Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction

Summary

Throughline – "Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction"

Air Date: January 1, 2026
Hosts: Rund Abdelfatah & Ramtin Arablouei
Guests: Adrienne Maree Brown, Ayanna Jamison, Nnedi Okorafor
Producer: Lane Kaplan Levinson

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Throughline’s Winter Book Club dives deeply into the works and enduring legacy of Octavia Butler, the groundbreaking science fiction author recognized for her visionary imagination, exploration of power and change, and unflinching take on America’s past and future. Hosts and guests—including writers, scholars, and acolytes—trace Butler’s journey from a shy, solitary child in Pasadena to the first Black woman to win sci-fi’s highest honors. They dissect her novels (notably Kindred, Wildseed, and the Parable series), highlight her warnings and hopes for humanity, and contemplate her influence on contemporary writers and activists.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

I. Octavia Butler’s Approach: Science Fiction as Cautionary Tale

• Butler’s Intentions:

  • She emphasized her work was not prophetic but "cautionary tales."
    • Quote (Butler, 01:27):

      “These novels are not prophetic. These novels are cautionary tales [...] if we are not careful, you know, if we carry on as we have been, this is what we might wind up with.”

  • Her belief: The act of imagining allows us to prepare for and resist dystopian realities.
  • She frequently returned to a core tenet expressed in her work (repeated by guests and herself):
    • Quote (Butler, 02:12 & throughout):

      “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”

• Adrienne Maree Brown (03:35): Explains Butler’s “visionary fiction” as rehearsing futures together and using stories as case studies for survival.

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II. The Life and Roots of a Visionary

Childhood & Family:

• Butler was an only child—shy, solitary, and grew up poor in Pasadena, California (12:03).
• Her mother, a maid, emphasized the importance of education (13:20).
• These roots deeply informed Butler’s consciousness of class and racism.

Discovery by Those Who Needed Her:

• Ayanna Jamison recalls first picking up one of Butler’s stories during trauma as a teacher in a tough neighborhood, seeing herself in Butler’s work in ways that canonical “old dead white men” failed to provide (14:14).

• Butler’s concept of "positive obsession":

  • Quote (Jamison, 17:05):

    “A positive obsession is like a compulsion that you cannot stop. [...] An obsession could be positive.”

Origin as a Writer:

• As a child, Butler started telling herself stories at age 4; began writing them at age 10 (17:24).
• Her first push to write sci-fi came after watching a disappointing movie (Devil Girl from Mars) and thinking she could do better (17:45).

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III. Breaking Boundaries—Genre, Race, and Gender

Outsider in Sci-fi:

• Sci-fi was overwhelmingly white and male when Butler began.
• Nnedi Okorafor, later inspired by Butler, discusses the alienation of never seeing Black people in sf stories or on covers (29:02).

Why Write When Excluded?

• Quote (Butler, 29:40):

  “People do what they see other people doing... If you look around and you don’t see many people who look like you doing something, you worry there’s a good reason for that... I looked around... and it didn’t matter. I still wanted to do it.”

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IV. Shapeshifting Impossible Worlds: Wildseed

• Wildseed introduces immortal African characters Anyanwu and Doro, exploring themes of power, survival, and gender.

• Anyanwu can shapeshift into any form and alternately experiences the world as woman, man, animal, yet always returns to her Black woman self (38:00).

• Butler rejects clear binaries of good and evil, gender, or race, and highlights complexity:

  • Quote (Butler, 39:57):

    “I don’t write about good and evil. I write about people. [...] Even the worst of us doesn’t just set out to be evil.”

• On gender:

  • Quote (Okorafor, 41:56):

    “She was definitely talking about 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?”

• Impact on Readers:

  • Okorafor describes finding Wildseed (never having seen an Igbo name on a genre book) as a "cathartic" experience (34:39).
  • After connecting with Butler, Okorafor felt emboldened to explore her own African heritage and new genre strains ("African Futurism," "African Jujuism").

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V. Kindred and the Emotional Reality of History

• Kindred (1979): Centers on Dana, a Black woman time-traveling to Antebellum Maryland.

• Butler’s goal: Make readers feel history, not just know the facts (20:56).

• The book was inspired by a classmate’s disregard for the sacrifices of previous generations (19:57).

  • Quote (Butler, 20:56):

    “I wrote Kindred to make people, I hoped, feel history as opposed merely to knowing facts of history... the lack of control a slave suffers.”

• Deeply personal: Butler saw her mother and grandmother as archetypal heroines of survival (22:54).

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VI. The Parable Series: Power, Transformation, and Earthseed

• Parable of the Sower (1993): Set in a dystopian near-future (the year 2024!), follows Lauren Olamina, a teenager forging survival and meaning amid societal collapse.

• Butler was alarmed by real-world trends that informed her apocalyptic vision:

  • The Reagan era and rise of conservatism in California (51:21, 52:07).
  • Quote (Butler, 51:59):

    “We were getting to that point where we were thinking more about building prisons than schools and libraries.”

• Prop 187, the criminalization of immigrants, widening rich-poor gap, environmental disregard—Butler extrapolated these out to vivid dystopia (53:02, 54:31).

• At the root: her theory that "humans are intelligent, but hierarchical," and that hierarchy was older and sometimes overwhelmed intelligence (56:32).

• The power paradox:

  • Lauren must become a leader, founding the adaptable, change-focused Earthseed religion (58:23).
  • Butler’s struggle: “I didn’t much like my character originally because she had to be a power seeker. [...] Power, like money, like education, [...] is just a tool. What you do with it is what matters.” (57:23)

Memorable Excerpts:

• Quote (Parable/Earthseed, 49:33):

  “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”

• Quote (Brown, 03:35):

  “It helps me so much when change comes and it’s unexpected and especially when change comes and it’s undesired.”

• The relevance feels almost overwhelming to today’s listeners:

  • Quote (Okorafor, 59:53):

    “I still can’t read Parable of the Sower. Even just looking at the title makes me nervous... it’s set around now... it’s too familiar.”

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VII. Lasting Influence & Legacy

• Butler’s work opened doors for marginalized voices—by simply existing, she “signaled the existence of a whole, you know, plethora of stories… she ushered that in.” (Okorafor, 63:08)
• Ayanna Jamison: “She dreamed me up in a way… she pretty much opened doors for the rest of us.” (63:53)
• Butler’s own words reflect her unlikely path and stamina:
  • Quote (Butler, 64:49):

    “I have to do the thing that’s important for me to do. I’m basically a storyteller and I have things that seem important to me... the emotional reality of history, the news items that we seem to be ignoring... These are the things that reach me and whatever else happens, happens.”

• While Butler died in 2006 at age 58, her “cautionary tales” continue to inspire, empower, and warn generations of writers, readers, and visionaries.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Time | Speaker | Quote / Highlight | |------------|------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:27 | Octavia Butler | “These novels are not prophetic. These novels are cautionary tales...” | | 02:12 | Octavia Butler | “All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.” | | 17:05 | Ayanna Jamison | “A positive obsession is like a compulsion that you cannot stop…” | | 29:40 | Octavia Butler | “I looked around and saw that there weren’t very many people who look like you... | | 39:57 | Octavia Butler | “I don’t write about good and evil... I write about people.” | | 41:56 | Nnedi Okorafor | “[Butler was] definitely talking about gender... are some definitions a little rigid?” | | 49:33 | Adrienne Maree Brown | “All that you touch you change... God is change.” (Earthseed, Parable) | | 53:36 | Octavia Butler | “Things have just carried on and slowly run down... In Parable of the Sower, we hit bottom.”| | 56:32 | Octavia Butler | “That human beings are intelligent, but also that they are hierarchical...” | | 62:31 | Adrienne Maree Brown | “The world is full of painful stories... Yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.”| | 63:53 | Ayanna Jamison | “She was present, and she pretty much opened doors for the rest of us...” | | 64:49 | Octavia Butler | “I have to do the thing that it’s important for me to do. I’m basically a storyteller...”|

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Timeline of Key Segments

• 00:15–06:32: Introduction to Butler, her philosophy of change, and the relevance of her cautionary tales.
• 11:04–14:40: Butler’s early life, poverty, and the impact of her mother and upbringing on her writing.
• 17:05–18:32: “Positive obsessions” and how Butler began writing.
• 18:55–22:54: The making and meaning of Kindred, and Butler’s desire for emotional understanding of history.
• 25:33–44:53: Deep dive on Wildseed, Afrofuturism, gender fluidity, and the complexity of Butler’s characters.
• 47:16–59:45: The Parable series, Earthseed, and power: The social and political context, the emergence of Lauren Olamina, and the resonance with today.
• 62:31–64:49: Epilogue, Butler’s death, her unmatched legacy, and words from those she influenced.

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Overall Tone

Reflective, reverent, and impassioned, this episode intertwines personal histories, literary analysis, and social commentary. The voices—Butler’s, her admirers’, and her literary “children’s”—are curious, insistent, and at times, deeply emotional, always circling back to the transformative possibilities of both pain and hope.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Heard the Episode

This special Throughline Book Club installment is an invitation into Octavia Butler’s immense and urgent fictional worlds—and the real-life contexts from which they sprang. Through rich storytelling and a chorus of admirers, the show demonstrates why Butler’s warnings, compassion, and imagination make her more relevant than ever in 2026, during an age of pressing social and environmental change.

Her message is clear and enduring:

“All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”
(Parable of the Sower; quoted throughout, 01:27–49:33)

Butler observed, extrapolated, and gifted us stories that show not only what we are, but what we might become. The world can be burning—but we can find each other, and shape what comes next.

Transcript

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[Rund Abdelfatah]

Edu welcome back to Throughline Book Club. Today we're talking about one of our favorite authors, Octavia Butler.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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 seeing. She was a beacon of hope, sometimes even when she wasn't trying.

[Octavia Butler]

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 why I write about them. All that you touch, you change.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

You're listening to Throughline from npr.

[Octavia Butler]

All that you change changes you.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Will we go back in time?

[Octavia Butler]

The only lasting truth is change.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

To understand the present, God is change. Today, Octavia Butler's world.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change. I found myself over the years returning to this quote over and over. It helps me so much when change comes and it's unexpected and especially when change comes and it's undesired. My name is Adrienne Maree Brown and I am a writer and an Octavia Butler scholar.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Adrienne Maree 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 Maree Brown co edited a book called Octavia's brood, and she co hosts a podcast called Octavia's Parables.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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, that quote.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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 Adrian's arm.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Much of Adrian's work, Ink and Worldview, is inspired by Octavia Butler, the science fiction author who wrote what Adrian calls visionary fiction.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

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, or Wildseed.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

A story about two African immortals who can shapeshift and travel across centuries and continents.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

And then there's Parable of the Sower, the story of a young woman trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world. Sad, set in the near future, which happens to now be, well, our present.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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?

[Rund Abdelfatah]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

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 and present and future to reveal striking and often devastating parallels to the world we live in today.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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.

[Octavia Butler]

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 2000 and 20s 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

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 I made.

[Octavia Butler]

Up my own stories to put myself in them.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

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 Lane Kaplan Levinson takes it from here after the break.

[Ayanna Jamison]

I'm Deidre White. I'm calling from Lexington, Kentucky, and you're listening to Throughline at npr.

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[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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[Nnedi Okorafor]

Part one time traveler.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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. Kindred.

[Octavia Butler]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Do you get along better with people now?

[Octavia Butler]

I can fake it.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Octavia E. Butler was a loner.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

She was tall, she was awkward, she was quiet.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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. And so she was, I think, kind of traumatized by that poverty. My name is Ayanna 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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Octavia Butler was also from Southern California. She was born in Pasadena in 1947.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Her own family migrated from Louisiana to California in 1930.

[Octavia Butler]

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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Her father passed away when she was a toddler. Her mother was a maid. And so she said, 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.

[Octavia Butler]

She cleaned houses most of her life. And she said, unless you want to be what I am, you better get that education. And I would take a look at her life and dive back.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Ayanna and Octavia were born a generation apart, but have similar backgrounds.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

And so when Ayana discovered Octavia while in grad school, she had the experience of reading things she'd never read 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 Ayanna puts it.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Old dead white men. It was like putting those authors to be the epitome of what's universal. And I really chafed at that. And I really felt that it didn't reflect my experience, and it was a really false dichotomy. I was like, okay, 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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Some of that trauma was coming from Ayanna's day job she had at the same time she was getting her degree, working in a middle school.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

So where did she go to decompress? Borders.

[Ayanna Jamison]

This is how old I am. I'm Borders years old. Like, I used to go on dates and borders. And there was the bargain section. I know you're laughing, but you know that it is a thing.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Yes.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

But.

[Ayanna Jamison]

And I was like, wow, this woman is really brilliant. That story really stayed with me and.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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 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 reliving my trauma and realizing that I was there on that campus trying to go back and save myself. 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 set snatched me into this work and it's taken over my entire life in the best possible way.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Octavia became Ayana's positive obsession, a term Octavia coined herself.

[Ayanna Jamison]

She says that a positive obsession is like a compulsion that you cannot stop. It's something that 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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

And Octavia's positive obsession was writing.

[Octavia Butler]

It's pretty much my religion, I think. 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 told myself stories. I've been telling myself stories since I was 4 years old. When I was 10, I began writing them down.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Well, the famous story is that she was watching television and she saw Devil.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Girl from Mars, a British sci fi film from the 50s. A frightening strange shape descending from outer space with relentless purpose. Where did it come from and what.

[Octavia Butler]

Did it want of us?

[Ayanna Jamison]

And then she turned off the television.

[Octavia Butler]

And thought like, geez, I can write a better stories than that.

[Ayanna Jamison]

And then she started trying.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

Well, you're a hell of a writer, kiddo.

[Octavia Butler]

There are not many people.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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 didn't know what to do with it.

[Octavia Butler]

When I tried to sell Kindred, that really gave me Trouble because nobody wanted to buy it. I had about 15 rejections.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Maryland, a slight turn from a world ravaged by an alien virus. Kindred centers around a young woman named Dana.

[Ayanna Jamison]

And Dana's a snatch back 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 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. 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.

[Octavia Butler]

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. Oh, my goodness. And I thought, well, gee, he knows a lot of facts and figures, but he doesn't really understand or. Or feel the realities of history.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Octavia Butler]

I wrote Kindred to make people, I hoped feel history as opposed merely to knowing facts of history. 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 understand the lack of control of your own fate that a slave suffers.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. The E seemed so frightening. I said, now I see why. What? The e's, Us, the children. I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.

[Ayanna Jamison]

She's talking about, like, how. But 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.

[Octavia Butler]

I was really going not so much for factual understanding but for emotional understanding.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

I went down the hall and toward the stairs slowly wondering why I hadn't tried, tried to defend myself, at least tried. Was I getting so used to being submissive?

[Ayanna Jamison]

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 their the things that they did in order to survive were very much present in who she was, who she was becoming.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

I read something about how that was one of the most painful books for her to write because it dealt with this history that was so directly connected to her own family.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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. She's saying, I think that the past is not past, that it's present, and everything happening in the present is simultaneously rooted in the past. It's not like you can erase one. 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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Hi, this is Tony in Montreux, Switzerland.

[Octavia Butler]

Thanks for helping me understand the present by opening my eyes to the past.

[NPR Sponsor Announcer]

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[Nnedi Okorafor]

Part 2 Shapeshifter.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

Ayanwu'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. Wildse.

[Octavia Butler]

Why science fiction? Because there are no closed doors, no walls you can look at, examine, play with anything, absolutely anything.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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 cold, white and male.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

To put it bluntly, this is Nnedi Okorafor I am a science fiction and fantasy writer of the African Futurist and African Jujuists strain African futurism is a.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Subcategory of sci fi. It's similar to Afrofuturism, but it's more deeply rooted in African culture, history and perspective.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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 American 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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

And African jujuism is a subcategory of.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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 those things. And the reason why I wanted to come up with this word was because of 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 African spiritualities and cosmologies, and it's highly problematic.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

So you invented that term?

[Ayanna Jamison]

Yes.

[Octavia Butler]

That's amazing.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

These strains of sci fi and fantasy that Nettie created are a far cry from the quote unquote classic science fiction strains she grew up with.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

Authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Ben Bova.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Isaac Asimov, think 2001, A Space Odyssey, I Robot, Star Trek, all that.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Are there things that bothered you about the science fiction books that you read when you were first starting to read them?

[Octavia Butler]

Yes, I wasn't in them.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Yeah, right, right.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

That's what Octavia read growing up. And that's what, for the most part, her contemporaries were still writing.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

But there was also Samuel Delany.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Samuel Delany, a black science fiction writer who published his first novel, the Jewels of Aptor, in 1960, a time when it came to black sci fi writers.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

There was only Samuel Delany, there's really only Samuel Delany. And that was what Octavio was coming into.

[Octavia Butler]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Nettie could relate.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

You know, a lot of artists come into their art through some kind of trauma, and for me, that's what it was.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Nettie was a star athlete, tennis and track and field. She had 22 medals. She had a state championship, and she also had scoliosis.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

It was 1993. She spent the whole summer after her freshman year of college, literally relearning how to walk.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

So it was like night and day.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

A few years later, still on the long recovery path, her parents took her on a trip to their homeland, Nigeria.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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 cell phone. 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 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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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 on, I haven't stopped writing since.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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 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.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

Of course, we all went to 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 COVID 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 COVID It caught my eye immediately where 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 Wildseed by Octavia Butler.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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 Anyan Wu. He repeated her name and glanced upward, understanding Sun. Her name meant Anyanwu, the sun.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

And so that night, I opened it up and read it. I started reading, and my mind was even blown, even flying, because it was like, suddenly I'm reading this book and I see the name Anya Wu. And I know what Anya Wu means. I know how to pronounce Anya Wu. 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, you know, and this is a character who carries who she is all the way across the timeline. And I'm like, what this is? This was a book that I picked up in the science fiction and fantasy section with an Igbo woman's name. And it's the beginning of the book. I 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? It was just. It was cathartic to me. It was just being in the. In that. 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. I knew it. I just. I just needed something, you know, I needed something. And discovering Octavia in that moment was. Was exactly what I needed.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Nettie was excited. So what did she do with all that excitement after finding her new favorite author? She called her.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

The first thing I thought was, oh, if she taught hair, then I could talk to her. I could talk to her. So I went to the organizers of Clarion. I was like, can you. 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. You know, like, it's like, you know, people who have. Like this, you know, they're a commanding presence, but they don't try to be. They just are.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Like, she's talking, and she doesn't need to raise her voice, but you're listening.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Octavia Butler]

I think I had more fun writing Wildseed than I had writing anything. And I think it was partly because I was so relieved to have written Kindred.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Wildseed was the next book Octavia wrote after Kindred as a return to her patternist series and in some ways as a gift to herself.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

The two immortals are named Anyan Wu and Doro.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Anyan Woo 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.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

She could remember being bullied as a female animal, being pursued by persistent males, but only in her true womanship could she remember being seriously hurt by males. Men swimming with the dolphins. Dolphins is like being with another people. A friendly people, no slavers with brands and chains. Here.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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 sexual in whatever kind of gender, as whatever race, but still always defaults back to her black woman self, her African woman self, Anyan Wu.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

And then there's Doro.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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. 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.

[Octavia Butler]

Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I don't write about good and evil with this enormous. 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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Octavia Butler]

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.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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?

[Octavia Butler]

My characters, who are often black and female, behave as though they have no limitations.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

The whole story kind of gets you to really question a lot of our assumptions about gender, about identity, about sex, about hierarchy.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Remember, Wildseed 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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

It wasn't just Wildti. 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. And like for me, I needed, I needed that process. Especially in my late 20s, there were just issues that I. That I would, was interested in, but I didn't have the. 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. And yeah, her work did that. I would walk away from. Almost every single one of her novels and short stories just changed.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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 ey. In this conversation, she wanted to know what it was like for Octavia to write about the Igbo people in Nigeria.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

That's incredible. It was like this moment of giving you her blessing, essentially, to expand upon something where she knew her own limitations.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

Yeah, that's a good feeling. It's a good feeling.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Wildsea doesn't pigeonhole itself by making absolute claims. Instead, it gets you to question things that society pigeonholes and puts as man and woman, good and evil, darkness and light.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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, a balance.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Octavia wrestled with in her own work and in her own life.

[Octavia Butler]

I don't know how we're going to end up. Well, the odd thing about my books is even though there is a a lot of pessimism and bad feeling, there is always hope at the end.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

When we come back, Octavia writes the Parable series and puts that resilience to the ultimate test.

[Octavia Butler]

Hi, my name is Matt Pope from.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Brighton in England, and you're listening to throughline on NPR.

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[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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[Nnedi Okorafor]

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[Nnedi Okorafor]

Part 3 Power Seeker.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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.

[Octavia Butler]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Octavia Butler]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

And she wasn't just called a science fiction writer. She was being called a black science fiction writer.

[Octavia Butler]

Are you trying to create a new black mythology?

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

No.

[Octavia Butler]

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?

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change. Earthseed, the Book of the living verse 1. Parable of the Sower.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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, and 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 gentleman 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, 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. 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. 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.

[Octavia Butler]

We were getting to that point where we were more thinking more about the building of prisons than of schools and libraries.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

This was around the time when Prop 187 passed a California law that Octavia later called fantastically stupid that was going.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Through the legislature to bar undocumented folks from, like, accessing health care and education.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

It was an effort to save taxpayer dollars by denying public services to undocumented immigrants. This 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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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, okay, let's extrapolate from there.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

What happens when another group in society gets cut off and then another group and another who survives?

[Ayanna Jamison]

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? 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 as how. And that's what Parable of the Sower is.

[Octavia Butler]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

By the year 2024, Southern California and much of the nation has become a wasteland.

[Octavia Butler]

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. Their problems. Now they become disasters because they're not attended to.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Everyone has guns, no one has jobs. And things like tv, computers, phones. Those are luxuries of the past.

[Octavia Butler]

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. 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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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.

[Octavia Butler]

I want to talk about what's going to 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.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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 power, the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

According to Octavia, all of these issues, all of these ignorances, came from one fundamental human paradox.

[Octavia Butler]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

In other words, it's all about power.

[Octavia Butler]

One of the reasons I got into writing about power was because I grew up feeling that I didn't have any.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Octavia Butler]

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, 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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Octavia Butler]

When I got through Parable of the Sower, I got to the point where I liked my character far too much.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Lauren Oya 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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Survive, you know, the world that she's depicting in Parable Sower, it feels so much like that's what we're experiencing now.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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 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, to go there? Oh God, it's just so, it's too familiar. It's too familiar.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

Do you think she saw herself as prophetic?

[Ayanna Jamison]

Oh, absolutely not. She did not predict the future. She observed what was happening around her and then she extrapolated from what she knew.

[Octavia Butler]

I hope they're not prophecy because I don't want to, to live in that world.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

But I also think that some writers are onto something and they've, they've tapped into something. And I, I believe in mystical aspects. So I wouldn't call anyone a prophet per se, but I do think that, that Octavia was tapping into something. She was tapping into something and she was channeling it. And I think that it's okay to acknowledge that and to hear and to hear that.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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 Nettie also see Octavia's work as a beacon of hope.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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. And 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've amassed. That there is another way to be in this world. And that's what I find so healing and so transformational.

[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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.

[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

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, 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.

[Ayanna Jamison]

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. 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. Octavia E. Butler once wrote, I'm a 53 year old writer who could 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.

[Octavia Butler]

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, the news items that we seem to be ignoring so completely. These are the things that reach me and whatever else happens, happens.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

I'm Rund Abdelfatah and you've been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Me and Jamie York, Lawrence Wu, Lane.

[Nnedi Okorafor]

Kaplan Levinson, Julie Kane, Victor Iz, Parth Shah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkar.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Thank you to Adrienne Maree 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. Check them out.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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 Grundmann.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Naveed.

[Ayanna Jamison]

Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

As always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, email [e-mail] thanks for listening.

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[Adrienne Maree Brown]

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[Lane Kaplan Levinson]

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