Backlisted - Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

This episode features a live recording made at Foyles in London, where John was joined on stage by Una McCormack, making her record breaking tenth appearance on Backlsited, and Salena Godden, who returns eight years after blowing us away in the episode on Hubert Selby Jr.  The book under discussion is The Parable of the Sower a 1993 novel by the American science fiction writer, Octavia Butler.  For those of you don’t know her work, you are in for a roller coaster ride. As fellow American novelist Junot Diaz has written, Butler is ‘one of the most significant literary artists of the twentieth century.’ This episode examines what makes her so important and why her reputation has taken time to establish itself, particularly in the UK. The novel is set in a superficially familiar California, a place that is rapidly descending into violence and mob rule, and is told through the eyes of Lauren Olamina, a teenage girl who has the ability to feel the pain of others as her own. The discussion covers the themes of religion and its uses in the novel, and the disfiguring legacy of slavery that Butler’s work constantly returns to. It provides an excellent introduction to the work of a writer whose books become more relevant with each passing year.  An extended bonus episode on Parable of the Sower will be available on 12/10/25 for our Patrons on the Locklisted level - www.patreon.com/backlisted *For £100 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted *Tickets are now on sale for our next live show in London where we will be discussing Round The Fire Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle on 23/10/2025 * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Batlisted is brought to you by Sirius Readers, a reading lamp for people like you and me. Sirius Readers. I've got one of these lamps and I think it's fantastic. Yeah, it's a great lamp for reading indoors. Perfect now the night's getting darker because it simulates daylight with its HD light. Which means you can read for hours and hours without any risk of eye strain. The great news is Sirius Readers are giving Batlisted listeners £100 off any HD light and free UK delivery. Just go to SiriusReaders.com forward slash backlisted and use the discount code BACK.

That's SiriusReaders.com forward slash backlisted with the code BACK. And there's a 30 day risk free trial so you can return the light after 30 days for free if you're unhappy with it, which I very much doubt you will be. So without further ado, lights out for the podcast. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us back at Foyles and Chancross Road for the first of our series of autumn live recordings. And although we're sitting comfortably in a warm and beautifully appointed modern bookshop, soon we're going to find ourselves immersed in an alternative version of California in

an imagined 2024 as we enter the strange and violent world of the Parable of the Sower, a 1993 novel by the American writer Octavia Butler. Some introductions. I'm John Mitchinson, publisher of Unbound, where people pledge to support the books that we want to read. And although sadly for family reasons, there's no Andy tonight, but we do have two returning guests. Friends of the show, Una McCormack and Selena Gordon.

I'll start with Selena. Selena is an award-winning novelist, poet, and broadcaster of Jamaican and Irish heritage. Her debut novel, Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death, won the Indie Book Awards for Fiction, the People's Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon-Burne Prize. Her literary childhood memoir, Springfield Road, a brilliant book, I'm allowed to say that because I did publish it. And her new full collection of poetry, With Love, Grief and Fury, was published by Cannon Gate back in May, and an eagerly anticipated second novel in the Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death universe is due for publication with Cannon Gate in spring 2026. Amazing. Now,

backlisted listeners will know those of you who remember Selena's Tour de Force performance back in 2016, can it really be? I can't believe it's been that long. On the episode dedicated to episode 18, dedicated to last exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selber Jr. You will testify that Selena is an electrifying live performer. It'd be fair to say, Selena, you've been doing electrifying live performances

for at least the last 20 years, brilliantly, all over the world, all over the UK. But she's also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a patron of Hastings Book Festival, an honorary Fellow of Estine Sussex, and co-host of the monthly arts and culture radio show and podcast, Roaring Twenties radio for Soho Radio. Celina, welcome back. Why has it taken us so long? I don't know, but I'm very happy to be here and thank you for inviting me to talk about this spectacular book. I'm very excited about this.

Well, why are we here to talk about this spectacular book? Well, here's a clue. Dr. Una McCormack is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling science fiction writer who's written more than 20 novels based on TV shows such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. An associate fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge, her academic interests include feminist science fiction, transformative works, and creative writing practice and methodology. She's on the editorial board of Gold SF, an imprint of Goldsmiths Press, aimed at publishing new voices in intersectional feminist science fiction, and she's a trustee of the Science Fiction Foundation. But I think more than anything else tonight, she is making her record-breaking tenth appearance

on Bat Listed. Woohoo! Double figures, guys! The first of our guests to hit double figures. Now you talk about range, listen to this. She has previously joined us for episodes dedicated to Georgette Heyer, Anita Bruckner, William Golding, J.R.R. Tolkien, Terence Dix, Russell Homan, Noel Streetfield, Winifred Holby, and on our Sci-Fi special where one of the books she chose was a book

by tonight's featured author, Octavia Butler. And Luna, welcome, welcome back. Thank you, John. Very good. I was browsing Instagram sometime earlier this year and I saw an amazing, I think it was Octavia Butler's birthday, was it, Selena, that you were? No, it was July the 20 2024, when the book begins, and I was going bananas trying to start a revolution.

Or trying to make everyone read it and start reading it on the same day, at least. Yeah. Well, we should start where all these shows begin with the question, the famous question, which is... I'll start with you, Celina. Where were you when you first discovered either Octavia Butler or this novel? Or both? I must admit I'm one of the newbies to Octavia Butler's work. I discovered her really recently, I'm gonna say maybe two years ago, three years ago, so really super recently, maybe even the last lockdown, or there was some kind

of trapped at home thing going on. Maybe I was poorly or my partner was poorly. And I got into audiobooks and stumbled upon Parable of the Sower. And I was like, what is this? And I've just kind of got, like I do, you know, get quite obsessed about things. You know, find a favourite colour, everything's got to be that colour. Or find a favourite author and everything's got to be that author. So I just started like really looking into her work and looking into things. And I remember it really quite clearly because I think there's a little sadness actually because I think the 12-year-old me would have loved her.

I was a massive reader of books, a real nerd with my big Afro and my National Health glasses. And for some reason, I was given Handmaid's Tale, and I was given these other books, but I was never given any Octavia Butler. And I think if I had, I would have seen a book where I am in it, where people that look like me are in it, and then it probably wouldn't have been such a far reach for me to dream to write, to be, to do what I want to do with my writing. But I found her now, and it's never too late to find a book.

So it's given me real confidence for the new novel and for new things that I want to do. I can sort of feel her like a guiding sort of fairy godmother of writing really big original unique you know hope and and daring and I really loved that. Amazing. Yeah. When did you first encounter it, Tavia Butler? It's been this has been quite a long relationship for you. Yeah it's a sort of three-part relationship I think but I partly I think it's due with what you were saying about going looking for stories that actually have you in them. And from about the kind of early mid 90s onwards, I was trying to find that in feminist science fiction.

But I get to Octavia Butler a little bit later than perhaps other authors like Le Guin, because she's not really published in Britain. You can't find her books very easily. She's first published, and only three of her books are published in Britain. She's first published by the Women's Press. So I think I got to parables and kindred, maybe about... And the Women's Press had a sci-fi imprint then. They did have a sci-fi imprint. Yeah, I'd forgotten that.

So it's very distinctive. Women's Press have got these distinctive kind of stripey spine. In a secondhand bookshop, you'll see these black and white spines and a little iron steaming ahead. But they also did a science fiction range, which I collect, which have got a grey spine. This one doesn't, interestingly. But they did both parables. They did kindred. But that was all that they put into print. I think all that was actually published in the UK. You would have had to have tracked her down through the States.

So I was reading her as part of my great attempt to kind of fill in this gap and going, I don't want to read Asimov. I don't want to read all this stuff. I want to read stuff about people like me and ideas that I'm interested in. But my real encounter with Octavia Butler came when I was teaching a short story course,

how to write the short stories, writing science fiction short stories. And I didn't like the stories that I'd inherited. So what do you do? Well, at the time I threw it out to my group of friends on LiveJournal, this data, and immediately everybody came back. I think it was Nisi Shaw,

African-American science fiction writer. She said, you've got to do Bloodchild. You've got to do Bloodchild. Got to do Bloodchild. I thought, okay do Bloodchild, got to do Bloodchild. I thought, okay, well, I know Octavia Butler, I haven't read Bloodchild. I read Bloodchild, we'll come back to that, and set it for my students, and it blew their minds.

It's an exceptionally good short story. It's extremely visceral and disturbing. And that really was my encounter with Butler, the power that she had to really make, in a very short story, make a set of students think. And then my very last coda to this story is that eventually, the rest of her story starts to appear in the UK. And I found sort of volumes of Lilith's brood

in the patternist series right here in this bookshop downstairs. I was browsing the science fiction section in Foyles and there they were with a kind of black spine. Of course, those of you who will know Foyles of Old, they helpfully organized their books by publisher. Ideally, I know. It was amazing. The most insane system you ever heard of. I thought the pleasure of walking down a shelf of Virago. Yeah, I know.

I mean, for some publishers, pick a door, Virago, boom. Amazing. Not so good for a lot of others. But assuming that not everybody has read the book and assuming that we want to get into the discussion of the book sooner rather than later, I'm going to come back in a moment and get you, Selina, to read as we like to do the blurb. We think it's the best blurb, but it's the blurb of the brilliant graphic novel that's

been made of A Peril of the Sower. But let's do that after a message from our sponsors. Life and death were two very realistic coexisting possibilities in my life. I didn't even think I'd make it to my 16th birthday, to be honest. I grew up being scared of who I was. Any one of us at any time can be affected by mental health and addictions. Just taking that first step makes a big difference. It's the hardest step. But CAMH was there from the beginning.

Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit camh.ca. Hey, we're back. Excellent. Now, we're going to talk about the blurb. We're going to get a little bit of the story out there so that people who don't know the story don't look at us in bafflement when we start to discuss it. Okay, so if you haven't read the book, it's written as a journal. Just read the blurb.

Yeah, stop it. Stop. In the year 2024, the United States teeters on the edge of madness. No shit, Sherlock. The country is marred by unattended environmental disasters, economic crisis, and social chaos. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olimina, a preacher's daughter living in Los Angeles, is protected

from danger by the walls of her gated community. However, her world is ruled by fear, and she is afflicted with hyper-empathy. She feels the physical pain of those around her as if it were her own. On top of everything else, in opposition to her father's Baptist preaching, she is developing her own religion, Earthseed. When her gated community is destroyed and her family murdered, Lauren travels north to try and find safety and to spread her new system of belief with these new founding words. All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.

Brilliant. Well, thank you. Well, that is kind of a pretty good blurb, I think. Yeah, it's a pretty good blurb. It's better than the one I've got, which so... But the thing that really strikes me about this book, I mean, there are loads of stuff that we'll go into about why it's different, why it's now different to 1993. But one of the things about the book, there isn't a sense in the book, is there, of a catastrophe having happened? It's not post-nuclear, kind of, a la The Road by Cormac McCarthy. There's no, kind of, cordyceps fungus that's eating people like The Last of Us.

It's just like modern American life ratcheted on a few notches. It's a withering, a withering of the states and a withering of institutions and a withering of belief in them. So there's no pandemic or anything like that, but it's a loss of faith in those institutions. And the institutions stop supplying the goods. The police in this are particularly corrupt, I think. You sort of pay fees.

Bit like Brazil, isn't it? I think it's a Terry Gilliam film. Yeah, but I think what she puts her finger on is the kind of logical trajectory of where Reaganomics is going to go, that kind of pulling back of the state. But if we pull it back too far, nothing's going to work anymore.

None of this is going to function. And that's what she extrapolates. But what is interesting is that there are still police. There is still fuel, although not much of it. There is still water. There's still money, to some extent. But money, she's interested. She really makes that point throughout the book,

doesn't she? You have to pay thousands of dollars for basic food. But it still kind of works. And it's what I think one of the things that makes it so original and food, but it still kind of works. It's what I think one of the things that makes it so original is that she's not inventing lots of futuristic technology. There is a little earring that is a radio that she puts in her ear at one point. Lauren, who's the main character,

which is a bit like an air pod, but other than that, there isn't a massive amount of it, it's the main character, which is a bit like an airport. But other than that, there isn't a massive amount of it. It's very familiar. Yeah. It's one of those science fiction books that's kind of written before the internet, but you don't feel the absence of the internet or mobile phones because you kind of go, oh, well, there's not enough power. You can charge it or, you know, the internet's probably rubbish by them because it's all

written by AI. So who would use that anyway? Or that kind of thing. I think the only, what you call the novum, which is the science fictional elements, is that hyper empathy that you mentioned. That she has this ability to feel the pain of others. And Butler gives it a kind of quasi scientific explanation,

doesn't she? It's kind of the effect of a drug her mother was taking when she was pregnant with Lauren. There is one pretty cool, well, I'll say, it's a terrifying drug in the book called Pyro. Yeah. Which is that the characters get sexually aroused by setting fire to things. Yeah. Which...

Who are monsters? I mean, yeah. Well you say that now. One thing you said there, which is fascinating, which is obviously, this book is very often regarded as science fiction. Can we hear the first clip of Octavia Butler? This is a 2005 interview. So it's the year before she died talking about Parable of the Sower. How did you first become attracted to that type of writing? Oh, I think I loved it because, well, I fell into writing it because I saw a bad movie, a movie called Devil Girl from Mars, and went into competition with it. But I think I stayed with it because it was so wide open, it gave me the chance to comment

on every aspect of humanity. People tend to think of science fiction as, oh, Star Wars or Star Trek. And the truth is there are no closed doors and there are no required formulas. You can go anywhere with it. Yeah, I thought that was just so interesting because there is this... A lot of people who are science fiction fans have a much broader idea of science fiction than a lot of people who aren't. In my experience, they assume that it has to have kind of spaceships or hyper technology or be set in the future.

But she didn't feel that. And I'm looking particularly at you, Una, as the scholar of science fiction. Yes, I would agree. I think, you know, Margaret Atwood used to say, I'm not sure she still says it, that she didn't write science fiction because it didn't have like squids in it, you know, this kind of thing. But that, I mean, I would never think that's what science fiction was. It's a much broader church. I don't think anyone quite agrees on the definition. It's a big fuzzy set of all sorts of different kind of tropes. There's usually a kind of toolbox we might associate it. There's some critical language we can attach to it. You kind of know it when you see it, I think. And it's really good to see someone like Butler being picked up and read,

because I think it does show that that kind of split that we've got into this mode of, well, we've got realism and then we've got the other stuff, that's much more interesting when you jam this stuff together. I think it goes into so many different genres. It's a coming of age story, as much as it's a dystopian story, it's a theological story, and it's also a kind of utopian story. There's something going in there, you know, trying to create utopia and it manages to balance both of those. That's interesting because, you know, you mentioned before that discovering her had

been like a liberation for you. Oh, yeah. Because Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death, I'd be fascinated to know how many people here have read Selena's amazing first novel. Oh, thank you. It's not a realist novel, is it? No, not at all. But you probably wouldn't describe it as science fiction either. Well, no, but then it's, you know, but then it is, I'm not doing anything particularly original. I'm writing about the dialogue of life and death and time and hope and love as though they're people.

And I think humankind, mankind have been trying to write that story forever, whether you're talking about gods and monsters or whether you're talking about the representatives of death or the representatives of life, angels. I think people have been writing those stories forever. I think I really love that in Octavia Butler's work. I keep going back to this word utopia. I really feel that we're putting so much energy and time into stories where everything's gone incredibly wrong, where fascism has won, like your stories like 1984,

or like Handmaid's Tale. And even the parable of a sower has got that, but there is hope in there. There is this driving hope. There is someone trying to make sense of the chaos and trying to make sense of the danger and the violence. And that's what I'm really intrigued by and really loving in her work. It's interesting, the latest edition, the headline edition has got John Green is the quote on the front, the fault is in our stars.

And there is a slight feeling of it being almost, I mean maybe with the TikTok audience in mind, that they're repositioning it almost as YA. I know that that's something that Andy felt was that it's gone from being serious kind of sci-fi to, hey, this has got a teenager as the main character. So if you've read Handmaid's Tale, then you want to be picking this one up next, I guess. That was really interesting. And John Green is the clincher, really. I think that's the... What's the cover like? Is it kind of, is it reminiscent of... I've got the same one. Can you describe it?

Surely people can see this on the radio. I'd like to describe it because it's like an old fashioned, old fashioned slavery almost era, which is quite misleading because the book is set in 2024. And she's dressed as a man for most of the book. Exactly. I mean, I would say it is massively misleading. Yeah. And entirely inappropriate. Yeah.

I mean, you can't blame the publisher for wanting to get young people to pick it up and read it because I think you would totally give this to teenagers. I think it would attract young readers because of the hyper-empathy. I don't know how many young teenagers you talk to, but they are really, have hyper-empathy, especially this new generation. They're amazing. They have capacity to love and care and want to fight for the planet and for peace and love. They're amazing. It is Olimina's book, isn't it? Lauren's book, it is Lauren Olimina's book. I mean, you're inside her head,

but you are also kind of, as you say, you're inside her imagination. I mean, she is a little bit annoying. Sure. She is a bit preachy, right? She does kind of preach a bit. She's quite focused on the big idea, isn't she? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And she's there to convert you. Yeah. But yeah, but you know, she's in love. Yeah. She's annoyed by her brothers. Yeah. One of whom is a particularly appalling specimen. Her dad is a hard ass,

but also she adores her dad and he's a Baptist preacher. And she- There's a step-mom that she sort of has a, you know, not always perfect relationship with. In other circumstances, quite a normal teenager, but the circumstances aren't. Una, how much do you think of Octavia Butler's own life is there in this book? It's always a terrible question to ask about any book. Yeah, I think it's always a dodgy move kind of trying to extrapolate.

The thing that I think that Octavia Butler does that I think is closest to a thing that Lauren does is she used to write kind of daily affirmations to herself. So her journals are, you can visit the archive now, her journals are full of sort of, I will succeed, I will publish, I will publish again, I will sell books, I will win awards. And there's a little bit of that, I think, in what Lauren does, that practice of thinking

through the world, through the words that she writes. That would be the kind of closest biographical material. But her first book was published in 1976, right? But she's not really published in 1976, right? But she's not really published in the UK until... 1995. So, yeah, that's nearly 10 years later. Now, I think I already know that you're going to push back against this, but my impression

is in those early 90 years, I looked back at 93 and what else was being published. And it was, you know, there was a lot of literary fiction out there was particularly Donna Tartt's Secret History had just been published. It was the year Victim of Sates' A Suitable Boy was published. There was the all the usual stuff as well, the kind of, you know, Adrian Mole and lots of the stuff. I was at Waterstones in those days. Maybe this is to do with the genre thing, but I only became aware of Octavia Butler's work when Andy did it on about five years ago. It was when people were beginning to talk about her. So my impression is that she was something that was only known

to science fiction aficionados or people who are reading a lot of American speculative fiction but she never sort of made that crossover into the mainstream which is, I mean, I just wonder why that is, do you think? So the reason, I mean, I don't know what her sales were. I mean, if you can, perhaps the closest book to this maybe would be, that I would think of would be something like Stephen King's The Stand, with that post-apocalyptic journey and all that sort of stuff.

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten. And a kind of religious element to it as well. She's certainly not well known in Britain. Yeah. But I think she has this steady rise in reputation throughout her life. And it moves outside of the immediate circles. So she's, she wows people as an unpublished writer in 1970

when she goes to Clarion, she's like the science fiction writers, mass MFA, yeah. So she wows them there and through the 80s she picks up the awards. She gets things like the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus Award. But she's not just constrained to that. She gets a Langston Hughes Medal, yeah? She gets a Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN America, yeah? And then she gets definitely her biggest accolade

and the thing that changes her life. She gets a MacArthur Genius Grant. And that, I think, and the most important thing about the MacArthur Genius grant, she's the first science fiction writer to get one of these. Not the first African American woman science fiction writer, not the first woman, but the first science fiction writer. So I think her reputation grows steadily and steadily and steadily and steadily. And I think what's really interesting about Butler is that after she dies, she doesn't have that period of neglect that women writers have.

I think that reputation just continues to grow and grow and grow and grow, and it's very nurtured by people who read her and immediately love her and immediately see that worth. But it starts in science fiction, it moves out into something that perhaps is going to be read by African American readers and editors. It moves then into a much wider literary circle. She's a public speaker.

It just keeps growing and growing and growing. So I think almost in Britain, we're catching up in many ways. But that sense of Lauren in the book sort of educating herself from her dad's library, that feels quite autobiographical. I think that's fair, yeah. Celine, do you get that sense when you read her for the first time that this was a writer who feels almost like she comes out of nowhere, that she's not writing out of a tradition, she's writing out of her own, really out of her own imagination. Yeah, very much so. If you're asking me what draws me to her or what, I think it's that I can see the work

that's gone into her work, the drive behind it. And there's a lot of things that we do that are quite similar that I've been doing since when I was working and doing Springfield Road with you 10 years ago. I get up at four in the morning, she used to get up at two in the morning. And I used to write contracts to myself. I've got diaries and notebooks of contracts to myself. And I saw that she did that and I saw them on the internet. I was like, I'm not crazy.

This is a thing. This is a thing. This is a thing. Having that discipline and that contract with yourself because you know you've got to work twice as hard, twice as big, and it's just going to be closed door after closed door and just to keep pushing. I think that's what I'm feeling in her work and in the way that she's sharing it and the way she talks about her work. There's amazing interviews on YouTube that I've just like really soaked up. So yeah. She's amazingly articulate.

We should hear something from the book. But before we hear something from the book, here's a message from our sponsors. And we're back in the room. Una, would you like to read a little from the beginning of the book? Yeah, absolutely. So I picked a little bit just because it's sort of her first statement of what her beliefs are. So you almost feel like she's writing her manifesto down to herself really for the first

time. down to herself really for the first time, and the journal entry is dated Saturday August the 17th 2024. For whatever it's worth here's what I believe. It took me a lot of time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right, just the way it has to be. In the past year, it's gone through 25 or 30 lumpy, incoherent rewrites. This is the right one, the true one. This is the one I keep coming back to. God is power, infinite, irresistible, inexorable, indifferant. infinite, irresistible, inexorable, indifferent.

And yet, God is pliable, trickster, teacher, chaos, play. God exists to be shaped. God is change. This is the literal truth. God can't be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying and then,

only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve. If they're used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us. God is power and in the end, God prevails. That's what I know. That's some of it anyway. That's brilliant, isn't it? That's so good. Yes. Anyway. That's brilliant, isn't it? That's so good. Yes.

Thank you very much. So that was written in 1993, and Lauren is 15 when she's writing that. And 1993, from what I, in my memory at least, was a relatively benign year. I think there was always war. there was war in Bosnia, but reading the visceral accounts of violence and bloodshed and cruelty, it feels much more like a 2024 novel than a 1993 novel. I mean, do you feel, when you were reading it for this, Selena, did that strike you that this book is incredibly prescient? Yeah, massively. There's so much I want to say about that. Like, there's part of me that wants

to very much say how prophetic Octavia Butler is. But I don't feel that she was... I think it's also a great imagination and a great observation of what she was seeing, whether it was sexism or racism or violence, just the existence. Climate change. Yeah, climate change. Exactly. violence, just the existence. Climate change. Yeah, climate change, exactly. And I think she was just very awake and alert and just seeing where the world was going.

I believe this book wasn't written as prophecy, but more as this is what will happen if you carry on like this, more as warning. Yes, visionary, but not this is for sure going to happen, but this might happen if we carry on like this. I think I saw in an interview, she said, I hope this isn't prophecy. I love that boldness in her vision with that. Couldn't have been easy to write. Some of the scenes in it are so violent and so much in it is so painful. A lot of people would have probably been like, la la la, climate change doesn't exist. Can you imagine back in 1993,

people have really changed now. Well, also, because the second book, The Parable of the Talents, there is extremely kind of, that feels extremely prescient with the rise of apparently democratic. There's a bit of that in Parable of the Sower with what's he called, President Tanner, who's Donna.

So Donna is her take on Reagan. She loathed Reagan, couldn't stand him. One proximate cause, I think, is the LA riots of 1992, the Rodney King riots. So that's a kind of, a kind of brat drop. I think her genius, her visionary genius is, it's almost a science fiction, I'd call it a science fiction one, because it's so extrapolative.

It's like she's kind of gone, you know, here's what the world is like now. I'm gonna sit and think through what the logical progress of that will be. And because I think she has a particular take on human nature, because she thinks that, you know, for all our achievements and all of this, we pull towards being hierarchical and competitive and selfish.

It's almost like she's always pulling between this vision that she can see and this sort of sense of what, how people are going to let her down, yeah? Or let themselves down. So do you mean, so the way they let Lauren down are like some of the things that she can see the flaws in the way. So Lauren being, if you want a character that's hope, walking, living hope, and then the way that she's betrayed or let down or, you know, or not listened to. I think, oh think it's more talking about Butler there that that's the kind of that's the sort of engine of her

fiction I think is this tension between what we could be and what we what we often deliver. We've not spoken about it yet there were going to be four sequels to this. She tries to write the next one called Parable of the Trickster and they're going to be Trickster teacher, Chaos Clay. And she can never, she has about three or four stabs at Trickster and can never resolve it. It was going to be an Earthseed community on a different planet,

but she could never quite work out what they would do. Would that condition alter the way that humans interacted, or would we kind of always fall back into kind of violence and short-sightedness? I mean she's pretty relentless writer isn't she? She doesn't really let herself off the hook at any point or Lauren off the hook. It's interesting you get with sort of moving towards Earthseed, maybe we should just hear what she, because I think this, we've mentioned religion a couple of times, it would be great

just to hear what she had to say about the religion in the book. What I wanted to write was a novel of someone who was coming up with solutions of the sort. My main character's solution is, well, grows from another religion that she comes up with. Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge this religion or not. So I thought religion might be an answer as well as in some cases a problem. And in, for instance, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, it's both. So I have people who are bringing America to a kind of fascism because their religion is the only one they're willing to tolerate. On the other hand, I have people who are saying, well, here

is another religion and here are some verses that can help us think in a different way, and here is a destination that isn't something that we have to wait for after we die. Yeah, I mean, that's almost 20 years ago. It is remarkable how wise she is. And I think that's one of the things I feel strongly about all her work, is that she is somehow able to look into the abyss.

Yeah, doesn't it make you feel incredibly sad? Like if she walked into the room right now and picked up a newspaper right now, looked at us now, I think she'd be so disappointed in us. I am. But maybe not surprised. Yeah, maybe not surprised. Celine, do you want to read some?

Because I think the bit that you were going to read kind of feeds into this. Just this little bit of dialogue I was going to read, wasn't I? Okay, let's have a go. Now we lounged in the shade of pines and sycamores. I enjoyed the sea breeze, rested and talked. I wrote, fleshing out my journal notes for the week. I was just finishing that when Travis sat down next to me and asked his question, You believe in all this earthseed stuff, don't you?

Every word I answered. But you made it up. I reached down, picked up a small stone, and put it on the table between us. If I could analyze this and tell you all that it was made of, what would that mean? Would that mean I'd made up its contents? He didn't do more than glance at the rock. He kept his eyes on me. So what did you analyze to get Earthseed? He didn't do more than glance at the rock. He kept his eyes on me.

So what did you analyze to get Earthseed? Other people, I said. Myself, everything I could read, hear, see, all the history I could learn. My father is, was a minister and a teacher. My stepmother ran a neighborhood school. I had a chance to see a teacher. My stepmother ran a neighborhood school. I had a chance to see a lot. And what did your father think of your idea of God? He never knew. He never had the guts to tell him. I shrugged. He's the one person in the world I worked hard not to hurt. Dead?

Yeah. Yeah, my parents too. He shook his head. People don't live long these days. There was a period of silence. After a while he said, How did you get your ideas about God? I was looking for God, I said. I wasn't looking for mythology or mysticism or magic. I didn't know whether there was a God to find, but I wanted to know. God would have to be a power that could not be defied by anyone or anything. Change. Change, yes. But it's not a God, it's not a person or an intelligence, or even a thing. It's just, I don't know, an idea. I smiled. Was that such a terrible criticism? It's a truth, I said. Change is ongoing. Everything changes in some way. Size, position, composition, frequency, velocity, thinking, whatever. Every living thing, every bit of matter,

all the energy in the universe changes in some way. I don't claim that everything changes in every way, but everything changes in some way. Brilliant. APPLAUSE Brilliant. Thank you. Bits of that remind me, although very different style of Ridley Walker, you know, that sense of change, of the flux of the universe, and a child or a young person looking at reality

and making account of that reality to themselves, which is what Lauren has to do without... I mean, I suppose she has her dad and she has the biblical, but she's quite furtive about the fact that she's... she won't tell her dad that she's made up her own religion and her own version of God. She makes a mistake, doesn't she, of sharing some of her ideas with her best friend? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Very early on in the book, she sort some of her ideas with her best friend? Yeah, very early on in the book, she sort of has a conversation with her best friend

where she kind of says, you know, any any minute we could all just get shot. So I think it's wise that we have like little survival packs. And the friend, they're both about 15, the friend panics and runs off to her parents. And, you know, Lauren gets into huge trouble and Lauren is thinking, oh, I'm glad I didn't mention the Earthseed stuff. That would have been an absolute disaster. But so always I think she's, like the character, like Ridley,

I think she sees a truth and is trying to live a life according to it and to work out what that truth means for her and for the unbelievably dire situation in which she finds herself. Would Lauren have come up with these ideas? If it had been our 1993, you know, and MTV's on and she's watching Kurt Cobain or whatever,

would Lauren have different ideas there? It's such a really incredible choice of character for someone who basically founds a religion. We're talking about a kind of future Jesus or Muhammad, aren't we? That's what we're seeing. Yeah, and the fact that she's so, you know, she's very wise. You know, that she has a relationship in the book, which people might find of which she's 18 and he's 57, which she has agency and control in that in a way that, again, in the hands of a different writer would be uncomfortable. If he in any way tried to prevent her starting Earthseed, Lauren will bought that.

Would have just dropped him, yeah. Earthseed takes centrality, I think. There's a huge part of me that believes that the 15-year-old Lauren is based on the 15-year-old Octavia. There's a huge part of me that believes that she was really in touch. There's something she said about that.

When I was a 10-year-old writer, I expected to be one day an 80-year-old writer. I think this is something that she was carrying and thinking about. I think a lot of writers do that. Isn't that an incredible phrase? You return to themes. You return to things that you were daydreaming about when you were sort of nine riding around on your bike, you know, watching...

Devil Girl from Mars. Yeah. Devil Girl from Mars. And reading comics. Isn't that amazing to hear herself say, and just insist on it, when I was a 10-year-old writer, and that's who I was,

and that's who that 10-year-old was, and to reach back and give that to that 10-year-old. Yeah, and it gives me goosebumps thinking about it. It really does. I love that about her, that this was a certain definite path, and something she definitely wanted to do with her life on Earth. And I love that about her, that this was a certain definite path and something she definitely wanted to do with her life on earth. And I love that.

One of the things that is unavoidable when you're dealing with her work is that to some degree or other that the ideas around slavery are kind of come to the surface. Early editions of her work, I know she was frustrated that they would have, with clearly black characters in, would have white characters on the covers. I mean, I guess she saw a degree of change in her lifetime for that. But she is, again, it's hard not to feel she's slightly ahead of the game. Very, yeah. When you think of writers who are now being lauded, Colson Whitehead and Percival Everett,

brilliant, who use slavery not simply as the backdrop to novels, but as a whole way of understanding power relationships. She seems to me about a writer who's really interested in power. It's the kind of slavery that is the slavery that is out there now. People trafficking, people who are being used and not paid and kind of gang masters, but just a few notches on. I think what she's clever at seeing, and partly in this book with the hyper-empathy, because I think she does she think that in this book,

this is a way of making people slaves. If you're constantly feeling the pain of others, then you are able to inflict pain on someone. I think it's more marked in the next book when the colors come into play, but she's very good at seeing how we can use technology as instruments of control. It's not inevitable, but it's a way that people will take technologies and use them, given half the chance, or a certain kind of person. Yeah, that character, Bankolia, at one point says, oh, we've gone back 200 years, but you feel that that's not what Lauren feels. Yeah, and they're even doing that similar route from south to north, heading north,

which echoes the route that people were taking to try to get to north, heading north, which echoes the route that people were taking to try to get to freedom, to try to get to the north. And those resonances, again, you're saying if the 12-year-old you had read this book and you'd have found yourself in that book, did all of that make kind of amazing sense to you? Yeah, massively. Massively. I would have really embraced my inner nerds, which is now a very much part of my, you know, when people bullied me for like my glasses and my library card.

I would have been, I would have had like a poster of Octavia Butler on my wall instead of Buck's Fizz. And you said something lovely when we were talking before. You said with your new book in the Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death universe that Octavia Butler has kind of, you feel that sky's the limit. She's given you the courage to. Yeah. The new book. How much can I say? Well, Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death was very much narrated by death and very London, very dark, very wintery. And the new book is narrated by life, so I

can go, wow. So it's a whole, it's a very different feel, very different narration, and not so London-y. And yeah, and this license to kind of have that freedom and that bravery and to be as bold and colorful and as imaginative as I want to be, yeah, it's definitely given me a boost, yeah, yeah. That's great, I mean, I think she is that kind of writer, though, I feel that she's one of those writers that if you, she's, her, because she isn't kind of, I don't know,

some, you feel that she's not, she stands outside all kinds of traditions and does her own thing. That's a tremendously positive, and if you're a young writer reading her stuff, I think you would, you would be kind of blown away by Lauren. Yeah, doing your own thing, it's the thing. And getting other people to believe in your own thing.

That's the thing, because so often, you know how they try and make things and they always advertise them as being like da-da-da, but on acid. Try this flapjack, it's like cheesecake on acid. They always sort of put, it's like this, but it's not, it's its own thing. I want things to be their own things,

not like things on acid. She died too young. There were lots of books that she could have written. Very young. High blood pressure. You think we're going to just get, Una's going to read a little bit from her great friend, Vonda McIntire, who is another sci-fi writer

who has written something beautiful about her. But you feel that she's, if she'd been, again, it's that goddamn Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith story. If the medical intervention had been better, she might still be alive and writing all four of those amazing books. You shouldn't die of high blood pressure. You think she had a stroke and then fell over and hit her head. But do you want to read? A little bit from Von der Bakenthal. Yeah, so Von der Bakenthal, I knew her from really before Octavia had published. Von der Bakenthal is an American science fiction writer who I'm a great admirer of. And they were together at the Clarion Writers Workshop. And this is a little sort of memorial that she wrote for a special issue on Octavia Butler,

which is in science fiction studies. Everybody knew her as Estelle in 1970 at the Clarion Writers' Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania. She was tall, quiet, dignified, and very shy. Harlan Ellison discovered her in a screenwriting workshop in Los Angeles, the city in which she lived for most of her life. Harlan has written that she wasn't a very good screenwriter, which doesn't surprise me much. Her subjects and ideas and expressions were deep and complex and screenplays have their strengths, but deep and complex aren't high on their list. When she turned in her first story,

everybody in the class read it and gave a collective gasp of amazement. It was clear from the first page that she was an extraordinary writer, as well as being an extraordinary person. Over the course of the six weeks of the workshop, her talent and range impressed her fellow workshop members as well as the instructors, a stellar list that included Joanna Ross, Hal and Ellison, Samuel Adelainy, Fritz Lieber, Kate Wilhelm,

Damon Knight. It was neat to watch her career flourish. She overcame her shyness and accepted speaking engagements. She was a terrific speaker, and the events made a big difference in the economy of her household. In her early years, when she had to get a day job to keep her head above water, she'd take jobs that required no intellectual exercise, such as working in a laundry. Then she'd get up early in the morning, two or three o'clock, and write before going to work.

That changed when her books grew more and more successful, and especially after the MacArthur Foundation awarded her one of its genius grants. They couldn't have picked a better recipient. Her health and some of the medication she took for it affected her ability to write. Distressed, she started one novel after another. Dissatisfied, she threw them away.

She decided to read some lighter fiction instead of beating herself up all day, every day about writing. She particularly enjoyed Charlene Harris's Sookie Stackhouse vampire novels. And she decided to write a vampire novel of her own, Fledgling. Being Octavia, she wrote a vampire novel unlike any vampire novel you've ever seen, one that

explores responsibility, love, obligation. She was thinking of writing a sequel. We'll never see it. I miss her. Oh, that's very lovely. Thank you. That's where I'm afraid we must draw a line. It's time for us to leave Lauren and her brave band of brethren behind. Thank you to the foils team, and in particular, Harry McNamara, to our multitasking producers

and mistresses of merch, Nikki Birch and Tess Davidson, and a huge thanks, obviously, to you, Selena, and you, Una. Thank you you Selena and you Una. Thank you. If you want show notes, clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 221 that we've already recorded please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. If you want to hear Backlisted early and without ads, subscribe to our Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash backlisted.

Your subscription brings other benefits. If you subscribe at the lot listener level, you get not one but two extra podcasts every month, including a bonus parable of the Sower episode, which we're recording this very evening, and which our audience in the room get to ask questions from this amazing panel. So if you want to hear that bonus episode, go to patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Before we go, I should also remind you that we're back in Foyles on Wednesday the 23rd of October to record our ninth Halloween show. For the first time live, the book is

Round the Fire Stories by Conan Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle. He of obviously Sherlock Holmes fame. Don't need to tell you that. And at least one of the guests will be Andrew Ghostly-Mail. You can sign up on the Foyles website today. Anything else before we end, Una, that you want to say about the amazing Octavia Butler? Oh my goodness, just read everything really. If you haven't read her, start with Parables or Kindred and then gently ease yourself into the science fiction and just don't stop reading her I think.

Yeah, I echo that. Check out the graphic novel of Parable of the Sower or the audio book and then work your way through. I mean, isn't it baffling that this is not being made into a really great film? Oh, it would be amazing. Somebody ought to do that. Yeah, I'm sure they will. I reckon they will. Thank you both. Thank you all for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight.