Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction

Throughline

NPR

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

Octavia Butler gave us a new kind of science fiction: not only as one of the first writers to use history to talk about the future, and not only as one of the first Black women to do it, but by sending, along with her warnings, a message of hope, survival, persistence, and repair.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from Yarl and Pamela Mohn, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
0:10.4	Welcome back to ThruLine Book Club. Today we're talking about one of our favorite authors, Octavia Butler.
0:29.4	Does it ever seem to you that there are people among us who hold up the sky and make the rivers flow?
0:34.1	People who are just like other people, just like the rest of us, only different.
0:38.2	They're the structural beams and the house we all share,
0:40.7	the house that has a sky for a roof.
0:43.9	And usually they don't want to call attention to themselves.
0:45.8	They just want to be who they are,
0:48.3	do what they do with as little interference as possible.
0:55.0	Octavia comes to my mind as first among that group of people.
1:03.0	In her books, she showed us the horrors and the great good that humans can create, and the choices that she made in her books and in her life always gave us new ways of seeing.
1:10.0	She was a beacon of hope.
1:14.6	Sometimes, even when she wasn't trying.
1:20.6	These novels are not prophetic.
1:22.6	These novels are cautionary tales.
1:24.6	These novels are, if we are not careful.
1:28.3	You know, if we carry on as we have been, this is what we might wind up with.
1:33.3	You have to think about what kind of world you want to live in.
1:38.3	And I don't think there is a person alive who would want to live in the world that I've written about,
1:43.3	but we can arrange it.
1:46.9	The problems that I write about are problems that we can do something about.
1:52.9	That's why I write about them.
	...

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