Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 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 warnings is her message of hope - a hope conjured by centuries of survival and persistence. For every society that perished in her books, came a story of rebuilding, of repair.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Does it ever seem to you that there are people among us who hold up the sky and make the
0:10.9	rivers flow?
0:13.6	People who are just like other people, just like the rest of us, only different.
0:18.1	They're the structural beams in the house we all share, the house that has a sky for
0:22.5	a roof.
0:24.2	And usually they don't want to call attention to themselves.
0:26.8	They just want to be who they are, do what they do with as little interference as possible.
0:32.4	Octavia comes to my mind as first among that group of people.
0:40.0	In her books she showed us the horrors and the great good that humans can create.
0:45.8	And the choices that she made in her books and in her life always gave us new ways of
0:50.4	seeing. She was a beacon of hope. Sometimes even when she wasn't trying.
1:03.2	These novels are not prophetic. These novels are cautionary tales. These novels are if we
1:09.1	are not careful. You know, if we carry on as we have been, this is what we might wind
1:13.8	up with.
1:17.3	You have to think about what kind of world you want to live in.
1:21.2	And I don't think there is a person alive who would want to live in the world that I've
1:24.6	written about, but we can arrange it.
1:29.6	The problems that I write about are problems that we can do something about.
1:35.5	That's why I write about them.
1:41.8	All that you touch, you change.
1:44.7	We're listening to Thurline from NPR.
1:48.1	All that you change changes you.
	...

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