Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction‬

It's Been a Minute

NPR

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2021

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A special episode from our friends at NPR's history podcast Throughline: 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. But 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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey out, Sam Sanders here.
0:01.4	Today on It's Been a Minute, we are bringing you a very special episode from our friends
0:06.0	over at the NPR podcast ThruLine.
0:09.8	ThruLine is NPR's history podcast.
0:12.6	It reaches backwards into moments from the past and connects them to the present, sometimes
0:17.3	in really surprising ways.
0:19.6	So all this month, ThruLine is profiling black visionaries in a series they're calling
0:24.8	Imagine New Worlds.
0:27.0	Today's episode of ThruLine, in this feed, it is all about the quote, mother of Afro
0:32.1	futurism.
0:33.7	Science fiction writer Octavia Butler.
0:36.6	Butler's work is seeing a big resurgence right now.
0:39.4	Last fall, her book, Parable of the Sower, it hit the New York Times bestseller list for
0:44.8	the first time ever.
0:47.6	Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993.
0:53.1	So that book, it features a society in collapse from climate change and economic crisis and
1:00.0	social anxiety.
1:02.3	And it takes place now in the 2020s.
1:05.6	So yeah, she had vision.
1:07.0	Alright, let's get to it.
1:08.8	Octavia Butler, her own story, the story she gave us, and why they're so relevant in
1:13.6	this particular moment.
	...

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