's bravery manifested in her exploration of complex themes, such as African diasporas and the intersection of race and gender through visionary stories, which allowed her to reshape the genre's trajectory and inspire a new generation of writers.
Those two women are celebrated for the intensity they brought to their respective passions. Their unwavering dedication and commitment to excellence have left lasting legacies in the worlds of film and literature. The journeys of Sigourney Weaver and Octavia Butler stand as testaments to the power of individual will in the face of societal constraints. Their tenacious spirits and intrepidity enabled them to triumph in science fiction, forging new paths for women in a previously male-dominated and highly standardized domain. As we reflect on their accomplishments, we are reminded of the words of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who observed that 'character is destiny.' It is through their unconquerable characters that these women have shaped their destinies and, in doing so, left an indelible mark on the realm of science fiction and the broader cultural landscape.
We have explored the similarities between the lives of Sigourney Weaver and Octavia Butler, both dared to defy the constraints imposed upon them by fate and society. As of now, we realize that their shared perseverance and courage ultimately unite them. The power of individuals to surmount obstacles and shape their destinies is a lesson that transcends the confines of science fiction, resonating throughout the ages and serving as an enduring reminder of the human spirit's capacity for greatness. Thank you, Octavia and Sigourney. You led by example. Your unwavering commitment to living by your values, defeating fear every time, will remain awe-inspiring for me and so many others.