Octavia Butler imagined the future on this typewriter

0:00Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBOR Podcasts, Boston. She showed us that we can all write ourselves into American history, and that's a profoundly hopeful act.

0:30Jennifer Sieck:Why the words of pioneering science fiction author Octavia Butler still resonate today.

0:47Jennifer Sieck:It's Friday, June 26th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Ashley Locke. Today on the show, we continue our series to mark America's 250th anniversary with an appreciation of 25 objects that define the country's history. At a time when going analog in a digital world is so on trend, we geek out over Octavia Butler's typewriter. Also, a massive model of an extinct shark may have not been on your bingo card of most memorable objects, but we are here for the debate. And a hospice doctor says visions at the end of life are common and profoundly moving. People having these experiences grow in remarkable ways, so you don't stop living because you're dying.

1:41Jennifer Sieck:But first, every storyteller has a tool, a notebook, a camera, a microphone. For legendary author Octavia Butler, it was a powder blue typewriter. On it, she wrote some of the most influential American science fiction novels. Her stories explored race, power, and what it means to be human. Scott Tong speaks with Jennifer Seek, a Smithsonian curator, about Butler's influence on our country's history. Octavia E. Butler was interested in writing as a child, even as young as 10. And at a young age, she also begged her mother for a typewriter. So she kept very focused on this passion and developed that through the years, was very disciplined about her work.

2:29Is there a work of hers you're particularly drawn to? I'm fascinated by Kindred, where the protagonist, who's an African-American woman who's a writer, travels in between California in the mid-1970s and pre-Civil War Maryland. Yes. And she explores what it's like to be enslaved and wrestles with that, and readers can get a sense of what that might have been like. And when you look at this typewriter, do you draw any clues about her habits, her routines, her famous discipline that was part of her writing? Well, along with the typewriter, she also gave the museum six replacement ribbons, and I think that speaks to her discipline.

3:16She encouraged other writers to develop good habits and write every day, as she did. And this typewriter, which was made around 1976, was one of several typewriters that she had. She wrote her first 10 books on typewriters. You can almost see, though, the adumbration of the personal computer coming into play with its shape. We have a little bit of sound of Octavia Butler. This is from her interview back in 2000 with Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose asked her why she liked writing. You got to make your own worlds. You got to write yourself in. Whether you were a part of the greater society or not, you got to write yourself in.

3:59Right, this African-American woman writing herself in to science fiction, how did that change the genre, you think? Previously, the genre was dominated by white male writers, and she brought her whole self into that genre and really changed it. She brought not only African-American protagonists, but also the beginnings of what we would now call Afrofuturism, melding science, technology, and even drawing on African folklore and mythology. Many of her works are dystopian, but in your view, what did Butler's work reveal about America? Its past, its present, its future. As we heard, Octavia Butler was interested in and did bring worlds into being with her words.

4:54And in some ways, that's an American project. The Declaration of Independence brought a new world into being. And that world was visionary, as Butler was. And yet, it still excluded some people, such as African Americans and women. However, Butler wrote herself into American history, and she showed us that we can all write ourselves into American history. And that's a profoundly hopeful act in the same way that declaring independence and envisioning a new world in that sense was also a profoundly hopeful act. And Jennifer, you mentioned Octavia Butler's book, Kindred. Is there another work, is there another book or series you want to suggest to people who might want to start reading?

5:42They might consider reading Parable of the Sower, which takes place in 2024. And so now we read a science fiction novel that's now in our past. And she envisions a lot of challenges that we're dealing with in the present, including with the environment and with wildfires even. and so we look at her protagonist, an African-American woman, who finds hope in building community. Yeah, and that book was so, so prescient. I understand it. It hit the New York Times bestseller list more than two decades after it came out as it envisioned some of the problems on the planet. Yes, and there's an opera that's been inspired by that and Butler's emphasis on community, it's been called a congregational opera because of that focus.

6:37We've been talking to Jennifer Seek, acting curator of the Anacostia Community Museum. Jennifer, thanks so much. Thank you very much, Scott.

6:51Jennifer Sieck:Coming up next, Robin Young gets pumped about the Megalodon.

7:06Jennifer Sieck:This message comes from Grainger. This is the story of The One. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. Oh my, what big teeth you have. I am speaking of the late, not at all lamented, megalodon, one of the biggest fish that ever lived with teeth seven inches long, 40 ,000 pounds of bite force.

7:52Crocodiles have the strongest bite today. That's about 36 ,000 pounds less. And don't worry, the megalodon swam around 3 to 23 million years ago, but you can still see a model hanging from the ceiling in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. We've been looking at 25 objects from the Smithsonian that tell the story of America in honor of the country's 250th birthday. Most of them, like an Olympic torch or a Broadway costume, are recent history. Now some prehistory with Nick Pienzen, a curator at the Smithsonian. Hi, Nick. Hi. And so we understand the megalodon was like the top dog of its day.

8:30This is so impressive. What did it eat? It ate whatever it wanted. I think that's a fair thing to say when you're a shark the size of a city bus with teeth the size of your hand and really, from the best we can tell, a never-ending appetite. And it's hard not to be impressed by the scale of this superlative shark. Well, and we know the people who, you know, live on the wonderful mockumentaries on Discovery Channel's Shark Week, you know, have these conspiracy theories that the megalodon is somehow still out there, not extinct. You say what? Oh, I would say if it wasn't extinct, we would know about it by now.

9:14Right. And that's, you know, just take a look at its mouth. If a shark was that big was still alive, we would see a lot of either direct or incidental evidence for a shark that large. So you would see whales stranded, missing parts of their body. I think saying that it's not extinct is... Off the table. Yeah. It's a hopeful thing, but it really doesn't align with reality. Well, and you can see its mouth and its teeth because of this life-sized model at the dining Hall of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. We understand this was built based on a set of teeth that were discovered in Florida.

9:55There's also a lot of mythology about whether or not people wore teeth as, you know, amulets. You know, just talk about the teeth that were real that were found. Sure. So when you see a model of megalodon, you're actually looking at a reconstruction, a best guess based on the fossil record of this very extinct shark. And it's worth taking a step back. Sharks are cartilaginous fishes. And what I mean by that is most of their bodies made up of cartilage and they don't have the same kind of bones you and I have in our bodies. And so what we find as fossils of megalodon are just teeth and parts of the backbone.

10:34They don't have ribs. They don't have flippers with bones. And the other feature that we know about sharks is that they replace their teeth throughout their life. So one single shark will probably spit out hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of teeth throughout its life. And that really increases the chances of us finding those individual hard part remains. It is rare, but people have found entire articulated jaws together with those teeth. And we kind of, paleontologists think of those really rare finds as rosetta stones because all of a sudden you can find all the individual teeth and their variation throughout the jaws.

11:18But for the most part, just get these spectacular individual teeth for which there are probably millions represented out in the world's collections. Well, we see in reporting that in the 17th century, 1600s, people thought that wearing a megalodon tooth, you know, around your neck or something might ward off certain things. You remind us that in the 2016 movie Moana, a main character wears a megalodon tooth. How else are we drawing a line from the megalodon to the country's birthday? Right. So looking at megalodon for me is about superlatives. tells us something about the past that is totally unlike the world today.

11:59And there's also this sense of awe, right? It takes us out of our daily life for just a moment and reminds us that this too is part of the American story. You know, today we have all these big challenges about climate change, about biodiversity loss, and there are future scenarios that do have their analogs in the deep past. And the hope is that this information is useful, that it actually guides our decision-making about what to do. And being a paleontologist is like looking at ancient worlds that seem like they're so different from today that they could be different planets. But it isn't. It's our planet, just at a very different time with very different conditions.

12:43Wow. Nick Pinesen, that's why you're lead curator and chair of paleobiology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Because I was just going to go with jaws. You know, the impact of sharks. And this guy, the megalodon, is the granddaddy of all of that, that relationship we have. And that fear we have. And that fascination. Nick, thank you so much. Sure, no problem.

13:08Jennifer Sieck:Coming up, how people leave us matters. A doctor explains the role of end-of-life visions.

13:26Jennifer Sieck:If you've ever sat with someone in the final moments of their life, you may have witnessed your loved one experience an end-of-life vision. When our producer Lynn Mennegon's father was dying, she said he behaved as though there were unseen visitors at his bedside. Others report visits from family members, friends, or even pets who've already died. Are they hallucinations? Ghosts? Something else? For years, Dr. Christopher Kerr of Hospice Buffalo has studied end-of-life visions in dying patients, and he's put together a toolkit about what family members should know. He speaks with host Peter O'Dowd.

14:06Sometimes a person will have visions of people who have preceded them in death. I've heard people tell stories about loved ones who arrive at the bedside with the sense that they're there to help them transition. Does this make you believe in an afterlife? You know, I don't, I'm actually not by inclination disposed to any of that paranormal religious afterlife. You know, I think where I end up is there's a better story. I mean, I've done this for nearly 30 years and I love the idea. I don't understand it. I don't know where it comes from, but just to have reverence for it, that it occurs. And that whatever we seem to have loved is still proximate and available to us.

14:55It's within our reach and it comes back to us. And I think that's life affirming. I don't know how to interpret it. It certainly suggests that there's some continuation of consciousness because those who have died often, you see a 95-year-old man, he lost his mom when he was five and yet she's there for him, that there's something in that loss that's sustained and available. And I just think that it can't be ignored. Yeah. It's interesting for me to hear you process that question and kind of chuckle at it because so many people would have that experience, I think, and say, well, that's it. That is proof for me.

15:38That's all the proof I need that there's something waiting for me on the other side. Yeah, you know, we're just really disciplined when we did this that it's not about what we think. We were just trying to translate the words and experiences of our patient without assigning or extrapolating some sort of meaning. Well, does it make you think of your own death? Yeah, it does. And, you know, I'm a cancer patient and, you know, confronted with mortality. And it certainly makes me feel less fearful of the process of dying. You know, overwhelmingly, people find their way there and it's less traumatizing than what it looks from from position of health.

16:24There's something in the process that takes care of you. And that there could be such life happening at the end of a life. I think that's actually the hidden story, is we're so affected by what we see physically in dying, but there's actually profound living that occurs within dying. And we did a study that looked at that, looked at post-traumatic growth, the idea within a negative experience there could be growth. And long story short, people who are having these experiences grow in remarkable ways. So you don't stop living because you're dying, in fact. That was Dr.

17:05Jennifer Sieck:Christopher Kerr speaking about end-of-life visions. Check out more of his conversation with Peter at hereandnow.org. Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Will Wackey and Lynn Menagon. Today's editors were Todd Munt, Miquela Rodriguez, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Caleb Green and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. Here now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. Back with you on Monday.