#octavia e. butler

[palatinewolfsblog]

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” ― Octavia E. Butler

[adamnablelittledevil]

HELP

P.S. I'm gonna read them all! This is just to help me decide the order. :D

[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

[as-warm-as-choco]

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

[mythologyofblue]

In order to rise

From its own ashes

A phoenix

First

Must

Burn.

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

[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”

[litandlifequotes]

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

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

[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

[uzumaki-rebellion]

Reminder:

[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)

[luxet0bscuritas-blog]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge / November / 7 / non-white author

My all-time favourite science fiction trilogy by Octavia E. Butler.

[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.

[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)

[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

[hwayjino]

parable of the talents by octavia e. butler (1998)

[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