Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements

by Walidah Imarisha

  If black speculative fiction authors are a family, Octavia was our matriarch. In 2006, three years later, we felt like we’d lost our family.

  Octavia’s death forced us all to remember the primary Earthseed tenet that powers Lauren Olamina’s belief system in Parable of the Sower: the only lasting truth is change.

  • • •

  Octavia was not, perhaps, a stereotypical revolutionary.

  I saw her in disagreements but never heated arguments, never heard her raise her voice, and the only weapon she raised was her pen.

  But she truly was revolutionary—entering the science fiction field, which was overwhelmingly white and male, and becoming the first science fiction writer, black or white, male or female, to win the noted MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1995.

  As an aside, Butler, like many writers, had fame without fortune—so the MacArthur award gave her an unprecedented opportunity to have more financial control of her life. She bought a house and was so struck by the experience that she recalled for me and Steve that she couldn’t believe it.

  At the time we spoke with her in 2000, the huge change in her life represented by the grant was finding its way to her muse: “My character in this novel receives a gift that is a really major gift,” she told us.11 “She’s so powerful that I had to invent some Kryptonite for her. But I didn’t know how she would handle it until I looked back on the MacArthur. I need her to handle it and stay sane. I don’t need her to go nuts, especially since I’m using my life and those years. . . . All of a sudden, I was given something I absolutely never expected and barely realized existed. . . . I didn’t really accept it until I began to see some evidence of it.”

  Sadly—though Octavia described at length during that interview work involving her character who wins a gift and memories of a charismatic older woman who boarded at her mother’s house when she was young—I never again heard her speak about that novel.

  Unbeknownst to me at the time, Octavia suffered from debilitating bouts of depression, and her medication made it very difficult to write. When the fog lifted, the last book she published was Fledgling, her own interpretation of vampire mythology—in which a race of vampires is trying to build immunity to daylight by increasing the melanin in their skin.

  Vampires written only the way Octavia could.

  Fledgling, Butler’s last novel, encompassed many of the same themes that ran like a beacon, or perhaps a plea, through her short stories and twelve novels, which she published over thirty years—between 1976 and 2006.

  As I observed in American Visions magazine in 2000: “Whether Butler writes about the struggles within a society of telepaths (Patternmaster, Doubleday, 1976), a contemporary black woman whisked back in time to the antebellum South (Kindred, Doubleday, 1979), an alien species intent on splicing itself genetically with our own (Dawn, Warner Books, 1987) or the creation of a new religion to help prevent a near-future America from coming apart at the seams (Parable of the Sower, Four Walls/Eight Windows), her work is a prism through which she examines ills in American society.”

  Octavia began publishing in the mid-1970s, toward the end of the powerful student protest and Black Power movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, tied to civil rights and calls against the Vietnam War. Just as an example, at my alma mater, Northwestern University, in May of 1968, students occupied the Bursar’s Office to demand higher black enrollment, scholarships, housing, and a Black Studies program.

  In the aftermath of this highly charged political environment, Butler published her first novel, Patternmaster, where humans are subjugated by a race of telepaths all tied to a central powerful telepath known as the Patternmaster. Humans are chattel and playthings. The novel focuses on the pitfalls of a hierarchical society, another theme Butler raises again and again—particularly in her novel Dawn, where her aliens tell us that the hierarchical tendencies of our species will be our downfall.

  At the time it was published, Butler’s themes of dominance and resistance didn’t resonate with her black detractors, who thought she was writing about the Struggle—at least the struggle as they saw it.

  Ironically, nearly all of Butler’s fiction is about the Struggle, especially as it relates to the quest for change—either depicting change in the world of her fiction, or advocating for change in her creation of dystopian societies that feel eerily like ours.

  In traditional science fiction, according to Robert Heinlein, there are three lines of thought that drive writers:

  “What if—” [What if we built a colony on Mars?]

  “If only—” [If only we could fix past mistakes by traveling through time.]

  And “If this goes on—”

  “If this goes on” is where much of Octavia’s fiction dwells, and it is the theme of her novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.

  Butler was a thorough researcher, with a library in her home, and was well known for making research trips—including a trip to the Peruvian rainforest, where I believe she grew quite ill. She had an excellent understanding of the sciences, but Octavia was a social scientist first and foremost.

  My husband Steve recalls many conversations with Octavia where she held his feet to the fire for not having strong enough political views—she was well informed about the issues of the day and dreamed a better world.

  Her dreams came to life in her work.

  To quote Gregory Jerome Hampton, an assistant professor in African-American literature at Howard University, in his well-researched book Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens and Vampires: “For Butler, the highest goal of humanity is survival by any means necessary, but mainly by accepting difference and acknowledging the inevitability and omnipotence of CHANGE.”

  These ideas of accepting difference and the inevitability of change are dramatically examined in Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, also known as the Xenogenesis series. As Hampton points out, Butler likely drew the character name Lilith from Hebrew mythology. Lilith, reputed to be the first wife of Adam, ran away because she refused to be subservient. She was cursed to see her children die, the first woman to defy the laws of man.

  Lilith’s Brood is a trilogy of novels: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989), set in the aftermath of nuclear destruction on Earth that has claimed an overwhelming percentage of the human population.

  This series represents some of the most biologically based of Butler’s science fiction, introducing her alien species, the Oankali. The Oankali have three genders—male, female and the Ooloi, who are neither male nor female but “lie between partners, gather and recombine genetic material, and inseminate the female to produce offspring. The main Ooloi organ, the yashi, contains genetic information about every living thing. Ooloi can cure anything with a single touch.”12

  Males and females are controlled by the Ooloi, who release pheromones to influence them. In the first novel, Dawn, the Oankali set out to colonize Earth with human hybrids. In the final book, Imago, Lilith’s child Jadahs serves as the catalyst for blending human and Oankali cultures, representing a new day and the promise of more lasting change.

  This vision of genetic splicing, alterations and recombination—and the struggle between disparate groups to make peace and create change for the sake of the collective—is the heartbeat of Octavia’s work.

  As an aside, I’ll point out that even as she tried to create images of evolution, Butler’s work was still bound to the realities of the real world. Although Butler describes the lead character in Dawn as Black, my 1987 paperback cover of Dawn features two white women on the cover. (Ah, book marketing!)

  Change is a slow, arduous business.

  The first time I read Parable of the Sower, I could only read four or five pages in a sitting—the gritty, unforgiving world of Lauren Olamina’s Robledo was too tough to take in bigger doses: a world where a family’s only safety is in walled-in communities under constant surveillance, where the world outside is overrun with scavengers, rapists, and killers
.

  By the time I read the last line of the book, I was sobbing, struck by the actual parable of the sower that Butler quotes on the final page.

  A sower went out to sow his seed;

  And as he sowed, some fell by the

  Way side; and it was trodden down.

  And the fowls of the air devoured

  It. And some fell upon a rock; and

  As soon as it was sprung up, it

  Withered away because it lacked

  Moisture. And some fell among

  Thorns; and the thorns sprang up

  With it, and choked it.

  And others

  Fell on good ground, and sprang up,

  And bore fruit an hundredfold.

  The words hit me like a gunshot. (And how interesting that a novel about the creation of a new religion ends up right back in the lap of the King James Bible.)

  In some ways, this parable may sum up the artist’s view—or perhaps Octavia’s view—of the impact of our work in larger society and Octavia’s hopes for her work in particular.

  We are artists. Some of us are out in the world more than others—and I’m always so moved by the field studies and work outside of the purely creative realm that so many Antioch students hold dear. I myself was raised by civil rights activists. My mother spent forty-nine days in jail for sitting in at a Tallahassee, Florida, Woolworth lunch counter in 1960—so I have grown up with a sense that, like the activists told Octavia in the 1970s, I am somehow shirking my social duties by holing myself up in a room to make up stuff.

  Yet we hope that the work we create is the planting of a seed. And most of the seeds we plant will have no impact beyond entertainment—if that. But one, perhaps one, might actually help change the world. The Quran, after all, is a poem. And the miracles of Jesus were merely an oral history—hardly the underpinnings of a powerful world religion—before the authors of the Gospels wrote the story.

  Parable of the Sower is a book that quite literally sets out to change the world by forcing readers to consider what a powerful force change really is.

  As both a reader and probably especially as a writer, what struck me most about this novel was the way the story actually forced me to become stronger, or else I wouldn’t be able to keep on reading. So, yes, while I cringed through some of the frankness and violence of the rape and murder running rampant in the society she depicts, I felt uplifted by both the sliver of hope offered in the parable itself and by the transformative aspects of the story that touched me in such a personal way. It was one of the few times I’d felt that the ending of a novel took my breath away.

  In Parable of the Sower, a teenaged protagonist, Lauren Olamina, creates her own spiritual doctrine to help order the chaos of the near-future world Butler depicts. She calls her musings “Earthseed: The Books of the Living,” and its primary belief system is that God is change. Butler sprinkles excerpts from the fictitious Books of the Living throughout the chapters as we follow Olamina and her newly gathered disciples across a nightmare-scape.

  Perhaps Butler’s most oft-quoted words are the following passage:

  All that you touch,

  You Change

  All that you Change,

  Changes you.

  The only lasting truth

  Is Change.

  God is Change.

  I’ve often wondered since Octavia’s death what she would have thought of Barack Obama’s successful presidential election bid promising hope and change.

  In Parable of the Sower, rather than depicting genetic splicing to create a new species, the change Butler calls for is in attitude and the interpretation of events around us. Attitudes are in need of change to prevent the dystopia in our book, moving away from a class system—again, the hierarchy—of rich, poor, haves, and have nots. In the world of Parable, a college professor can still get work, but all jobs are hard to come by, and getting to work can be a life-or-death matter. The rich are squirreled away in high-security compounds, the poor live in squalor and violence on virtually unprotected streets, and the middle class—much like now—must fend for itself, in constant flux between the dream of safety at a higher income or the threat of chaos if they lose their homes and neighborhoods.

  Moving also away from racism: although it is set in the near future, beginning in the year 2024, Octavia’s vision for our future is far from postracial. Mixed couples catch hell on the roads, and the characters in this book, as in her earlier works, are often themselves a combination of ethnicities. Protagonist Lauren Olamina’s black father is married to a Mexican-American woman, for example, and the core of her discipleship is made up of ethnically blended families or couples.

  But Butler’s plea—and Lauren Olamina’s—goes beyond the traditional remedies to social ills that we’ve seen embraced by our own politicians.

  Earthseed calls for a change in the way we view ourselves, our world, and our God.

  God is Power—

  Infinite,

  Irresistible,

  Inexorable,

  Indifferent.

  And yet, God is Pliable—

  Trickster,

  Teacher,

  Chaos,

  Clay.

  God exists to be shaped.

  God is change.

  Perhaps Lauren Olamina’s (and Butler’s) greatest challenge is to convince her potential followers that she is describing a valid belief system.

  An excerpt from the book starts with a skeptical character, Travis.

  “I still can’t see change or entropy as God.”

  “Then show me a more pervasive power than change,” [Lauren Olamina] said. “It isn’t just entropy. God is more complex than that. Human behavior alone should teach you that much. And there’s still more complexity when you’re dealing with several things at once—as you always are. There are all kinds of changes in the universe.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe, but nobody’s going to worship them.”

  “I hope not,” I said. “Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures. Worship is no good without action. With action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind.”

  To Butler, action to create change is the highest imperative. She revisits that idea in another Earthseed verse: “Belief initiates and guides action—or it does nothing.”

  I can’t help believing that if Octavia were alive to witness our mortgage crisis unfolding and the ongoing debate over health care, she would think she was seeing the pages of her novel coming to life. Several families crowded in a single home because of the inability to find work and a system of de facto slavery by companies that hire workers at pitiful wages in exchange for food, shelter, and safety.

  I can guarantee you that no part of Octavia would be surprised.

  What is, in fact, most horrifying about reading Parable of the Sower is that the world of this novel DOES feel so much like our own.

  Identity, Community and Change in Octavia E. Butler

  Much in the way that Barack Obama’s blended ethnicity helped pave his way to the White House, Octavia Butler’s work often points to the blending of ethnicities and species as a portal to the future.

  As Gregory Jerome Hampton points out in chapter six of Changing Bodies in the Work of Octavia Butler, “The blurring or mixing of character identities in Butler’s fiction is facilitated by migration over land or through space. To be identified as a hybrid in Butler’s fiction is, often times, synonymous with becoming a survivor and a signifier of the future.”

  This idea is very clear in Octavia’s last novel, Fledgling, where, as a sometimes horror writer, I was personally thrilled to see Octavia venturing into the realm of the vampire novel. It was Octavia’s first novel in seven years after a terrible bout of writer’s block due to medications and illness—and the last she would write.

  But naturally, Octavia isn’t simply going to write a vampire novel as we have come to understand them.

  Octavia h
erself was somewhat dismissive of Fledgling. I got the first call from her in a long time in the summer of 2005, when she asked me to read Fledgling for a blurb, and she sounded so embarrassed about the book that I assured her, “I’m sure it’s brilliant!” Butler seemed to go out of her way to insist to me that no, actually, it was not.

  I only mention this to point out that we all face insecurities about our work, and Octavia was no different. But as I said in my blurb—which, incidentally, never appeared on the book cover—I considered Fledgling to be “vintage Octavia Butler.” There is no mistaking the author and her favorite thematic preoccupations, including the call for change.

  As in Parable of the Sower, the protagonist in Fledgling represents youthfulness—although she is chronologically in her fifties, the protagonist has the appearance of a ten- or eleven-year-old girl. This girl, named Shori, has also suffered a memory loss, so part of her quest in the story is to discover herself and her history—as all young people must.

  In Fledgling, the telepathic ties Butler first introduced in Patternmaster emerge in a different form. This time, Shori gains control over a band of followers by biting them and feeding from them—which creates strong loyalty and mutual satisfaction and pleasure.

  There is again the pattern of hierarchy—Butler’s race of vampires holds domination over mortals—but Shori, like the character of Mary introduced in Mind of My Mind, the second of her Patternist series, feels a deep sense of responsibility for the mortals in her “family.” Just as Mary needed to feed from the power of weaker telepaths to gain strength, Shori must have seven or eight “symbionts” in her circle to maintain her feeding.

  Shori hails from a race called the Ina, who form the basis of all vampire myth. Like the Bram Stoker variety of vampire, they are saddled with the vampire’s burden: an inability to come out during daylight.

  In other words, Butler’s vampires are also forced to live in darkness.

  The first line of the novel, in fact, is: “I awoke to darkness.”