Tag Archives: Octavia Butler

THINKING ABOUT WHAT’S GONE BEFORE

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As we live through our present, whenever that is, we tend to forget what’s gone before. Good, bad, and neutral, our pasts influence our present. Some of our changes are bad, like the COVID-19 pandemic and the major impact it’s had on our lives, our economy, and our very lifestyles. But it didn’t appear out of nowhere, nor is it the first pandemic ever to hit humanity. The plague, various versions of the flu including the 1918 Spanish variety, typhoid fever, cholera, and others were happenings we had to live through and learn from.

So, too, with social change. The recent incidents that led to Black Lives Matter, #metoo, and other movements did not occur instantaneously, like Athena springing from the forehead of Zeus. There always have been precursors leading to the development of change. We may not know of these, but they exist nonetheless.

That’s a major reason why I value fiction. It ushers us to the emotional tangle served up with mere facts. We could read treatise after book after study concerning the Vietnam war, and those numbers wouldn’t carry one-tenth of the impact of The Things They Carried. A volume on the causes and potential cures for COVID wouldn’t ring our chimes like A Year of Wonders, set in 17th century England during a plague.

So when I picked up Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler, I knew I’d get a story about the African-American experience, but the actual narrative was much more than a mere tale. Dana, the 20th century protagonist, is thrown back in time to the antebellum South where her white ancestor Rufus is drowning. She saves him but then only returns home when her own life is threatened. So the pattern is set, back and forth more than a century, as Dana learns Rufus is becoming more twisted and damaged by the economic and social system of slavery than Blacks.

Butler’s genius (and she was the first science fiction author to be awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant) was to imbue her characters with true humanity. They jump off the pages and create resonations in the reader’s mind and emotions that remain far after the last page in the book is closed.

It’s strange to me to think Butler passed away years ago, way too early in her career, and now people forget or overlook the strides people like her and other advocates for social justice made. We can’t live in any time other than our own, except through our imaginations. Butler was and remains a guide for our own confused, infuriating, and at times malevolent situations. Through her writerly gifts, we can extract not only a ripping good story but also the awareness and solace of human emotions. If you haven’t sampled Butler, now might be a good time to do so.




When Science Fiction Becomes Fact, the Dangers Aren’t Zombies, Aliens, Robots, Weapons of Mass Destruction, or Comets

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Octavia ButlerScience fiction is a genre chock-full of stereotypes. Doesn’t take much imagination to throw in an alien monster or launch a barrage of special effects through images or words about explosions, fires, and destruction.

Then there are the few thoughtful works that hold a mirror up to us and show us the real horror we are or could become. Such is the case with Parable of the Talents, the second book in Octavia Butler’s duet of the near-future. The time is about 2035, the society is ours, gone slowly and terribly astray, like TS Elliott’s vision in The Hollow Men. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”

Published in 1996, the book comes sooooo close to many happenings today. Slaughters in Africa and the Middle East; hidden concentration camps of low-income workers and their families tacitly approved by governments; discrimination against the poor like we have in our country; pronouncements by rich or powerful individuals blaming the powerless for their own situations; disappearances of people that challenge the system; arming of the citizenry; ambitious individuals who bend the truth, even lie, as they set up tar-babies as objects for hatred, using politics or religion as the excuse; brutality against women and helpless. While all these evils don’t occur in any one location, they are present in the world today.

Protagonist Lauren Olamina has moved, escaped, from LA with her doctor-lover, to establish a tiny community in northern California. There they struggle to raise crops, build homes and businesses, and occasionally fight bad guys and rescue a few from the huddled masses. But they can’t escape the evil of authoritarian—or greedy?—do-gooders who want to wipe them out. Lauren’s husband, friends, and neighbors are killed, her infant daughter snatched from her.

Fortunately, steeped as the novel is in religious ideas of one sort or another, one holds some promise. Lauren’s vision of spirituality is a philosophy called Earthseed. It preaches acceptance, tolerance, and community purpose. Despite a vision of the future so close we could turn the corner and be living it, optimism is possible.

Butler, an African-American woman who won numerous awards, including a MacArthur “genius” grant, was unusual in the scifi field. Unfortunately she died in 2006. Although she’d planned additions to the series, none were published, as far as I can tell. I keep thinking, wondering, what she would have thought about Obama’s election, about the mouthings of politicians who think (or at least claim) they have all the answers, the attacks of some against public education and tolerance. Equally, what would she have thought about wave after wave of extremist, violent terrorism launched in the name of God, regardless of the affiliation or country of origin of proponents.

I’m sure she would have laughed about the popularity of zombies, vampires, robots, and other easy-to-sketch villains. She knew that the real horrors of the future lie within humans themselves, and she warned us as best she could while she encouraged us to think about the consequences of our actions. . .and inactions.