Pod Insights Throughline Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction About this episode Octavia Butler gave us a new kind of science fiction: not only as one of the first writers to use history to talk about the future, and not only as one of the first Black women to do it, but by sending, along with her warnings, a message of hope, survival, persistence, and repair.
To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.
See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for dirty air and water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on. Because it's not political, it's fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.
0:17 Speaker 01 Welcome back to Throughline Book Club. Today, we're talking about one of our favorite authors, Octavia Butler.
0:30 Speaker 02 Does it ever seem to you that there are people among us who hold up the sky and make the rivers flow? People who are just like other people, just like the rest of us, only different? They're the structural beams in the house we all share, the house that has a sky for a roof. And usually, they don't want to call attention to themselves. They just want to be who they are, do what they do with as little interference as possible. Octavia comes to my mind as first among that group of people. In her books, she showed us the horrors and the great good that humans can create. And the choices that she made in her books and in her life always gave us new ways of
1:15 Speaker 02 seeing. She was a beacon of hope. Sometimes, even when she wasn't trying.
1:28 Speaker 03 These novels are not prophetic. These novels are cautionary tales. These novels are if we are not careful, you know, if we carry on as we have been, this is what we might wind up with. You have to think about what kind of world you want to live in. And I don't think there is a person alive who would want to live in the world that I've written about, but we can arrange it. The problems that I write about are problems that we can do something about. That's, that's why I write about them.
2:06 Speaker 03 All that you touch, you change.
2:09 Speaker 01 You're listening to Throughline from NPR.
2:12 Speaker 03 All that you change, changes you.
2:15 Speaker 04 Will we go back in time?
2:17 Speaker 03 The only lasting truth is change.
2:21 Speaker 01 To understand the present.
2:23 Speaker 03 God is change.
2:29 Speaker 01 Today, Octavia Butler's world.
2:35 Speaker 05 All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.
2:50 Speaker 05 I found myself, over the years, returning to this quote over and over. It helps me so much when change comes and is unexpected, and especially when change comes and is undesired.
3:07 Speaker 05 My name is Adrienne Marie Brown, and I am a writer and an Octavia Butler scholar.
3:16 Speaker 04 Adrienne Marie Brown is one of a growing group of Octavia's quote-unquote "children," writers, thinkers, scholars, activists, who see themselves as her spiritual descendants in a way, and who look to Octavia Butler as a leader, a guide. In that vein, Adrienne Marie Brown co-edited a book called Octavia's Brood, and she co-hosts a podcast called Octavia's Parables.
3:44 Speaker 05 I am actually so enthralled with Butler's thinking that I have a tattoo that runs down my left arm, starts up on my shoulder, and it's just my own handwriting. I wrote out this quote.
3:58 Speaker 04 That quote, "All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change." These lines appear in Octavia Butler's dystopian and some would say prophetic novel, Parable of the Sower. They also appear on Adrienne's arm.
4:19 Speaker 05 How do I affect change in ways that allow for change to touch me? And help me to improve, help me to become more human, more human and more human.
4:28 Speaker 04 Much of Adrienne's work, ink and worldview is inspired by Octavia Butler, the science fiction author who wrote what Adrienne calls visionary fiction.
4:39 Speaker 05 Visionary fiction writing is a practice we can use to imagine and prepare for the future together, to generate the ideas that we want to see more of in the world. She gives us the practice and then she gives us case study after case study after case study of our imaginary futures and how we will behave.
4:59 Speaker 01 Her case studies being her many novels, novels like Kindred, a story about a young black woman living in California in the 1970s who's pulled back in time to Antebellum, Maryland and forced to reckon with a life of slavery.
5:14 Speaker 04 Or Wild Seed, a story about two African immortals who can shapeshift and travel across centuries and continents.
5:23 Speaker 01 And then there's Parable of the Sower, the story of a young woman trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world set in the near future, which happens to now be, well, our present.
5:35 Speaker 05 The approach that she used of looking at the world around her and projecting into the future, what happens if this state continues? What happens if we don't address the things that matter? What happens if we don't turn our attention to the climate crisis? What happens if we don't really, really contend with our comfort with inequality, with hierarchy? What happens?
6:06 Speaker 01 Octavia Butler stays with you. Once you've experienced one of her written worlds, she's always showing up in your own, hiding out in your periphery, saying, "See? I told you." And she did. She saw things, turned them into stories, and in doing so, built new worlds from the old. As her former editor, Dan Simon, said at the very top, "Octavia held up the sky and made the rivers flow."
6:33 Speaker 04 And forged new paths. Octavia was among a small group of Black science fiction writers to get published, causing some to call her "the mother of Afrofuturism", an open-ended genre combining science fiction, fantasy, and history to imagine a liberated future through a Black lens.
6:54 Speaker 01 She wrote more than a dozen books, essays, and short stories. She was the first Black woman to receive both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, the highest honors in the science fiction and fantasy genres. And she was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Genius Grant. She was prolific from the 1970s up until her untimely death in 2006. This star power is rooted in her ability to weave in and out of the past, present, and future, to reveal striking and often devastating parallels to the world we live in today.
7:29 Speaker 05 There's nothing terrifying that Octavia writes about that we're not experiencing right now, at least when she's writing about things happening on Earth.
7:39 Speaker 03 Well, I think of the '60s as the decade of attempting to come together. '90s is the decade of disintegration, I'm sad to say. And the 2020s is the decade of, I call it the burn. This does not mean that it's the end of the world or even the end of the US. Things are just a lot worse.
8:02 Speaker 04 But Octavia Butler's work wasn't all doom and gloom. For every society that perished in her books came a story of survival, of repair. And with each dire warning came a signal of hope, a reason to keep going, and something to believe in so strongly, you might as well tattoo it on your arm.
8:22 Speaker 01 In turn, she gave us a new kind of science fiction, not only for being one of the first writers to use history to talk about the future, and not only for being one of the first Black women to do it, but for writing herself in.
8:36 Speaker 03 I made up my own stories to put myself in them.
8:44 Speaker 01 Today on the show, we dive into the mind of Octavia Butler, how she used the past to predict the future, and why her insights might be more relevant than ever. Producer Lain Kaplan-Levinson takes it from here after the break.
9:26 Speaker 06 I'm Bijra White. I'm calling from Lexington, Kentucky, and you're listening to Throughline at NPR.
9:34 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon with their five-day fasting-mimicking diet, a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR.
9:51 Speaker 07 This message comes from NPR sponsor, Lyndhamood Bell. Lance was bright, but he struggled to read words. Michelle was the opposite. She could read words easily, but struggled to understand what she read. Like so many students, they struggled not only with learning, but with self-confidence. Personalized one-to-one instruction at Lyndhamood Bell Learning Centers changed that. Today, they read with confidence, and they understand what they read. Instruction is available online or in person. Learn more at lyndhamoodbell.com/NPR.
10:23 Speaker 00 Support for NPR and the following message come from Bowlin Branch. Change your sleep with Bowlin Branch's airy blankets, cloud-like duvets, and breathable sheets. Feel the difference with 15% off your first order at bowlinbranch.com with code NPR. Exclusions apply. See site for details.
10:42 Speaker 06 Part One: Time Traveler.
10:51 Speaker 05 I felt sweat on my face mingling with silent tears of frustration and anger. My back had already begun to ache dully, and I felt dully ashamed. Slavery was a long, slow process of dulling.
11:10 Speaker 05 Kindred.
11:17 Speaker 03 I'm an only child, and I had no idea how to get along with other children. And also, I was a strange kid who'd learned to stay by herself and make things up.
11:28 Speaker 04 Do you get along better with people now?
11:30 Speaker 03 Um, I can fake it.
11:34 Speaker 06 Octavia E. Butler was a loner. She had a really interesting solitary existence as an only child. She spent a lot of time alone. She was super, super shy, very introverted. She was tall, she was awkward, she was quiet. And she was very, very poor. Her mom would have to decide, like, what kind of shoes she would buy her child. Like, she, one time, I think, bought her church shoes, and she would have to wear her church shoes all the time. So she was, I think, kind of traumatized by that poverty.
12:08 Speaker 06 My name is Ayana Jamison. I am the founder and director of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. I teach ethnic studies at Cal Poly Pomona, and I live in Southern California. And I am an expert in Octavia E. Butler's life, and I work to try to highlight those who are upholding her legacy. Octavia Butler was also from Southern California. She was born in Pasadena in 1947. Her own family migrated from Louisiana to California in 1930.
12:41 Speaker 03 These were people who survived the Depression, who went hungry because of the Depression, who left Louisiana and came to California and lived on very little because of the Depression.
12:52 Speaker 06 Her father passed away when she was a toddler. Her mother was a maid. And so she said she like she saw her mother going into back doors or people talking about her as if she weren't there and that it really made an impression on her.
13:07 Speaker 03 She cleaned houses most of her life. And she said, unless you want to be what I am, you'd better get that education. And I would take a look at her life and dive back in.
13:22 Speaker 05 Ayana and Octavia were born a generation apart, but have similar backgrounds.
13:27 Speaker 06 My mom's the same age as Ruby Bridges. And there was segregated schools in California much later than Brown versus Board of Education. And that's the California that my grandparents came to. And this is the California that Octavia grew up in.
13:43 Speaker 05 And so when Ayana discovered Octavia while in grad school, she had the experience of reading things she'd never read before, things that had to do with her. Octavia's books felt way more relevant than what she was being assigned in school. Freud, Jung, or as Ayana puts it.
14:01 Speaker 06 Old dead white men. It was like putting those authors to be the epitome of what's universal. And I really chafed that. And I really felt that it didn't reflect my experience and it was a really false dichotomy. I was like, OK, I need to read something by someone who includes me in their understanding of universal. I need to read something that helps to soothe all of the trauma that I'm experiencing.
14:27 Speaker 05 Some of that trauma was coming from Ayana's day job she had at the same time she was getting her degree, working in a middle school.
14:34 Speaker 06 Like, I was just a long-term substitute teacher, but like students were bringing weapons to my class. Students, brothers were gunned down by police and then they came to school the next day. And so I was dealing with things that were like way above my pay grade.
14:50 Speaker 05 So where did she go to decom-
14:52 Speaker 01 Press Borders.
14:54 Speaker 06 This is how old I am. I'm Borders years old. Like, I used to go on dates in Borders, and there was the bargain section. I know. You're laughing, but you know that it is a thing. Yes. I mean, I weep when I pass by the one in Old Town Pasadena. So, in any case, I picked up this book, and I ended up reading one of her short stories. And I was like, wow, this woman is really brilliant. That story really stayed with me.
15:23 Speaker 01 And led her down the Octavia rabbit hole. The more of Octavia's fiction she read, the more she could apply to her life, her reality.
15:32 Speaker 06 I used her books like even more than I was using the things I learned in psychology in order to just help my students get by. And I grew up in the same neighborhood as them, and I walked the same streets. I was, you know, street harassed in the same ways. So, a lot of my own trauma got ignited, right? I was like time traveling. Like, this is the definition of Afrofuturism. I feel like I was a teacher with teachers I had been taught by, but I was an adult. And so, I was like myself as a 12-year-old, myself as a 20-something, and myself like reliving my trauma and realizing that I was there on that campus,
16:16 Speaker 06 trying to go back and save myself.
16:21 Speaker 06 And I feel like when I started learning more about Octavia's life, her books are also about saving herself and transforming herself and healing herself, healing herself and the world at the same time. And that's like what really snatched me into this work. And it's taken over my entire life in the best possible way.
16:47 Speaker 01 Octavia became
16:47 Speaker 06 Ayana's positive obsession, a term Octavia coined herself. She says that a positive obsession is like a compulsion that you cannot stop. It's something that you you keep doing, that you're driven to do, even though you know it's not reasonable for you to continue to do it. And that an obsession could be positive. And Octavia's positive obsession was writing.
17:11 Speaker 03 It's it's pretty much my religion, I think.
17:15 Speaker 03 I didn't really know how to get along with other kids, but I knew how to make little worlds of my own. And that's what I did for my amusement. I wrote, I told myself stories. I've been telling myself stories since I was four years old. When I was 10, I began writing them down.
17:32 Speaker 06 Well, the famous story is that she was watching television and she saw Devil Girl from Mars. A British sci fi film from the 50s.
17:41 Speaker 02 A frightening, strange shape descending from outer space with relentless presence. Where did it come from? And what did it want of us?
17:51 Speaker 06 And then she turned off the television and thought like.
17:53 Speaker 03 Geez, I can write a better story than that.
17:55 Speaker 06 And then she started trying.
17:59 Speaker 06 Octavia published her first novel, Pattern Master, in 1976, shortly before her 30th birthday. It takes place in the distant future and involves telepaths, human mutation, and an alien pandemic. She sold the first book pretty quickly, and it got good press, albeit some of it condescending. Well, you're a hell of a writer, kiddo. There are, there are not many people. But that foolery didn't stop her. Pattern Master was the first book in her five part patternist series, and she quickly pumped out the second and third volumes. But then, in 1979, she broke from the series to write something incredibly different, so different that publishers.
18:41 Speaker 03 Didn't know what to do with it. When I tried to sell Kindred, that really gave me trouble because nobody wanted to buy it.
18:49 Speaker 03 I had about fifteen rejections.
18:51 Speaker 06 She calls Kindred a grim fantasy. It's not even really science fiction. It takes place in the present, in what was the present at the time. And it's going between 1976 and Antebellum Maryland. A slight turn from a world ravaged by an alien virus, Kindred centers around a young woman named Dana. And Dana is a snatchback in time in order to save the white ancestor who would rape her, many times remove great-grandmother in order for her to exist. And so it was based on the lives of her mother and grandmother and the lives that they lived in Louisiana, like on a sugar plantation, I think as sharecroppers.
19:34 Speaker 06 And it was based on knowing what they suffered and the things that they had to go through in order for her to even exist in the present.
19:44 Speaker 03 It's something that I got an idea for when I was in college. A friend who, he was kind of our historian because he knew so much about black history, said something that I thought indicated that he didn't know as much as I had believed. He said, "I wish I could kill all these old people who have, old black people who've held us back for so long, but I can't because I'd have to start with my own parents."
20:09 Speaker 06 Oh my goodness.
20:10 Speaker 03 And I thought, well gee, he knows a lot of facts and figures, but he doesn't really understand or feel the realities of history.
20:20 Speaker 06 She knew that there were things that you'd had to do to compromise, but as long as you survived, that there was something to be gained from surviving for future generations. And so she, you know, I don't know how much she argued with him, but she wrote out that anger and that humiliation and frustration and ignorance of what he said in an entire book.
20:43 Speaker 03 I wrote Kindred to make people, I hoped, feel history as opposed merely to knowing facts of history.
20:52 Speaker 03 It seemed important to me to get that kind of emotion, the extra feeling, the awareness of what it might have been like to be a slave, to feel it on your own skin, so to speak. And to, you know, to understand the lack of control of your own fate that a slave suffers.
21:16 Speaker 05 I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. The ease seemed so frightening, I said. Now I see why. What? The ease. Us, the children. I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.
21:36 Speaker 06 She's talking about like how, it's much worse than anything she read about in history books. That was one of the things that she was trying to demonstrate to that classmate of hers. It's like, you don't know what you're saying by saying you'd kill your parents.
21:53 Speaker 03 I was really going not so much for factual understanding, but for emotional understanding.
22:00 Speaker 05 I went down the hall and toward the stairs slowly, wondering why I hadn't tried to defend myself, at least tried. Was I getting so used to being submissive?
22:13 Speaker 06 She used to feel ashamed of her mother being a maid, but then she also realized that her mother suffered those humiliations in order for her to eat. Their existence and the things that they did in order to survive were very much present in who she was, who she was becoming.
22:31 Speaker 05 I read something about how that was one of the most painful books for her to write
22:36 Speaker 06 because it dealt with this history that was so directly connected to her own family. Oh, absolutely. And I think Octavia felt that her mother and her grandmother were really the archetypal heroines or heroes that were not being written about, that they had real heroics and real survival because they were still here.
22:59 Speaker 06 She's saying, I think, that the past is not past, that it's present. And everything happening in the present is simultaneously.
23:07 Speaker 06 Rooted in the past. It's not like you can erase one.
23:12 Speaker 06 She knew that she needed to write it. And there was something really pressing on her soul to get it done. She's writing things that haven't been written before.
23:26 Speaker 01 Just three years into her career, Octavia made it clear that she didn't fit into any one genre, that she wasn't interested in playing by the rules, and that she had a lot more to say. Her next book would only break more boundaries, challenging the limits of who and what we can become.
24:01 Speaker 07 Hi, this is Tony in Montreal, Switzerland. Thanks for helping me understand the present by opening my eyes to the past.
24:11 Speaker 07 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
24:15 Speaker 00 This message comes from Prolon with their five-day fasting mimicking diet, a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR.
24:29 Speaker 07 This message comes from NPR sponsor, Lyndhamood Bell. Lance was bright, but he struggled to read words. Michelle was the opposite. She could read words easily, but struggled to understand what she read. Like so many students, they struggled not only with learning, but with self-confidence. Personalized one-to-one instruction at Lyndhamood Bell Learning Centers changed that. Today, they read with confidence and they understand what they read. Instruction is available online or in person. Learn more at lyndhamoodbell.com/NPR.
25:01 Speaker 00 Support for NPR and the following message come from Bowlin Branch. Change your sleep with Bowlin Branch's airy blankets, cloud-like duvets, and breathable sheets. Feel the difference with 15% off your first order at bowlinbranch.com with code NPR. Exclusions apply. See site for details.
25:19 Speaker 00 Part Two: Shapeshifter.
25:27 Speaker 05 Anianwu's ears and eyes were far sharper than those of other people. She had increased their sensitivity deliberately after the first time men came stalking her, their machetes ready, their intentions clear. She had had to kill seven times on that terrible day, seven frightened men who could have been spared, and she had nearly died herself, all because she let people come upon her unnoticed. Never again. Wild seed.
26:04 Speaker 03 Why science fiction? Because there are no closed thorns, no walls. You can look at, examine, play with, anything, absolutely anything.
26:17 Speaker 06 That is, if you could get in the door in the first place. Octavia was trying to break onto the scene in the 1970s, when most sci-fi writers were
26:26 Speaker 05 "cold, white, and male," to put it bluntly.
26:29 Speaker 06 This is Nnedi Okorofor.
26:31 Speaker 05 I am a science fiction and fantasy writer of the African futurists and African Jujuists strain.
26:40 Speaker 06 African futurism is a subcategory of sci-fi. It's similar to Afrofuturism, but it's more deeply rooted in African culture, history, and perspective.
26:51 Speaker 05 It's concerned with visions of the future, it's interested in technology, and it's centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent, black people. It is about future visions and imaginings of Africa, but it's very connected to the past, the culture, the history, all of that.
27:12 Speaker 06 And African Jujuism...
27:14 Speaker 05 is a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative. So it understands that some of these things may be real, some of these things are believed by... People, they are part of people's worldviews. And, and those things, and, and the reason why I wanted to come up with this word was because of this, this idea that African spiritualities and cosmologies have historically been looked down upon, viewed as less than. I mean, you look at colonialism and what that has done to, to African spiritualities and cosmologies, and it's highly problematic. So you invented that term?
27:59 Speaker 05 Yes. That's amazing.
28:03 Speaker 05 These strains of sci-fi and fantasy that Nnedi created are a far cry from the quote unquote, "classic" science fiction strains she grew up with. Authors like- Arthur C. Clarke, Ben Bova, Isaac Asimov.
28:16 Speaker 03 Think 2001: A Space Odyssey, iRobot, Star Trek, all that.
28:21 Speaker 05 It wasn't just about like, being white and male, but like, there was like, an element of colonialism and imperialism that would just run, like, that thread would run through the themes of the story. And I found it, 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.
28:48 Speaker 03 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.
29:00 Speaker 03 That's what Octavia read growing up, and that's what, for the most part, her contemporaries were still writing.
29:06 Speaker 05 But there was also Samuel Delaney.
29:09 Speaker 03 Samuel Delaney, a black science fiction writer who published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, in 1962, a time when it came to black sci-fi writers.
29:18 Speaker 05 There was only Samuel Delaney. There's really only Samuel Delaney. And that was what Octavia was coming into.
29:27 Speaker 03 Why do you suppose there aren't more black, female, science fiction writers? Uh, 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.
29:58 Speaker 03 Nnedi could relate.
29:59 Speaker 06 You know, a lot of artists come into their art through some kind of trauma. And for me, that's what it was.
30:06 Speaker 03 Nnedi was a star athlete, tennis and track and field. She had 22 medals. She had a state championship and she also had scoliosis.
30:15 Speaker 06 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.
30:28 Speaker 05 It was 1993. She spent the whole summer after her freshman year of college, literally relearning how to walk.
30:35 Speaker 06 So it was like night and day.
30:37 Speaker 05 A few years later, still on the long recovery path, her parents took her on a trip to their homeland, Nigeria.
30:44 Speaker 06 We'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 cellphone. And I was like, this is nuts. You know, this is, this is like the past and the present and the future all together. And it wasn't
31:28 Speaker 06 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-
31:50 Speaker 05 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, that's really powerful.
32:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, 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.
32:18 Speaker 06 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. But Nnedi 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.
33:02 Speaker 06 And as we're 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. It 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 Sea by Octavia Butler.
33:49 Speaker 05 You 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 Anyanwu. He repeated her name and glanced upward, understanding. "Son," her name meant. Anyanwu. The son.
34:25 Speaker 06 And 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 Anyanwu. And I know what Anyanwu means. I know how to pronounce Anyanwu. It's an Igbo name. It means "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.
35:09 Speaker 06 You 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 fantasy section with an Igbo woman's name in the beginning of the book. I was like, oh my God.
35:27 Speaker 06 Like, that feeling, I had never experienced it before. I've been waiting to read something like that for how long?
35:37 Speaker 06 It was just, it was cathartic to me. It was just being in 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. I knew it. I just, I just needed something. You know, I needed something. And discovering Octavia in that moment was exactly what I needed.
36:04 Speaker 02 Nnedi was excited. So what did you do with all that excitement after?
36:08 Speaker 06 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 Clary and was like, can you put, can I talk to Octavia? And next thing 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? Like, I'm talking to Octavia. I don't remember anything I said. I remember, though, the impact. Like, 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.
36:52 Speaker 06 You know, like, it's like, you know, people who have like this, this, you know, they're, 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.
37:05 Speaker 03 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.
37:19 Speaker 06 Wild 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. It's 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.
38:01 Speaker 06 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.
38:18 Speaker 05 She could remember being bullied as a female animal, being pursued by persistent males. But only in her true woman she 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.
38:42 Speaker 06 She 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.
39:25 Speaker 06 She's always trying to create family and home and community and nurture the people around her. And 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.
39:44 Speaker 03 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.
40:03 Speaker 06 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. It's not like good guys and bad guys. She really rejects binaries in so many ways.
40:24 Speaker 03 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.
40:46 Speaker 06 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?
41:03 Speaker 03 My characters, who are often Black and female, behave as though they have no limitations.
41:11 Speaker 06 She 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.
41:29 Speaker 06 The 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 Anyan Wu is doing. And so she got to explore that in her writing.
42:14 Speaker 06 It wasn't just Wild Seed. It's like almost all of her works had that, this, 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, I needed that process, especially in my late twenties. There were just issues that I, that I was interested in, but I didn't have the, um, I didn't have the tools to unpack them and properly interrogate them. I did not have the tools.
42:44 Speaker 02 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? And yeah, her work did that. I would walk away from almost every single one of her novels and short stories just changed.
43:13 Speaker 06 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.
43:28 Speaker 02 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. And so now, while we're adapting it, I'm just like, okay, well, let's do that.
43:56 Speaker 06 That's incredible. It was like this moment of giving you her blessing essentially to expand upon something where she knew her own limitations.
44:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a good feeling. That's a good feeling.
44:13 Speaker 06 Wildseed 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.
44:26 Speaker 02 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, which is, that balance is really important.
44:39 Speaker 06 A balance Octavia wrestled with in her own work and in her own life.
44:43 Speaker 03 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.
45:01 Speaker 06 When we come back, Octavia writes the Parable series and puts that resilience to the ultimate test.
45:23 Speaker 02 Hi, my name's Matt Pope from Brighton in England, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.
45:31 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Prolon with their five-day fasting-mimicking diet, a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR.
45:48 Speaker 07 This message comes from NPR sponsor, Lynda Mood Bell. Lance was bright, but he struggled to read words. Michelle was the opposite. She could read words easily, but struggled to understand what she read. Like so many students, they struggled not only with learning, but with self-confidence. Personalized one-to-one instruction at Lynda Mood Bell Learning Centers changed that. Today, they read with confidence and they understand what they read. Instruction is available online or in person. Learn more at lynda moodbell.com/NPR.
46:20 Speaker 00 Support for NPR and the following message come from Bowlin Branch. Change your sleep with Bowlin Branch's airy blankets, cloud-like duvets, and breathable sheets. Feel the difference with 15% off your first order at bowlinbranch.com with code NPR. Exclusions apply. See site for details.
46:39 Speaker 00 Part Three, Power Seeker.
46:48 Speaker 05 All 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.
47:16 Speaker 03 I 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's me.
47:45 Speaker 06 By 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.
48:02 Speaker 03 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.
48:12 Speaker 06 And she wasn't just called a science fiction writer. She was being called a black science fiction writer.
48:18 Speaker 02 Are you trying to create a new black mythology?
48:21 Speaker 03 No.
48:22 Speaker 02 You're not?
48:22 Speaker 03 No.
48:23 Speaker 02 What then is central to what you want to say about race?
48:26 Speaker 03 Do I want to say something central about race? Aside from, hey, we're here.
48:31 Speaker 06 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 Afro-Futurist, Octavia the Radical. And then her newest book brought her a whole new reputation on a whole nother level. Octavia the Prophet.
49:06 Speaker 05 All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change. Ursi, The Book of the Living, verse 1, Parable of the Sower.
49:23 Speaker 01 So Parable of the Sower is actually a book that was written where the protagonist Lauren Olamina is this girl who lives in this place called Roble. Which is stands in for Pasadena. And she is about 15 years old, turning 16 in this book. So it's a coming of age novel.
49:44 Speaker 06 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. And 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.
50:16 Speaker 03 Welfare is another of our major problems. We're a humane and a generous people.
50:20 Speaker 06 Octavia lived in California for most of her life and had watched the state's political course lean more and more conservative. In the seventies, when she was starting her career, Ronald Reagan was governor.
50:31 Speaker 03 We accept without reservation our obligation to help the disabled, the aged.
50:36 Speaker 06 A man who even before he was president, was pretty open about being against the idea of people funding the government, AKA taxes, and government funding the people.
50:47 Speaker 03 But we are not going to perpetuate poverty by substituting a permanent dole for a paycheck.
50:52 Speaker 06 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.
51:05 Speaker 03 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.
51:17 Speaker 06 Which, 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.
51:32 Speaker 03 We were getting to that point where we were more, were thinking more about the building of prisons than of schools and libraries.
51:40 Speaker 06 This was around the time when Prop 187 passed, a California law that Octavia later called fantastically stupid.
51:48 Speaker 01 That was going through the legislature to bar undocumented.
51:52 Speaker 05 Folks from like accessing healthcare and education.
51:56 Speaker 06 It was an effort to save taxpayer dollars by denying public services to undocumented immigrants.
52:03 Speaker 02 This fall, we can send a message to Washington to stop illegal immigration by passing Proposition 187, the SOS Initiative.
52:14 Speaker 06 SOS, the Save Our State Initiative.
52:18 Speaker 05 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.
52:27 Speaker 06 What happens when another group in society gets cut off? And then another group, and another? Who survives?
52:34 Speaker 05 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? What if you couldn't go to the hospital? What if there's no gasoline? What if water became scarce?
52:49 Speaker 05 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.
53:09 Speaker 03 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. And in Parable of the Sower, we hit bottom.
53:33 Speaker 06 By the year 2024, Southern California and much of the nation has become a wasteland.
53:40 Speaker 03 Society is pretty much broken.
53:44 Speaker 03 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.
54:04 Speaker 06 Everyone has guns, no one has jobs, and things like TV, computers, phones, those are luxuries of the past.
54:12 Speaker 03 In "Terrible of a 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. And 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.
54:43 Speaker 01 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 gonna have consequences." And those consequences are demonstrated in this book.
54:59 Speaker 03 I want to talk about what's gonna happen if we keep doing what we've been doing. If 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.
55:30 Speaker 05 People 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.
55:56 Speaker 06 According to Octavia, all of these issues, all of these ignorances, came from one fundamental human paradox.
56:05 Speaker 03 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. We 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.
56:35 Speaker 06 In other words, it's all about power.
56:38 Speaker 03 One of the reasons I got into writing about power was because I grew up feeling that I didn't have any.
56:43 Speaker 06 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.
56:56 Speaker 03 The parable of the sower was difficult because I didn't much like my character originally, because she had to be a power seeker. I 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.
57:34 Speaker 06 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. So 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.
58:11 Speaker 06 Earthseed 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.
58:31 Speaker 03 When I got through Parable of the Sower, I got to the point where I liked my character far too much.
58:37 Speaker 06 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.
58:49 Speaker 01 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.
59:04 Speaker 06 Offerings 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.
59:19 Speaker 01 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, huh, 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. I mean, do I need to go there? Oh, God. It's just so, it's too familiar. It's too familiar.
59:56 Speaker 06 Do you think she saw herself as prophetic?
1:00:00 Speaker 01 Oh, absolutely not. She did not predict the future. She observed what was happening around her, and then she extrapolated from what she knew.
1:00:11 Speaker 03 I hope they're not prophecy, because I don't want to live in that world.
1:00:14 Speaker 01 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. And I think that it's OK to acknowledge that and to hear, and to hear that.
1:00:47 Speaker 06 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 Ayana and Nnedi 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,
1:01:31 Speaker 06 it's not magically all going to get better, but we're still going to be together. We 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 have acquired and the things we have amassed. That there is another way to be in this world. And that's what I find so healing and so transformational.
1:02:03 Speaker 05 The 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.
1:02:26 Speaker 06 Parable 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.
1:02:41 Speaker 01 The moment that she passed, there was so much that was, that was lost. And I know that hurt.
1:02:50 Speaker 01 What does it mean to? Those who who come after her, you know, it means it means so much. It means like she 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 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.
1:03:34 Speaker 01 It makes me feel like I'm part of history. I'm part of the future and I am my ancestors' wildest dreams. She 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.
1:03:56 Speaker 01 Octavia E. Butler 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."
1:04:21 Speaker 03 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 mentioned the news items that we seem to be ignoring so completely. These are the things that reach me. And whatever else happens, happens.
1:05:04 Speaker 04 That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
1:05:08 Speaker 01 I'm Rand Abdelfatah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
1:05:12 Speaker 04 This episode was produced by me.
1:05:14 Speaker 01 And me, and? Jamie York.
1:05:17 Speaker 06 Lawrence Wu. Laine Kaplan-Levinson.
1:05:19 Speaker 00 Julie Kane.
1:05:20 Speaker 06 Victor Ibevez.
1:05:22 Speaker 04 Parth Shah. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
1:05:26 Speaker 01 Thank you to Adrian Marie Brown for reading all of the passages from Octavia's books that you heard throughout the episode. Adrian has two podcasts, Octavia's Parables, which she co-hosts with Toshi Regan, and How to Survive the End of the World, which she co-hosts with her sister Autumn. Check them out.
1:05:43 Speaker 04 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 Grunman.
1:06:04 Speaker 01 Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes? Navid Marvi.
1:06:09 Speaker 06 Cho Fujiwara.
1:06:11 Speaker 00 Anya Mizani.
1:06:13 Speaker 04 As always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, email us at [email protected] .
1:06:20 Speaker 01 Thanks for listening.
1:06:41 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
Previous Winter Book Club: Why You'll Love 'Dune' Next El Libertador (Venezuela update) Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated