Embracing diversity and defying dystopia: what we can learn from Octavia Butler

October is Black History Month and we’re celebrating Octavia Butler. She was one of the twentieth century’s most influential science fiction authors. 

Many of the issues that Catalyst aims to address are centred in her ground breaking work. And our values of love, equity, interdependence, curiosity and bravery are examined in her writing. 

The worlds she builds are blighted by violence, abuse of power and environmental collapse. But her characters still dare to dream of just and regenerative futures.

Exploring the future through a Black cultural lens

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in 1947 and died in 2006. She’s considered one of the mothers of Afrofuturism. The author and filmmaker Ytasha Womack describes Afrofuturism as, “a way of looking at the future, and alternate realities, through a Black cultural lens.” 

Butler’s novels are dystopian but hopeful, and reach into the past as well as the future. They explore themes including the climate emergency, authoritarianism, social justice and human survival. Black people are the heroes in her work. By centring their experiences her writing challenges the stereotypes, side-lining and exclusion that often features in the sci-fi genre. A genre that her books helped expand and redefine.

In a 1999 journal entry, Butler wrote: “I never bought into my invisibility or non-existence as a Black person. As a female and as an African-American, I wrote myself into the world. I wrote myself into the present, the future, and the past.” 

Butler received many awards. They included the PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award and the MacArthur “Genius” grant. She was the first science fiction author to receive the latter.

Influencing the present

Butler’s subject matter, career and worldview have inspired and influenced writers including N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okafor and adrienne maree brown. Her Parable series has been made into an opera. And at the time of writing (September 2024) TV adaptations of Dawn and Wild Seed are in development.

Why Butler’s writing is relevant today

Butler’s vision of the future was scarily accurate. She wrote 2 Parable novels. The first was published in 1993 and begins in 2024. In these books:

• the president is a Christian-fundamentalist who uses the slogan “make America great again”
• the USA is plagued by drought and rising seas
• fresh water is expensive because it’s hard to come by
• the middle classes, and people struggling to make ends meet, live in walled communities to keep themselves safe 
• public schools, the police, the fire service and entire cities are privatised
• people are dying from cholera and measles.

The issues Butler focuses on are wicked problems. They’re even more pressing now than when she was writing about them. A 2020 article about why so many readers are turning to Octavia Butler’s fiction suggests that, “Butler’s books resonate right now because the apocalypse they describe is not singular but a series of them. There’s no major event that wracks the country, just an accumulation of serious problems… and second-order crises...”

How Butler treats technology 

Tech isn’t positioned as inherently good or evil in Butler’s books. Its impact depends on who controls it, who benefits from it and if they’re using it as a tool to liberate or dominate. 

Kindred

Kindred is the first-person account of Dana, a young Black writer. She time travels between her home in Los Angeles in 1976, and a 19th-century plantation in Maryland. As Siana Bangura says in Catalyst’s tech justice report “race itself, to borrow from Benjamin and other theorists such as Falguni A. Sheth, can be thought of as a technology that legitimates violence and exclusion while concealing its nature and function.” Race is at the centre of Kindred. White supremacists use it as a technology to create, maintain and justify their ideology. And to build generational wealth.

Parable of the Sower

Tech injustice is rife. The rich can afford to travel by plane and reinforced trucks. And they’re able to keep their homes safe using high tech security devices. But the “street poor” live in shacks. Some people find temporary relief by using a drug that induces pyromania. Or, if they have the hardware, they escape into something that sounds similar to the metaverse. ​​

Parable of the Talents

Slavery’s been rebooted for the 21st century. And slaves are controlled using collars that give them excruciating electric shocks. 

The Patternist series

Advanced biological technologies have made mind control and genetic manipulation possible. The patternists are a telepathic race that use their psychic abilities to dominate other humans.

Xenogenesis trilogy

The Oankali are aliens. They use advanced genetic technology to breed with humans to save them from extinction. But the price that humans pay for their survival is having to surrender their agency and choice.

Systemic problems need many solutions

Butler doesn’t provide simple answers to tech injustice. And, instead of joyfully triumphing like leads in Hollywood action movies, her protagonists endure, adapt and survive.

For Butler, the beginnings of positive change lie in:

• pragmatism
• resilience
• acknowledging that we’re all connected 
• accepting our differences
• building communities
• prioritising group needs and goals
• living in harmony with the environment instead of destroying it.

Through Lauren, the protagonist in Parable of the Sower, she issues this warning:

“Embrace diversity

Unite—

or be divided,

robbed,

ruled,

killed

By those who see you as prey.

Embrace diversity

Or be destroyed."

- from Earthseed: The Books of the Living, Octavia Butler.

Catalyst’s approach to change echoes Butler’s optimism-tinged realism. We believe that shifting towards tech that helps us resist oppression and thrive means:

• defining and sharing leadership and power differently
• recognising that the way forward is painful and emergent
• recognising that systems change work is also personal. Individuals in the system need to examine their own conditioning and beliefs too.

How to get started with Octavia Butler

The New York Public Library’s Where to start with Octavia Butler has helpful pointers. Book Riot’s Which Octavia Butler books should you read first? is also a good place to begin. 

Activist adrienne maree brown and musician Toshi Reagon host the Octavia’s Parables podcast. In it they explore Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents and Wild Seed chapter by chapter. 

A piece by N. K. Jemisin in the NewScientist explains how her understanding of Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents has developed. The article underlines how prophetic Butler was.

‍

---

‍

Image credit: Released under the Createive Commons "Attribution Share-Alike" 2.5 License by Nikolas Coukouma.