"Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

History, Books, Arts

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2020

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Imagine a plague that ravages the world and impairs the ability of humans to communicate with one another. What kind of society would we have? Who would take power and how would they hold it? What would the world be like for the powerless? How would children adapt and survive? In "Speech Sounds," Octavia E. Butler invites us to consider these questions - and helps us look for rays of hope in even the bleakest of landscapes. Octavia Butler (1947-2006), the daughter of a shoeshine man and a housemaid, went from a poor but proud childhood to becoming "the grand dame of science fiction." Known for her physically and mentally tough black heroines, her work combines the dynamism of invented worlds with astute observations of race, gender, sexuality, and power. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. (We appreciate it!) Find out more at historyofliterature.com, jackewilson.com, or by following Jacke and Mike on Twitter at @thejackewilson and @literatureSC. Or send an email to [email protected]. Music Credits: “Backbay Lounge” and “Magistar” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to The History of Literature, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding literature, history, and storytelling like Storybound, Micheaux Mission, and The History of Standup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	Hello, I'm Jack Wilson.
0:11.0	Welcome to another special quarantine edition of The History of Literature. Okay, here we go.
0:23.0	Wow, what a month.
0:24.0	A man.
0:25.0	A bah-hah.
0:27.0	Okay, here we go.
0:32.0	Wow, what a month. March was terrible as usual, but April is usually a better month.
0:39.0	And yet it's been pretty awful as well. Tragedy Strikes.
0:44.2	It's the kind of time, can we call it an era?
0:47.3	Like the World War II era and the Cold War era,
0:51.1	and the post 9-11 era, and the Great Depression era. Are we in the COVID-19 era or
0:56.8	the virus era? I think we might be. I think we'll have a before and
1:01.0	we'll have an after.
1:02.7	And that's why I'm so excited to bring you today's story.
1:06.8	Octavia Butler, a fascinating person,
1:09.5	another one of those people born to be a writer.
1:12.2	We'll have her story first, her biography I mean,
1:14.9	because it's very interesting and very inspiring. And then we'll hear her
1:19.5	story, speech sounds, which was successful and won some prizes won the Hugo Award for
1:26.1	Best Short Story in 1984 which is a science fiction prize we haven't done a lot of genre here. Well, maybe we have what have we done so far? We did a Kurt Vonnegut
1:37.2	Jr. story. We talked about Ray Bradbury with Carolyn Coahagan. We've had episodes on Agatha Christie, it's Stephen King, we've talked with Charles Ardie, the publisher of the hard case crime book series.
	...

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