Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction

26:42And I found it very difficult to relate to that. When you're reading about worlds that are set in the future where you feel like you wouldn't even exist, you know, like you couldn't exist in that world, that's a different feeling. Are there things that bothered you about the science fiction books that you read when you were first starting to read them? Yes, I wasn't in them. Yeah, right. Right. That's what Octavia read growing up, and that's what, for the most part, her contemporaries were still writing. But there was also Samuel Delaney. Samuel Delaney, a Black science fiction writer who published his first novel, The Jewels of Abdor, in 1962, a time when it came to Black sci-fi writers.

27:29There was only Samuel Delaney. There's really only Samuel Delaney. And that was what Octavio was coming into. Why do you suppose there aren't more Black female science fiction writers? Probably because there aren't more. People do what they see other people doing. and if you look around and you don't see very many people who look like you doing something you worry that maybe there's a good reason for that and you go and do something else I don't have any sense I didn't do that I looked around and saw that there weren't very many people doing what I wanted to do and it didn't matter I still wanted to do it Nettie could relate you know a lot of artists come into their art through some kind of trauma And for me, that's what it was.

28:16Nettie was a star athlete, tennis and track and field. She had 22 medals, she had a state championship, and she also had scoliosis. And it got progressively worse, and I had to have the surgery. And there was a small percent chance of paralysis with this. And I was in that small percent. So when they did the surgery, I woke up paralyzed. So I was a paralyzed athlete. It was 1993. She spent the whole summer after her freshman year of college literally relearning how to walk. So it was like night and day. A few years later, still on the long recovery path, her parents took her on a trip to their homeland, Nigeria.

28:54We'd spend part of our time in Lagos, which is very modern, fast, big city. And then we'd spend the other half in the southeast, which was more rural. So when cell phones showed up, I started seeing them showing up in these very rural places where you would see very traditional images like, you know, women carrying water, all those things with cell phones present. Like I would see palm wine tappers. That's a practice of tapping the sap to make palm wine. They'd be in the tree, you know, sticking the straw in there and then leaning back on their harness to answer their cell phone. And I was like, this is nuts.

29:31You know, this is this is like the past and the present and the future all together. And it wasn't like conflicting. It was like it was in harmony. So it's like all of these things, you know, while I was going through all of that, we still traveled to Nigeria. And I still had those experiences while I was recovering, you know, while I was getting back. So it all, in my mind, it's all like part of the same thing. Yeah. And just, it sounds like that you were an athlete, like you said. And then you lose that part of yourself and it's like what's left. And then in that same moment to go back and like dig into your roots, that's really powerful.

30:15Yeah. It's a lot of identity shifting. And the way that I kept myself sane was to start writing stories. And from that point, I haven't stopped writing since. And that feeling that she was simultaneously time-traveling throughout her own body and her own culture got her interested in sci-fi and Afrofuturism and her own strains of African futurism and Jujuism. So she started writing it, even though she had never read anything like it by anyone else. Then in 2001, she got into a well-known sci-fi workshop, the Clarion Writers Workshop. In fact, the same workshop Octavia Butler had once attended and even taught at.

30:57But Nettie didn't know that. She had never heard of Octavia Butler. Until one day when the workshop took a field trip to a local bookstore. Spoiler alert, it may or may not have been Borders. Of course, we all went to the science fiction and fantasy section. And as we were going through that section, I stopped. Because I saw something that I had never seen before. and it was a book that was turned face out and on the cover was a black woman. And that's what stopped me because up until that day, I had never gone through the science fiction and fantasy section and seen a cover with a black person on the cover.

31:37It caught my eye immediately. I'm like, what is this? And I immediately just picked it up and bought it. I didn't even look at what it was about or anything. I just picked it up and bought it. I'm like, I just want this book. And that book turned out to be Wild Seat by Octavia Butler.

31:59You exist and you are different. That was enough to attract me. Now tell me who you are. You must be the only man in this country who has not heard of me. I am Anyangu. He repeated her name and glanced upward, understanding. Sun, her name meant. Anyanru, the sun.

32:35And so that night, I opened it up and read it. I started reading, and my mind was even blown even further, because it was like, suddenly, I'm reading this book, and I see the name Anyawu, and I know what Anyawu means. I know how to pronounce Anyawu. It's an Igbo name. It means the eye of the sun, and I'm Igbo. One of Nigeria's indigenous groups. And so this was about an Igbo woman in pre-colonial Nigeria, before it was Nigeria, who doesn't die, who is immortal, has these mystical abilities, moves through the transatlantic slave trade, like middle passage to the United States, while she's alive.

33:19You know, and this is a character who carries who she is all the way across the timeline. And I'm like, what? This was a book that I picked up in the science fiction and fantasy section with an Igbo woman's name in it. And it's the beginning of the book. I was like, oh my God. Like that feeling, I just never, I had never experienced it before. I've been waiting to read something like that for how long? And it was just, it was cathartic to me. It was just being at that moment in my writing career where I'm just trying to figure out, it's not even trying to figure out, I knew what I was. You know, I knew what it is that I was writing.

34:01I knew it. I just, I just needed something. You know, I needed something. And discovering Octavia in that moment was exactly what I needed. Nettie was excited. So what did she do with all that excitement after finding her new favorite author? She called her. The first thing I thought was, oh, if she taught here, then I could talk to her. I could talk to her. So I went to the organizers of Clarion and was like, can I talk to Octavia? And next to you know, I was on the phone with Octavia. And she basically blacked out. I don't even remember what we talked about. I just remember thinking, what am I doing?

34:43I don't remember anything I said. I remember though, the impact, like hearing her voice. I'm like, oh, this is a powerful person. That was it. Her voice was low and like commanding, but she's not commanding. You know, like it's like, you know, people who have like this, this, you know, they're a commanding presence, but they don't try to be. They just are. Like she's talking and she doesn't need to raise her voice, but you're listening. Exactly. Exactly. I think I had more fun writing Wild Seed than I had writing anything else. And I think it was partly because I was so relieved to have written Kindred.

35:29Wild Seed was the next book Octavia wrote after Kindred, as a return to her Patternist series and in some ways as a gift to herself. is about these immortal Africans who end up coming to the new world, and they have these different qualities and abilities that are really out of this world. The two immortals are named Anyanwu and Doro. Anyanwu is a scientist who can control her own body and heal herself and heal other people. she controls her fertility she creates medicines in her body to inject into other people and who can literally change shape into any other living thing it's so hot

36:27she could remember being bullied as a female animal being pursued by persistent males but only in her true woman shape could she remember being seriously hurt by males, men. Swimming with the dolphins was like being with another people, a friendly people. No slavers with brands and chains here.

36:51She can transform into a bird and fly or into a dolphin and swim or into another person. She can transform her body into the body of a male person. She can experience desire and love and sex in whatever kind of gender, as whatever race, but still always defaults back to her Black woman self, her African woman self, Anyanwu. And then there's Doro. Doro is a mad scientist. He's breeding certain kinds of people together because he wants to basically generate children who won't die. And this is something Anyanwu wants, and they end up sort of being a couple, but they're adversaries. She's always trying to create family and home and community and nurture the people around her.

37:41And he's always trying to control them and manipulate them and push them and threaten them. And she will not stand for that. So Octavia has split these very distinct parts of a whole. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I don't write about good and evil. with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do. And I mean, I think even the worst of us doesn't just set out to be evil. So when you're reading it, you're like, oh, but it's so appealing to be able to have the ultimate control over people and intimidate them into doing what you want. It's so complicated.

38:26It's not like good guys and bad guys. She really rejects binaries in so many ways. People set out to get something. They set out to defend themselves from something. They are frightened, perhaps. They set out because they believe their way is the best way to perhaps enforce their way on other people. But no, I don't write about good and evil. She was definitely talking about gender. I think she was definitely talking about structures, structures of sex and gender and complicating them and asking, what is it to be male? What is it to be female? Are some of those definitions a little rigid? My characters who are often Black and female behave as though they have no limitations.

39:20She rejected racial inferiority or gender norms that would have restricted her, that didn't fit whatever the so-called universal or like what the dominant culture was doing.

39:39The whole story kind of gets you to really question a lot of our assumptions about gender, about identity, about sex, about hierarchy. Remember, Wild Seed was written in 1980. So ideas around gender fluidity and queer sex were far from mainstream. This was bold stuff. And if you read it and you dug it, you probably started thinking about the world in new ways. Thinking about yourself in new ways. You end up being in the mind and the bodies of those characters and you experience change, transformation and healing from the inside because that's what Anyanwu is doing. And so she got to explore that in her writing.

40:24It wasn't just wild. It's like almost all of her works had this ability to leave you changed. You know, you read it and you're like, okay, I don't think the same way that I thought before. Like for me, I needed that process, especially in my late 20s. There were just issues that I was interested in, but I didn't have the tools to unpack them and properly interrogate them. I did not have the tools. And Octavia Butler gave me those tools in so many ways to interrogate those things. And in a comfortable way because it was through literature. And so I didn't have to like talk to anybody. It was like the book and I talking together and then me just having my crisis by myself, you know.

41:11And yeah, her work did that. I would walk away from almost every single one of her novels and short stories just changed. And there's another reason. It comes from another conversation Nettie had with Octavia years after that first time that she called her up all starry-eyed. In this conversation, she wanted to know what it was like for Octavia to write about the Igbo people in Nigeria. She said that she didn't want to spend too much time there because she had never been to Nigeria and she didn't feel like she knew the culture well enough. And so now, flash forward years later where I'm adapting it, I can remember that conversation and how she said she'd wish she could have delved deeper into all of that, but she just didn't feel like she could.

42:00And so now while we're adapting it, I'm just like, OK, well, let's do that. That's incredible. It was like this moment of giving you her blessing, essentially, to expand upon something where she knew her own limitations. Yeah, that's a good feeling. It's a good feeling. Wild Sea doesn't pigeonhole itself by making absolute claims. Instead, it gets you to question things that society pigeonholes and puts as binaries. Man and woman, good and evil, darkness and light. But the darkness is really dark and it goes there. It goes where it needs to go. But there's joy and there's hope as well. Which is, I think, that balance is really important.

42:49A balance Octavia wrestled with in her own work and in her own life. I don't know how we're going to end up. Well, the odd thing about my books is, even though there is a lot of pessimism and bad feeling, there is always hope at the end.

43:11When we come back, Octavia writes the Parables series and puts that resilience to the ultimate test.

43:33Hi, my name is Matt Pope from Brighton in England, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part three, Power Seeker.

43:51All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together. Parable of the Sower.

44:19I don't recall ever having wanted desperately to be a black woman science fiction writer. I wanted to be a writer. And my attitude was, I am a black woman. And if it doesn't come out in the stories, I can't imagine why. It's there. So it's not something I'm focusing on. It's just there. It's part of it. It's me.

44:48By the early 1990s, Octavia Butler had cemented a place for herself in the white, straight dude-dominated genre. She had received both Hugo and Nebula awards, the highest honors in the sci-fi and fantasy world. But she was resistant to the labels that were starting to stick. Labels bore the heck out of me. I realized that if I wrote a biography of my mother, somebody would put the word science fiction on it. Or at least put it in that section of the store. And she wasn't just called a science fiction writer. She was being called a Black science fiction writer. Are you trying to create a new Black mythology?

45:25No. You're not? No. What then is central to what you want to say about race? Do I want to say something central about race, aside from, hey, we're here? But while she was dodging these titles, Black, feminist, and queer audiences were embracing her edgy explorations of race, sex, and gender. She was complicating traditional power structures and centering marginalized voices. So the labels persisted. She was Octavia the Feminist, Octavia the Afrofuturist, Octavia the Radical. And then her newest book brought her a whole new reputation on a whole nother level. Octavia the Prophet.

46:08All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change. First Seat, The Book of the Living, Verse 1, Parable of the Sower. So Parable of the Sower is actually a book that was written where the protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, is this girl who lives in this place called Robledo, which stands in for Pasadena. And she is about 15 years old, turning 16 in this book. So it's a coming of age novel. But this isn't your catcher in the rye or to kill a mockingbird type of coming of age story. Parable of the Sower is your the apocalypse is right now coming of age story.

46:58And this time there were no aliens. There was no time travel. There were no women turning into dolphins. There was merely a teenage girl in the year 2024 watching society crumble before her very eyes and desperate to find a way to survive. And what was Octavia's inspiration for the story? the news. Welfare is another of our major problems. We're a humane and a generous people Octavia lived in California for most of her life and had watched the state's political course lean more and more conservative. In the 70s, when she was starting her career, Ronald Reagan was governor. We accept without reservation our obligation to help the disabled, the agent.

47:39A man who, even before he was president, was pretty open about being against the idea of people funding the government, a.k.a. taxes, and government funding the people. But we are not going to perpetuate poverty by substituting a permanent dole for a paycheck. Reagan would go on to become president in 1981 and repeated his, yes, his famous campaign slogan when he accepted the nomination as the Republican candidate. For those who've abandoned hope, we'll restore hope and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again.

48:20Which, by the way, is also the slogan of the president in the Parable series. Behind her typewriter, Octavia was paying close attention to where the country was headed and what the government was and wasn't willing to pay for. We were getting to that point where we were thinking more about the building of prisons than of schools and libraries. — This was around the time when Prop 187 passed, a California law that Octavia later called fantastically stupid. — That was going through the legislature to bar undocumented folks from, like, accessing health care and education. — It was an effort to save taxpayer dollars by denying public services to undocumented immigrants.

49:06This fall, we can send a message to Washington to stop illegal immigration by passing Proposition 187, the SOS initiative. SOS, the Save Our State initiative. She said, oh, you want a bunch of like uneducated sick people who can't go to the emergency room because they're undocumented? And she's like, OK, let's extrapolate from there. What happens when another group in society gets cut off and then another group and another? who survives. What if there was no garbage collection? What if the fire department didn't come when your house started to burn down? What if the police only took bribes to look for your loved ones when they got snatched?

49:45What if you couldn't go to the hospital? What if there's no gasoline? What if water became scarce? She showed the way of using the news and current events and meticulous research and coming up with something that's so-called fictional, but apocalypse has already happened to someone in this timeline. Like she asked what if, and then she showed us how. And that's what Parable of the Sower is. Things have just carried on and slowly run down. There's no particular hideous disaster to account for it. A little like the Soviet Union, but since we have farther to fall, it hurts more when we hit bottom.

50:29And in Parable of the Sower, we hit bottom.

50:36By the year 2024, Southern California and much of the nation has become a wasteland. Society is pretty much broken. People are living in walled communities and risking their lives whenever they go out. There are a lot of reasons for this. Drugs, of course, and deterioration of public education. There are problems now. they become disasters because they're not attended to. Everyone has guns, no one has jobs, and things like TV, computers, phones, those are luxuries of the past. In Parable of the Sower, there is an even greater rich-poor gap than we've got now, for instance. And that does seem to be, the gap does seem to be widening.

51:28And there are more and more poor people, and there are the few rich people who are richer than ever. And so in the novel, there are people who work as hard as they can but have to choose between living in a house and eating. And they live on the sidewalk. And to top it all off, Global Warming is basically a character. She was researching and writing about global warming before people were talking about it in public. And she was like, it's going to have consequences. And those consequences are demonstrated in this book. I want to talk about what's going to happen if we keep doing what we've been doing.

52:06If we keep recklessly endangering the environment. If we keep paying no attention to economic realities. If we keep paying no attention to educational needs. If we keep doing a lot of the things that are hurting us now. And that's what I wound up writing about. And everything else just kind of fell into place.

52:33People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike, from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they are frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it. According to Octavia, all of these issues, all of these ignorances, came from one fundamental human paradox. That human beings are intelligent, but also that they are hierarchical, and that their hierarchical tendencies are a lot older than their intelligence, and the hierarchical tendencies are sometimes in charge.

53:23We do seem sometimes much more interested in one-upping each other, one-upping one country over the other, than in doing ourselves some long-term good. In other words, it's all about power. One of the reasons I got into writing about power was because I grew up feeling that I didn't have any. And neither did 15-year-old Lauren Olamina, the protagonist in the story. But she quickly realized that no one in power was going to protect her. If she was going to survive, she'd have to step into her own. Parable of the Sower was difficult because I didn't much like my character originally, because she had to be a power seeker.

54:07I had gotten the idea from some of the politicians I'd run across that people who wanted power should perhaps not have it. couldn't really be trusted with it. And I had a character here who wanted power. And I had to bring myself to realize that power, like money, like education, like technology, like any number of other things, is just a tool. And what you do with it is what matters. Octavia's character, Lauren, knew that because she needed power, she needed people. There's power in numbers, power in community. She was a preacher's daughter, and saw her father's ability to bring people together through religion.

54:50So she began to preach. Not her father's religion, but her own. A new religion she called Earthseed. I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we'll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place.

55:14Earthseed is based on the idea that to survive in a changing, uncertain world, you need to be able to adapt. You need to be resilient. Lauren wrote her convictions into verse and realized that in these verses were lessons that people could live by. She realized she had found a leader, herself. When I got through Parable of the Sower, I got to the point where I liked my character far too much. Lauren Olamina became the first power seeker Butler could finally trust. And others did too. She slowly grew a following of people willing to join her in the pursuit for a new life, a new beginning. Lauren Olamina, this adolescent young adult, it's really, I think, Butler's belief system and the things that she lived by and she's writing them out and she's offering them to us.

56:06offerings on how to sustain yourself in an unsustainable world how to survive fascist governments how to survive wildfires how to survive drug epidemics how to survive police brutality how to survive poverty how to survive you know the world that she's depicting in parable of the sower it feels so much like that's what we're experiencing now i still can't read parable of the Sower. I mean, like, Parable, I can't read it. Like, even just looking at the title, it just makes me nervous. It's nervous. It's set around now. We've got, like, corporate greed. We've got climate change. We've got, you know, the government falling apart.

56:50I mean, do I need to go there? Oh, God. It's just so, it's too familiar. It's too familiar. Do you think she saw herself as prophetic? Oh, absolutely not. She did not predict the future. She observed what was happening around her, and then she extrapolated from what she knew. I hope they're not prophecy because I don't want to live in that world. But I also think that some writers are on to something and they've tapped into something. And I believe in mystical aspects. So I wouldn't call anyone a prophet per se, but I do think that Octavia was tapping into something. She was tapping into something and she was channeling it.

57:42And I think that it's okay to acknowledge that and to hear that. At the end of the day, it might not really matter if Octavia was all-knowing or just paying attention. The point is that as dire as her imagined futures could be, and as much as her work can feel a little too real, especially right now, Both Ayanna and Nettie also see Octavia's work as a beacon of hope. She says she was a pessimist, but I think she was really a pragmatist. I think she was so pragmatic that people called her pessimistic. But there are always these little kernels of hope in her writing. There are always this open-ended possibility that even if things look bleak right where we're standing, It's not magically all going to get better, but we're still going to be together.

58:38We can still choose our family and our loved ones. We can still choose to do things that will add to our collective survival instead of just whatever is supposed to be our individual bounty of the things we've acquired and the things we've amassed, that there is another way to be in this world. And that's what I find so healing and so transformational.

59:06The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind. And yet, I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.

59:30Parable of the Sower made Octavia Butler the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Genius Grant. A decade later, while working on her third novel for the Parable series, she fell outside her home and died. She was only 58 years old. The moment that she passed, There was so much that was lost, and I know that hurt. What does it mean to those who come after her? You know, it means so much. It means, like, just her doing what she did just kind of, like, alerted to others of the existence of a whole, you know, plethora of stories, which really shouldn't be the case but that is what the case that is the case it's like it signaled um the existence of all this of so much you know and she ushered that in and that's how she really upended science fiction she was there she was present and she pretty much opened doors for the rest of us it makes me feel like i'm part of history i'm part of the future and i am my ancestors' wildest dreams.

1:00:45She dreamed me up in a way. You know, she's allowed me to do work that even my grandparents couldn't have envisioned for one of their relatives.

1:00:59Octavia E. Buller once wrote, I'm a 53-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial, a hermit in the middle of Seattle, 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. I have to do the thing that it's important for me to do. I'm basically a storyteller, and I have things that seem important to me. I mentioned the emotional reality of history. I I mentioned the news items that we seem to be ignoring so completely.

1:01:43These are the things that reach me. And whatever else happens, happens.

1:02:07That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Jamie York. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Victor Ivees. Parth Shah. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelker. Thank you to Adrienne Marie Brown for reading all the passages from Octavia's books that you heard throughout the episode. Adrienne has two podcasts, Octavia's Parables, which she co-hosts with Toshi Reagan, and How to Survive the End of the World, which she co-hosts with her sister Autumn.

1:02:45Check them out. Thanks to WHYY's Fresh Air with Terry Gross for the use of the interview with Octavia Butler. Thanks also to Nisi Shaw and Steve Barnes, both sci-fi writers and friends of Octavia's, who shared their insights and memories with us that helped shape this episode. And thanks also to Beth Donovan, Yolanda Sanguini, and Anya Grundman. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. As always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, email us at throughline at npr.org. Thanks for listening.

1:03:33Thank you.