#octavia e. butler

[eleanor-arroway]

Lauren Oya Olamina is truly a protagonist of all time

she's very practical, she's an empath, she's a cult leader, she's learning to draw for fun, she's making acorn bread and adopting children into her community, she's obsessed with populating interstellar space even as societal order is collapsing, she's writing the bible but this time it's about how diversity and change are central to a thriving society, she's stocking up on weapons and caching supplies, and she's like twenty... no one is doing it like her

[mythologyofblue]

In order to rise

From its own ashes

A phoenix

First

Must

Burn.

-Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents, 1998

[as-warm-as-choco]

July 20, 2024, the first diary entry in Parable of the Sower.

[litandlifequotes]

In order to rise From its own ashes A phoenix First Must Burn.

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

[philosophors]

“Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn’t say them, couldn’t sort out my feelings about them, couldn’t keep them bottled inside me.”

— Octavia E. Butler, “Kindred”

[camojacketfag]

“There is no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you.”

- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

[aberration13]

Tfw you're reading a book written in 1998 and the author starts describing the current president in the year 2032 who happens to be a bigoted extremist demagogue who came to power by playing into religious fundamentalist ideology and his campaign slogan is this

Book is parable of the talents by Octavia E. Butler

[blackinperiodfilms]

Habits were difficult to break. The habit of living, the habit of fear … even the habit of love.

Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed (1980)

[sup3rxn0va]

I wanted to share this cool picture I found in the ebook version of Dawn, at the end of the book.

"Butler with authors Tananarive Due, Jewelle Gomez (standing), Samuel R. Delany, and Steven Barnes (sitting) at Clark Atlanta University’s conference for African American science fiction writers—the first of its kind—in 1997."

instagram.com/tananarivedue

instagram.com/vampyrevamp

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I love this picture of Octavia Butler with fellow Black Sci Fi writers in 1997! (I turned 7 years old that year) I wish I was older at the time so I could have been there 😊 It would have been amazing to see these five in the 90s, just writing sci fi and making a way for future Black sci fi writers.

So much talent in one image, wow.

[rjalker]

Giving this its own post because I feel like it. Here's the original reply version for context.

Not sure if you read the third book yet but that sort of makes it clearer.

The whole fear that their children “won’t be human anymore” is more a fear of eugenics, reflecting the historic trend of white colonizers coming in and purposefully trying to “breed out” the genetics, history, and culture of native people by making sure that they couldn’t have kids with each other or even grow up learning about their culture, which is exactly what the Oankali are doing.

They’ve made it literally impossible for humans to have kids without their explicit eugenicist intervention, which will always ensure that the kids are less human than their parents.

It’s a form of eugenics and genocide, with the ultimate goal being that humans are completely subsumed within the Ooankali and cease to exist except for a few traces of DNA that will be used to colonize the next planet and the people who live there.

“Human” here represents everything that makes these people the victims of colonization, rather than just being a species designation. When genocidal eugenicist aliens appear out of space, everyone on the planet becomes the colonized, and “human” becomes a minority status that has to be defended to the nail when the explicit goal of the aliens is to make humans cease to exist.

It’s not about not wanting kids to be disabled, because that is explicitly what the Oankali do. And there’s a difference between interracial marriage and purposeful forced eugenics.

[eleanor-arroway]

Octavia E. Butler's lost works

"There's much more to her career than the dozen or so books we know; out of the spirit of brutal perfectionism that drove her, she held a lot of interesting and worthy work back. I've talked a lot about the treasures of the Huntington in these pages: the unpublished Blindsight, "Evening" [1] and Paraclete; the many Tricksters; the alternative Xenogenesis, the lost short stories and essays and sequels and interviews and plays. This material should not be left only to the small number of scholars who are able to make their way to the Huntington; much of it can see, and deserves to see, publication. These are not discarded scraps or abandonded, embarrassing mistakes; it's just more.

Butler's incredible productivity, coupled with her intense self-criticism, self-censorship, and perfectionism, has conspired to create a vast intertextual hidden archive of alternative versions and lost tales that will, I hope, reinvigorate the study of her work as more scholars are able to get to the Huntington and as more of it trickles out in published form."

From Gerry Canavan's biography of Octavia E. Butler in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series

[mythologyofblue]

To survive, Know the past. Let it touch you. Then let The past Go.

-Octavia E. Butler, from "Earthseed: The Books of the Living," Parable of the Talents

[theoreticallysensible]

I finished Ursula K Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore yesterday, and it got me thinking about two things:

1) The relationship between truth and meaning.

2) The wisdom of accepting death.

The conflict of the book is established when it is discovered that people have lost their connection to the “true speech”, the language of creation, which means that wizards can no longer use magic, but also that everyone falls into nihilism, listlessness, and paranoia. People retain their regular language, but the language of magic is lost, and so they lose their grip on reality. They see everything as flat, without any transcendence in anything. Nothing is more significant than anything else, and so nothing is worth doing. People keep talking, but none of it means anything real.

The cause of this is someone trying to escape the fear of death by dying and coming back immortal, leaving a tear in the world that magic leaks out of. The fact that they have to first die to find immortal life suggests that death and immortality are in a way the same thing, and that this deconstruction is the cause of the spread of nihilism. The necromancer is able to send out a message to people’s dark sides, causing this change in them:

By denying life you may deny death and live forever!

This is reflected in the fact that the souls of the dead show an even more extreme embodiment of the emptiness and stillness experienced by those seduced by the message. The tear in the world is blurring the distinctions between life and death, and calling for people to hurry it along.

For Le Guin then, life is change and difference - rather like Octavia Butler’s message from Parable of the Sower that “God Is Change”. Maybe the key part of Butler’s poem for this though is “The Only Lasting Truth Is Change.” Seeking immortality is sort of denying reality. Le Guin describes each individual life as a wave on the ocean, and claims that seeking immortality would be like making the entire ocean one wave, so that it grows still. In other words, life cannot exist without other lives, and without a chance of ending. A single life that totalises all would be indistinguishable from death.

I’m with her on the first point, that a changeless life would be indistinguishable from death. Experience is formed through interaction, which inevitably changes both parties. This is ancient knowledge, which Le Guin no doubt gets from her passion for Taoism, but my favourite exposition is Donna Haraway’s Situated Knowledges. But if life is always changing, always unfinished, why could there not theoretically be an eternal life which does not totalise, which accepts its mutability?

I think here is where we run up against the tension between Le Guin’s commitments to true language on on side and contingency on the other. Nietzsche is famous for having pointed out that language is a host of metaphors. Derrida then took this further to point out that no word is self-contained, rather its meaning is dependent on so many others that it can never be pinned down perfectly to mean just one thing for certain. This includes the self. It stops and starts when we’re knocked unconscious, and its altered with every experience, every exchange of atoms. In a sense we die a lot - if we thing of ourselves as a being, rather than an emergent property of various processes. We can’t be perfectly described with a word, because we aren’t a constant thing anyway, irrespective of that final death.

But this is kind of a moot point as Le Guin’s story is concerned. Few of us ever actually seek immortality. And Le Guin is right to frame it as an impossible task. It plays a symbolic role for the equally, perhaps even more, impossible task of seeking control, constancy, solidity. Nothing is constant - The Only Lasting Truth Is Change. But for me this just makes the final change of death easier to accept, as just one more change that will leave the previous version of myself behind - only this time there won’t be a recognisably new version to take its place.

There is definitely a difficulty in accepting the indefinite fuzziness that comes to things when you look at them like this though, that can lead to the nihilism Le Guin was so afraid of. I think Le Guin answers this rather well though, when she says that we cannot help but do everything we do, want everything we want, feel everything we feel. We can’t actually avoid caring about things, especially if we throw ourselves into them. We don’t have to justify what we care about based on some sort of metaphysical truth, as if we could ever be certain of that - we just have to accept the inclinations given to us by the universe and act on them in a balanced way to make ourselves content. Don’t rationalise your feelings through strict force of will, pay attention to them and what the good asks of you. That’s actually from a different anarcha-feminist writer - Simone Weil - but it fits!

[ordinaryfailure]

…TV and movies advertise killing as a very easy thing—how simple to blow somebody away. If it is that easy it shouldn’t be, and I didn’t want my character to be someone who felt the need to murder somebody.

Octavia E. Butler on writing Kindred (1979), interviewed by Frances M. Beal for The Black Scholar (1986)

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Parable of the Sower | Author: Octavia E. Butler | Publisher: Seven Stories Press (2016)

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]