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If you are a fan of science fiction a name you should be familiar with is Octavia E. Butler
Especially if you watched our telly award-winning Afro-Futurism video. Starring me!
One of the most prolific and important Black authors in the genre, Butler’s storytelling
pushed the boundaries of what Black people were allowed to be in science fiction.
Today we will be highlighting the Grand Dame herself, and how her novels were important, and
sometimes, oddly predictive. Like super freaking predictive.
Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California in 1947.
Her father died when she was a toddler and she was raised by her grandmother and mother
in what she would recall as a very strict Baptist environment.
That religious experience would come up often in her work, especially in the Parable series.
Butler would describe herself as awkward, introverted, and painfully shy which led to
her being picked on by her fellow classmates growing up. Which, ya know, every nerdy black girl story. Preaching to the choir there, Octavia.
Later, she would describe herself in the following self-deprecating way:
“Who am I?
... A pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water
combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”
Honestly that should be my tinder profile. Thumbs up if you agree.
Despite being pushed by her mother to find a more secure job, Butler pursued her writing goals.
She participated in the Open Door Workshop of the Writers Guild of America West, a program
designed to specifically mentor minority writers, and ended up impressing science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison.
He encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania
where she met, fellow Black sci-fi writer Samuel R. Delany.
After selling some short stories in 1971 she would spend the following five years writing
on what would become the Patternist series.
It was with the release of that series that she finally became a full-time author, the dream, and
subsequently in 1979 she published what is probably her most famous novel, Kindred.
Kindred tells the story of an African American woman named Dana Franklin, who, for reasons
we never really find out, is pulled back in time to a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation.
On her first journey there she meets her ancestors: Alice Greenwood, a Black freewoman, and Rufus
Weylin, a white planter who eventually forces Alice into slavery and sexual servitude.
Dana’s trips into the past range from one moment to years and each trip does substantial
harm to her mind and spirit.
Especially having to deal with the harsh reality that her existence is part of this dark legacy of sexual violence.
It would be one of the many times Butler would address the legacy of slavery in the science fiction element.
Madhu Dubey, professor of English and Afro-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said of Butler.
“In common with other contemporary African American writers, Butler persistently revisits
slavery in order to challenge the redemptive accounts of US racial history that began to
gain sway in the decades following the civil rights movement.
.... Yet, in a distinct departure from the neo-slave narrative genre, the signifier of
"slavery" in Butler's novels mutates to refer to a range of abusive practices, such as sexual
trafficking, reproductive oppression, and debt bondage, which are not reducible to race;
even when race does operate as a central axis of inequality in Butler's novels of enslavement,
it far exceeds the binary (black-white) logic bequeathed by the institution of chattel slavery”
These themes are most obvious in Kindred but pop up throughout her work, such as in the
Patternist series, where an ancient human with the ability to body snatch people basically
breeds his own descendants like cattle in the pursuit of creating a new post-human species, which, okay.
Or the Xenogenesis trilogy, wherein after the Earth blows itself up in nuclear armageddon, possible,
some aliens show up and force what’s left of humanity to breed with each other.
And also the aliens. Don't know why, but okay.
Tragically, Butler’s life was cut short when she died at the age of 58 in 2006.
The novel Fledgling, a story about a vampire that was changed very young, was published posthumously.
Octavia E. Butler is what we would call a certified genius and her work has resonated
so powerfully because of themes and imagery she was able to bring together.
Yet, when people talk about sci-fi and Blackness together, it is treated as some anomaly.
Something that Butler herself would talk about in her essay “Birth of a Writer” first published in Essence:
“There seems to be an unwritten rule, hurtful and at odds with the realities of American culture.
It says you aren’t supposed to wonder whether as a Black person, a Black woman, you really
might be inferior—not quite bright enough, not quite quick enough, not quite good enough
to do the things you want to do.
... Act tough and confident and don’t talk about your doubts.
If you never deal with them, you may never get rid of them, but no matter.
Fake everyone out. Even yourself.”
While all of her novels and short stories have a lot we could discuss, we decided to
focus on the Parable novels because there is nothing like living in your own dystopia
to make things come into focus - if you get what I mean.
Released in 1993, Parable of the Sower takes place in the distant future of 2024,
when society in the United States and our favorite unholy trinity of climate change,
wealth inequality, and corporate greed has ravaged the nation leaving in in a state of pure dystopia.
We start this journey with the main character, Lauren, an African American teenager,
who details everything in a journal.
She has a condition called “hyper-empathy" where she feels the emotions of others, due
to the side effects of a drug her late mother took while pregnant.
Lauren lives with her father, step-mother, and three half brothers in the remains of
a gated community in California.
She and her community struggle to maintain any sense of civilization against the Mad
Max world outside where rape, torture, violence, and pure lawlessness are allowed to take place.
Police officers and firefighters exploit their positions taking brides for-profit and do very little to
actually serve any common good.
Lauren's father, a Baptist pastor, has been trying to keep their community civilized and
collaborative through democratic socialism (cough) Excuse me, that was my propaganda showing. I mean, sharing of resources and investing
in mutual aid for each other - totally not democratic socialism.
Still, Lauren can tell this is only a temporary thing.
In response to the darkness surrounding her, she starts the religion Earthseed, based around
the concept “God is Change.”
“God is Change. This is the literal truth . God cannot
be resisted or stopped , but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be
prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying , and then , only if they strengthen
and focus that person’s resolve. If they’re used that way, they can help us in our only
real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the
shapes that God imposes on us. God is power, and in the end, God prevails.”
After her family and most of her community are destroyed and burnt down, Lauren begins
to travel North and along the way builds a congregation through mutual aid and assistance.
The second novel, Parable of the Talents, takes place five years after the end the previous novel.
America has become controlled by a Christian fundamentalist denomination called "Christian
America" led by President Andrew Steele Jarret, a totally normal name.
Despite the optimistic ending of the first book, we see Lauren and her followers deal
with an even darker America.
John Blair Gamber, Professor of English at Utah State University, says of this theme:
“...while Sower appears to have a utopian conclusion, Talents irrefutably shows it to
be dystopian—a failure of misguided idealism.
Specifically, the implicit critique of antiurbanism and flight that comprise the past-oral impulse
and aesthetic we see in Sower becomes explicit in Talents.
The primary failure of this impulse comes in the protagonist’s inability to recognize
her role within a wide-reaching community or her fundamental connection to local and
distant structures of power, oppression, and marginalization.”
President Jarret’s presidency is filled with death and torture as he ...if you can believe this, wants to
restore American power on the global stage and actually, literally uses the slogan
"Make America Great Again" [screams into the void]
Jarret brings back slavery with shock collars being used to control people and restarts
witch hunts in order to wipe out non-Christian religions.
Virtual reality headsets called "Dreamasks" also become very popular since they enable
wearers to escape their harsh reality and okay … now this is messing with me.
Who copied this timeline into the nexus and can you control "D" it?
Earthseed, as a faith, continues to spread and develop, despite the violence that is
depicted and eventually after one-term, President Jarret is not reelected. Yaayyy. Okay that also tracks. That's fine. That's good.
Humanity then begins its expansion into the stars carrying with it the ideas that Lauren started.
At the end of the novel, she watches the first of Earth’s starships leave called the … Christopher Columbus.
Says Lauren in the book’s conclusion:
“I object to the name.
This ship is not about a shortcut to riches and empire.
It’s not about snatching up slaves and gold and presenting them to some European monarch.
But one can’t win every battle.
One must know which battles to fight.”
Parable of the Talents (408)
Even the utopian society she is constructing starts off with a little crumb of colonization,
addressing that nothing can truly detach humanity from that sin, especially when tied to the United States.
Scholar Jim Miller in “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision said:
“As an African-American woman writing within a largely white women's tradition, her work
often questions the assumptions shared by many white feminist utopian writers.
Butler is also far more class-conscious than many other utopian feminist science-fiction writers.
Thus, her largely dystopian fictions challenge not only patriarchal myths, but also capitalist
myths, racist myths, and feminist-utopian myths.”
Butler herself doesn’t seem to care much for utopias and said as much during an interview in
1988 with Larry McCaffery and Jim McMenamin:
“I find utopias ridiculous.
We're not going to have a perfect society until we get a few perfect humans, and that seems unlikely.
Besides, any true utopia would almost certainly be incredibly boring, and it would probably
be so overspecialized that any change we might introduce would probably destroy the whole system.
As bad as we humans are sometimes, I have a feeling that we'll never have that problem
with the current system.”
These themes are woven throughout Butler’s body of work, which asks complex and often
challenging questions about the nature of autonomy and how it interacts with community,
and usually with no clear answers.
But Butler’s work uses science fiction to advocate for a more just world, despite knowing
full well that the road to get there won’t be easy, nor, like Lauren not personally leaving
Earth to see humanity spread beyond the stars, would she live to see it.
Jim Miller writes that, “the ideal for Butler seems to be a society which respects individual
differences, but not at the expense of the greater good of the society as a whole.
The achievement of the collective good should not require the neglect of individual autonomy,
nor should the price of freedom be the "inevitable" deprivation of the weakest among us.”
Octavia E. Butler is a name that has only grown in esteem in the past few years as Black
authorship in science fiction and fantasy has only expanded.
Regardless of how you feel about her work, because boy can it get dark, she laid the
foundation through which contemporary Afrofuturists stand upon.
She was bold and brave in her Blackness and the way in which her stories feel so modern is a testament to her own genius and creativity.
Taken much too soon there is no telling how much she could have done if she were alive
today, still writing and still pushing Black people to the stars.
Thank you to Ancestry for supporting PBS. Was that your great grandmother keeping the family together?
Was that your great grandfather paving the way for change? Did they brave mother nature, and walk away stronger?
Did they face the unknown with resolve – and triumph? There is strength in every family story.
Ancestry can help you learn about yours. Visit Ancestry.com for more information.