Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction (2021)

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2021

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Octavia Butler's alternate realities and 'speculative fiction' reveal striking, and often devastating parallels to the world we live in today. She was a deep observer of the human condition, perplexed and inspired by our propensity towards self-destruction. Butler was also fascinated by the cyclical nature of history, and often looked to the past when writing about the future. Along with her warning is her message of hope - a hope conjured by centuries of survival and persistence. For every society that perishes in her books comes a story of rebuilding, of repair.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we get started, we wanted to let you know where hard at work on two episodes looking at the complex and nuanced history of Afghanistan.
0:08.0	Coming to you in early September.
0:10.0	All right, now on with the show.
0:13.0	Hey everyone, it's from Team.
0:16.0	And we're back with our fourth episode of our Movies for Your Mind series,
0:20.0	where we're revisiting some of our most cinematic and immersive episodes.
0:24.0	This week, Octavia Butler, a black woman who was a trailblazer in the world of science fiction.
0:31.0	I've been a fan of Octavia Butler since I was in middle school.
0:34.0	And I've looked to her stories many times over the years to help make sense of things,
0:38.0	to find in her stories lessons to God my own life.
0:42.0	In 2016, for example, a year of significant change in the world and my life,
0:47.0	I entered fatherhood and embarked on an entirely new career at MPR.
0:51.0	I reached with more urgency to her work.
0:54.0	And the thing is, her stories feel more and more relevant even after all these years.
0:59.0	So today on ThruLine's Movies for Your Mind series, we invite you into the world of Octavia Butler.
1:05.0	Did she predict the future or just pay attention to her present?
1:10.0	Does it ever seem to you that there are people among us who hold up the sky and make the rivers flow?
1:24.0	People who are just like other people, just like the rest of us, only different.
1:29.0	They're the structural beams in the house we all share, the house that has a sky for a roof.
1:35.0	And usually they don't want to call attention to themselves.
1:38.0	They just want to be who they are, do what they do with this little interference as possible.
1:43.0	Octavia comes to my mind as first among that group of people.
	...

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