Category Archives: Octavia Butler Roundtable

Octavia Butler — Best and Worst

Posted on by

OEB

So we’re in the middle of an Octavia Butler roundtable, I thought it’d be fun (maybe) for people to talk about which of her works are their favorites and which are their least favorites.

My favorite book of hers is Dawn, from her Xenogenesis series (which I’ve written about here among other places.) I just love the way it presents a standard aliens-as-colonizers narrative in such a way that the colonizers are both repulsive and sympathetic. The flatness of her prose here feels like it both conceals and accentuates the complexity of what she’s doing with empathy. It’s an interesting comparison with Gwyneth Jones, who touches on many of the same themes and ideas in a more knowing, ironized, and deliberately academic way. I love Jones, but there’s a lot to be said for Butler’s approach too, which presents everything almost transparently; it feels almost like a YA novel about growing up to be a tentacled sex monstrosity.

As for my least favorite….I read “Wild Seed” a long while back, but I found its presentation of gender difference (male, bad! female good!) to be pretty irritating. I just read Butler’s short story collection “Bloodchild”; the last story, “Martha”, in which a black female sci-fi writer is asked by God to save the world through vivid dreaming seemed both overly cute and nakedly self-aggrandizing.

For the rest of her books I’ve read, I quite like Kindred, didn’t like Fledgling much, and I think that’s all I’ve read.

So what about you all? What’s your favorite and least favorite Butler?

Deus Ex Machina By Alien

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
__________
adulthood-ritesIn order to keep relevant, the contemporary film adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy would update its nuclear holocaust to apocalyptic climate change. With a few exceptions, most of the end-of-times imagery can remain unchanged. Mass rioting and civil wars erupt over deadened landscapes and disintegrating cities. All seems lost. Then: an alien race, the Oankali, swoops in from space, scooping up the last surviving species, humankind in particular.

The Oankali also restore Earth to pristine, pre-Industrial health, yet Butler treats this like a neutral fact, important to the world building, (literally,) and not singled out for the miracle that it is. This would change in the modern movie remake. In the book, the humans seem barely appreciative, and quickly move onto other concerns. They take the healed planet for granted, but as victims of an atomic war, they were never responsible for its loss. Everyone blames the few military plutocrats who pushed the button. The Oankali try to prevent the redevelopment of technology, which irks a great many survivors. How could innocent people not wish to restore everything that was stolen from them—houses and streets and mines and guns and all?

In the hypothetical film update, the world is destroyed by the narrowness of the human race, albeit orchestrated by these same military plutocrats. No one prized the environment above all, and everyone lived unsustainably. The blame becomes collective. The equators flood, and food and water run out. The humans are widely aware of their hopelessness as they approach the end of the world. Then: almost divine intervention. Redemption. The audience watches the human survivors emotionally leveled, toppled by grace and humility, rapture and grief. Cue swelling strings, a long pan over waterfalls, or intact glaciers. Hands sifting the soil. They could easily reapply the John H Williams score from Jurassic park—the part when the jeeps pull up into a field of Brachiosauri.

In this version, it’s also easier to imagine humanity consenting to what the Oankali require in return—to interbreed with them completely, leaving no further generation of purely human beings.

Would humanity still value Earth, if humankind had to take the fall, and extinguish itself instead? The reverse narrative is far more dominant—humans racing out in spaceships for a replacement planet. Interestingly, the Oankali believe that letting the human species continue as is constitutes mass-suicide. ‘The Human Contradiction,’ the mixture of intelligence and hierarchical behavior, will always guide humankind to utter destruction of themselves and the Earth. The Oankali believe they are offering a way out—humans may not survive, but their genes can.

It is eventually revealed that the Oankali plan a parallel fate for Earth. They had to save the environment to have something to feed their animalesque spaceships. Once these ships reduce Earth to a desolate core, the half-Human, half-Oankali people will take off in search of more intelligent life to augment. Sadly, this development comes too soon in the books, nullifying what had been a beautiful, difficult paradox. Why not resist, if they’re destroying the Earth as well? So what if the solar system will be eaten by the sun, or a passing black hole, in the matter of aeons? Perhaps humans will outrun it. That’s what the Oankali are doing. The movie version breaks down in development hell.

Power, Change and Science Fiction

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
__________

Octavia E. Butler, the most influential black American woman science fiction writer of the twentieth century, wrote to confront and understand power, an essential part of the human condition that she found entirely “fascinating.”[i] From the Patternist trilogy to Fledgling, her final published novel, Butler rarely flinched from using science fiction to ponder the depths to which people (and aliens) will go to ensure survival and growth. Stories of aliens colonizing war-ravished humans, masters subjugating slaves, men raping women, capitalists exploiting workers, and humans destroying the planet all speak clearly to this stubborn preoccupation with power. They also speak, of course, to what Butler often called the “Human Contradiction,” namely, the tendency to put our innate human “intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior.”[ii] For Butler, humans are born with the capacity to be both extremely intelligent yet equally hierarchical – “characteristics” that she saw as evolutionarily necessary for human survival. Both traits can, if left alone, promote the survival of the species, but as the imaginary histories and futures reveal throughout Butler’s work, a different outcome unfolds, proving entirely that “the two together are lethal.”[iii]

Butler’s interest in the inner-workings of power owes a great deal to the fact that she experienced life from the margins. She was black, female, and (for most of her life) working class. Of course, to say that Butler wrote about power because she herself lacked it is somewhat obvious. As she has already observed: “one of the reasons I got into writing about power was because I grew up feeling like I didn’t have any.”[iv] Not so obvious, however, is the fact that Butler also wrote from another kind of margin: the genre of science fiction. Often relegated to the category of pulp fiction or pop culture, science fiction has endured what Samuel R. Delany has famously called a type of literary “ghettoization,” or the tendency to see science fiction “as a working-class kind of art,” that as such “is given the kind of short-shrift that working-class practices of art are traditionally given.”

Yet where there is power, there is resistance. Where there are centers, there are margins. And where there are ghettoes, there are stories of survival, resilience, and transformation. For although the lived realities of marginalization are not pretty, marginality can also generate counter-narratives and alternative perspectives. As bell hooks has already observed, marginality “offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”[v] And what other genre than science fiction is more equipped to explore radical – even alien – perspectives and wield alternatives to the status quo? It is no wonder Octavia Butler, a self-described introvert and a woman of color, was drawn to science fiction, a genre that she believed attracted “the out kids…People who are, or were, rejects.”[vi]
 

52397

 
The sheer power of Butler’s interest in power emerges with stunning vividness in Parable of the Sower, my personal favorite of all her novels. Like so many post-apocalyptic cyberpunk texts, Parable begins after the fall of civilization as we in the late twentieth century U.S. have come to know it. Gone are the middle-class, basic social services (all of which have been privatized), and clean air and water. In their place is a United States in rapid decline where the majority of its subjects are living on the streets or as “debt” slaves in gated communities that function more like prisons than anything else. When I teach this novel, written the same year as the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, my students often respond with despair. “This is too close to home,” as one put it last quarter. And, yet, this is precisely the response Butler wanted. She wrote it as a cautionary tale: “If we keep doing what we’re doing, here’s what we might end up with.”[vii]

With Parable, though, Butler not only mirrors for us the deadly consequences of unbridled capitalism and environmental destruction. All of this is there, sure. But what she also offers us is a paradigm for change and resistance. I am speaking, of course, of Earthseed, a new religion that Butler, through her protagonist Lauren, imagines as an alternative to dominant Western religions. In fact, Parable comprises two texts: the dystopian reality into which we are thrust and the “Book of Living,” Earthseed’s mission statement, snippets of which are placed at the beginning of most of the chapters. Rooted in a philosophical view that reveres nature, acknowledges the constant of change, and insists on the need for collaboration and community, Earthseed is Butler’s alternative to Christian fundamentalism and its tendency to subordinate the creative and transformative potential of human action to an authoritative, patriarchal, and ultimately oppressive Christian God. With Earthseed, prayer gives way to practice, belief is always attended by action, and Change is both positive and inevitable:

As wind,

As water,

As fire,

As life,

God

Is both creative and destructive,

Demanding and yielding,

Sculptor and clay.

God is infinite Potential.

God is Change.[viii]

Here, in the midst of what can only be described as a type of hell on Earth, Butler articulates a counter-narrative. Here, despite her belief that humanity is innately prone to self-destruction – remember her thing for ‘power’ – Butler dares to imagine an alternative. And this alternative is not outside of us or from the outside: it is a return to our potential to create, to shape, and to change.

In sum, Octavia Butler has left a mark not only because she was the first black woman science fiction writer to make a name for herself, or because she is the first science fiction writer – male or female, black or white – to win the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Grant. She has left her mark because through stories like Parable Butler has proven that marginality can be productive, powerful, and transformative. For although she wrote after the steady decline of the Civil Rights era and during a time (1980s-1990s) in which the black underclass grew exponentially – as it continues to do so today – Butler never ended at hopelessness. Like her marginalized black women protagonists, who always seem to be drawn to writing and collaboration, Octavia Butler is the ultimate ‘radical’ postmodernist whose stories provide a safe space to question, shape, and transform the worlds within and without us.
_________

[i] Conversations with Octavia Butler, 173

[ii] Lilith’s Brood, 467

[iii] ibid., 37

[iv] Conversations, 173

[v] bell hooks, “Marginality as Site of Resistance,” 341

[vi] Conversations, 5

[vii] Conversations, 167

[viii] Parable of the Sower, 270

Ugliness, Empathy, and Octavia Butler

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
__________

How do critiques of identification complicate Western models of empathy? What might empathy look like, and produce, when it doesn’t require identification? What about more difficult cases in which the reader is required to empathize with the oppressor, or with more complicated protagonists? – Megan Boler, “The Risks of Empathy”

She was not afraid. She had gotten over being frightened by “ugly” faces long before her capture. The unknown frightened her. The cage she was in frightened her. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage. – Octavia Butler, Dawn

I didn’t agree to participate in this roundtable on Octavia Butler because I enjoy her writing, but rather because I don’t. My admiration for her storytelling is nothing short of begrudging; I have to work at it. And I’ve always been careful to attribute my resistance to matters of personal taste. Butler is, after all, a beloved award-winning writer in science fiction, a pioneer who helped open a space for communities of black speculative fiction writers that I adore, including Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemison, Tannarive Due, and Zetta Elliot. So if I find the slug-like aliens in Dawn nauseating or if the pedophilic undertones in Fledgling nearly keep me from finishing the novel, then I assume that’s my problem.

My displeasure doesn’t prevent me from recognizing Butler’s importance in my African American literature courses and I teach her fiction whenever I can, with her 1979 novel Kindred being the most popular. Students are eager to embrace the story’s invitation to see the interconnected perils of slave resistance and survival through Dana’s modern eyes, grateful that the narrative’s historical corrective comes at the comfortable distance of science fiction tropes. The book raises provocative questions for debate, although I admit to being troubled by how often readers come away from Kindred convinced that they now know what it was like to be enslaved. Too often, their experience with the text is cushioned by what Megan Boler characterizes as “passive empathy”: “an untroubled identification that [does] not create estrangement or unfamiliarity. Rather, passive empathy [allows] them familiarity, ‘insight’ and ‘clear imagination’ of historical occurrences – and finally, a cathartic, innocent, and I would argue voyeuristic sense of closure (266).

Much of Butler’s fiction doesn’t work this way, however. Estrangement and unfamiliarity, particularly in relation to ugliness and the repulsiveness of the alien body, are central to her work. And this is what gets me. The non-human creatures she imagines make me cringe and their relationships with humans in her fiction are even harder to stomach. My first reaction to the Tlic race in Butler’s 1984 short story, “Bloodchild,” was disgust, made all the more unnerving because of the great care Butler seemed to take in the description of the strange species; the serpentine movements of their long, segmented bodies resemble giant worms with rows of limbs and insect-like stingers.
 

bloodchild

 
It doesn’t matter to me that the Tlic can speak English and feel pleasure and build governing institutions, not when they look like that. In the story, they use humans of both sexes to procreate in what initially appears to be a mutually beneficial, parasitic relationship, at least until the main character, a young human male named Gan, begins to question the status quo. Butler’s description of Gan curled up alongside T’Gatoi, the Tlic who has adopted him and his family, is not really an image I want to grapple with for long:

T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches, and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses. (4)

T’Gatoi uses her authority as a government official to protect humans (called Terrans) in exchange for the use of their bodies as reproductive hosts. The balance of power between the two species tips back and forth in the interest of self-preservation and free will. Gan isn’t sure he wants to be impregnated – is he a partner or a pet? – but he ultimately submits under the terms of a negotiated relationship that takes into account both his discomfort with the T’Gatoi’s rules and his reluctant longing for her affection. T’Gatoi, too, has desires and cares for Gan. She also wants her Tlic children nurtured in a loving home if they are to survive. And while I admit that I can relate to these feelings and conflicted needs, this is a kind of intimacy that I’m willing to share with a pregnant man, not with a bug.*

Boler asserts that Western models of empathy are based on acts of “consuming” or universalizing differences so that the Other can be judged worthy of our compassion. Despite our best efforts, we end up using the Other “as a catalyst or a substitute” for ourselves in order to ease our own fears and vulnerabilities, rather than actively working to change the assumptions that shape our perspective (268). I’m in awe, then, of the way Butler’s science fiction heightens readers’ physical discomfort with characters like the Tlic in order to rebuff passive empathy and other modes of identification that absolve us of the need for critical self-reflection. T’Gatoi is the Other that I can never fully know. I can’t easily reduce her experience to my own, but I also can’t deny the prickle of recognition that comes from the emotional struggle between the Tlic and the Terrans. When Gan’s mother jokes, “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” I recognize her bitterness as a survival strategy, an attempt to upset a social hierarchy and dissociate from the Not Me.

So when I recoil at every reminder of T’Gatoi’s “ugliness,” I wonder what this emotion says about my approach to difference in society and in myself. How does my reaction to the unfamiliar outside the story, my unwillingness to engage the socially embodied strangeness of 2014, compare to the blustery panic of creepy crawly things I want to step on because they are small enough? (And what about those times when the bug is me?)

“Bloodchild” turns my personal readerly aversion into an ideological dilemma and advances the more challenging work of what Boler describes as “testimonial reading”:

Recognizing my position as ‘judge’ granted through the reading privilege, I must learn to question the genealogy of any particular emotional response: my scorn, my evaluation of others’ behaviour as good or bad, my irritation – each provides a site for interrogation of how the text challenges my investments in familiar cultural values. As I examine the history of a particular emotion, I can identify the taken-for-granted social values and structures of my own historical moment which mirror those encountered by the protagonist. Testimonial reading pushes us to recognize that a novel or biography reflects not merely a distant other, but analogous social relations in our own environment, in which our economic and social positions are implicated. (266-7)

Boler’s work on emotion and reading practices draws on her experience teaching Art Spiegelman’s Maus and other fictional works about historical events to make her case. But Butler’s science fiction thought-experiments also provide a framework for a mode of bearing witness that is just as complicated .
 

60929

 
In the 1987 novel, Dawn, the first book of Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (retitled Lilith’s Brood), the main character models the task of testimonial reading against the “affective obstacles” that hinder awareness of “the power relations guiding her response and judgments” (265). These obstacles initially come in the form of extraterrestrials called the Oankali whose bodies are entirely covered with writhing, grayish-white sensory tentacles. They have rescued groups of human survivors, including a black woman named Lilith, in the wake of nuclear destruction on Earth. Awakened on their ship years later, Lilith is required to remaining in her room with one of the ugly creatures until she can look at them without panic. The aliens know that before Lilith can interact with their society without harming herself or others, she must grapple with her revulsion at their physical appearance:

[The Oankali] walked across the room to the table platform, put one many-fingered hand on it, and boosted himself up. Legs drawn against his body, he walked easily on his hands to the center of the platform. The whole series of movements was so fluid and natural, yet so alien that it fascinated her.

Abruptly she realized he was several feet closer to her. She leaped away. Then, feeling utterly foolish, she tried to come back. …

“I don’t understand why I’m so… afraid of you,” she whispered. “Of the way you look, I mean. You’re not that different. There are – or were – life forms on Earth that looked a little like you.”

He said nothing.

She looked at him sharply, fearing he had fallen into one of his long silences. “Is it something you’re doing?” she demanded, “something I don’t know about?”

“I’m here to teach you to be comfortable with us,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”

She did not feel she was doing well at all. “What have others done?”

“Several have tried to kill me.”

She swallowed. It amazed her that they had been able to bring themselves to touch him. “What did you do to them?

“For trying to kill me?”

“No, before – to incite them.”

“No more than I’m doing to you now.” (16-17)

Entire chapters are spent detailing the process through which Lilith learns to view the Oankali named Jdahya without fear. Their exchange invites comparisons with the xenophobia and prejudice of our own world, of course; Lilith’s dark skin could easily elicit similar reactions. Untangling the “genealogy” of her emotional responses becomes even more daunting once she learns that the aliens have three sexes and the ability to manipulate the genetic material of other beings. She is repulsed one moment, curious the next. Unable to look away, she demands answers from Jdahya until her body’s refusal to accept what he is becomes physically and emotionally exhausting. It is then that she begins to ask questions of herself. “God, I’m so tired of this… Why can’t I stop it?” (26).

Butler turns Lilith’s reactionary apprehension into a more productive space for her and for us as readers so that we may all think more critically about the larger forces at work in our judgments of others. To me this is what makes Butler an exceptional storyteller, whether I like her writing or not. Equally important is the fact that Lilith’s encounter with this single Oankali is only a first step. She’ll have to leave the room, meet others, apply what she has learned. For my own part, I’m now half way through Adulthood Rites, the second book in Lilith’s Brood and it is slow going, but I want to finish. The story has been difficult and deeply rewarding for me in a way that I’ve come to expect from Octavia Butler, a reading experience not unlike the probing of limbs that turns to a series of caresses.

 

*Nnedi Okorafor also explores dynamics of power through human companionship with an insect-like robot in her terrific short story, “Spider the Artist.”

Works Cited

Boler, Megan. “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze.” Cultural Studies. 11 (2) 1997: 253-73.

Butler, Octavia. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996.

—–. Lilith’s Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

Octavia Butler Roundtable Index

Posted on by

OctaviaButler2005-by-Leslie-Howle

This is the index for our Octavia Butler Roundtable. Posts are listed in chronological order.

Qiana Whitted — “Ugliness, Empathy, and Octavia Butler”

Lysa Rivera — “Power, Change, and Science Fiction”

Kailyn Kent — “Deus Ex Machina By Alien”

Octavia Butler: Best and Worst

Noah Berlatsky — “How Do You Say ‘Love’ In Alien, Or Vice Versa”

Vom Marlowe — “Wild Seed: A Curious Love Story About Family”

Alexis Pauline Gumbs — “When Goddesses Change”

A.Y. Daring — “When Loss Becomes You”

Julian Chambliss — “The Body Envisioned: Octavia Butler”

Noah Berlatsky — “Pattern Flattener”

Charles Reece — “Is Survival Always The Best Option? Pessimism, Anti-Natalism, and Blood Children”

_____
To see all HU posts on Octavia Butler, including those from before the roundtable, click here.