Imaginary Worlds - Octavia Butler Revisited

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Octavia Butler’s birth. There have been commemorations nationwide, and I wanted to join in by replaying my 2016 episode, “The Legacy of Octavia Butler.” I produced that episode early in the history of my podcast, when I was still discovering the world of sci-fi literature. I became obsessed with Butler’s writing – even though at times it can be disturbing. Nisi Shawl, Ayana Jamieson and Cauleen Smith explain how Butler came to tell stories about power imbalances between humans and other worldly beings, and what her work means to them. And we hear actress Aliza Pearl read a passage from Butler’s 1987 novel “Dawn.” This episode is sponsored by Brilliant and D&Tea. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. To get started for free, visit brilliant.org/imaginaryworlds to get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Back in 2016, I did an episode called The Legacy of Octavia Butler. Octavia Butler was one of the great science fiction authors of the late 20th century, and I released that episode on the 10th anniversary of her death. This year was another milestone. 2022 would have been her 75th birthday, and there were a lot of media stories about how her writing and her vision of the world is more relevant than ever. There are also now several TV and movie adaptations in the works, and the talents behind these projects include Issa Rae, Viola Davis, and Ava DuVernay,

to name a few. And the first of these adaptations just came out. It's a new TV series based on Octavia Butler's novel Kindred. Kindred is about a black woman in modern times who is mysteriously transported to a 19th century slave plantation. And she keeps going back and forth in time. Dana. Dana. You okay? I got up to get a glass of water. And I was here. And I was drinking it.

And then suddenly I wasn't here. I was somewhere else. Where? I don't know. By a river. So you fell asleep? I don't know. It doesn't feel like it.

Am I crazy? I sound crazy, but it happened. It just happened. I'd like to take part in this commemoration of Octavia Butler by replaying my episode about her. And after the break, we'll hear a reading from one of her novels. But first, here's the episode, The Legacy of Octavia Butler from 2016. So when I started this podcast a few years ago, I knew I had a lot of catching up to do when it came to science fiction literature. And so I've been trying to read as many of the great books that I've missed out on. And a lot of them have been great. But I hate to admit this, but I often have trouble suspending my disbelief

in losing myself in some of these stories. And I don't know if it's because I need the visual component of TV or film or comic books. Although one issue I have is that a lot of these stories take place so far in the future, in a distant galaxy. The author of the stories needs to lay down so much backstory to explain how the human race ever got there. I'm lost by the second chapter. And then I read Octavia Butler.

She does not write stories like that. And her writing is so powerful, so disturbing. I couldn't sleep at night. I actually had to keep reminding myself these are just stories, they're not real. And I never have to do that. And just to give you a sense of these stories without too many spoilers, I'd be lying in the dark thinking about Doro, the spirit in her book Wild Seed, who kills anyone he wants and takes their body.

He gets into a century-long abusive relationship with a shape-shifting woman during the American slave trade. Or I'm thinking about Shori, the vampire-like character in her novel Fledgling, who looks 12 but is much older. She has sex with adults, both men and women, who become addicted to her body chemistry. Then there's the novel Dawn,

where the few remaining people that survive a nuclear war are taken aboard a spaceship. The aliens mean well, but they treat humans as an endangered species. They try to fix our fatal flaw towards self-destruction by altering our genes. Humans can only have sex or feel attracted to each other when one of these repulsive aliens is squirming between them. Heterosexual males are very nervous about that arrangement not being on top anymore.

Ayanna Jameson is writing a biography about Octavia Butler. She shows over and over again that sometimes the best choice is the one that you may not be able to live with. And a lot of people can't really deal with the ambiguity of some of the things that are being experienced.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Octavia Butler's passing, and there are commemorations happening across the country, including a conference that Ayanna Jameson organized. By the way, she grew up in Pasadena and remembers seeing Octavia Butler taking the bus around town. Octavia Butler was dyslexic and didn't drive. Ayanna is also working with an arts organization in Los Angeles called Clock Shop, which is hosting a year-long series of events, panels, and walking tours. And Clock Shop is

commissioned works by artists about Octavia Butler. The filmmaker Colleen Smith is making a short movie about her favorite Butler novel, Kindred. Ever since I read that novel, I have been haunted by the first and last chapter. Kindred is about a black woman in the 1970s who is transported to a slave plantation in the 1800s. When she finally returns

home, the time vortex closes in on her arm. In that scene, that moment, bookends the novel. She survives this incredible sort of journey of time traveling back and forth and living as a slave. She survives it, but not without it leaving this fairly indelible mark on her,

which is the loss of her arm. Octavia Butler was celebrated during her lifetime, but too often, white journalists would focus on the fact that she was an African-American woman writing science fiction. You know, they would ask her how she got there. But they would hardly ask any follow-up questions about the content of her work, which really irritated her fans. Her life story and her work are definitely linked. But I wanted to explore why her stories dig so deep into my consciousness. Why do they keep me up at night?

Well, at the same time, I can't get enough of them. So to start learning about Octavia Butler and her work, I called up Nisi Shawl. She and Butler were good friends. And they first met at a fantasy convention in Seattle. Butler grew up in L.A., but she eventually moved there. I think the first thing I said to her was, oh, you're much more beautiful than your photographs, which is, it was not at all premeditated, but apparently she understood I wasn't just flattering her. Butler was not traditionally beautiful. She was over six feet tall with a deep voice.

She says in an interview that she remembers being called ugly for the first time in first grade, and that by the time she got to middle school, she thought that people still believed that she was ugly. So she still believed that she was ugly, only they were now too polite to say it. Now, Octavia Butler may have had many rich friendships as an adult, but Ayanna Jameson says as a child, she was pretty lonely. Her mother had four miscarriages before she was born, including a stillbirth, and the idea of her missing siblings always haunted her. When she first started writing, she was very isolated. I actually know a person that went to high school with her, and so people knew that her mother cleaned houses for a living. So there's a weird sort of class thing, right? And she writes as a child about being afraid that they're going to be evicted and not knowing where her mother had or was going to get the money for the rent.

When she was a teenager, Butler's mother gave her a $100 bill as a Christmas present. And when she tried to use it at Ralph's supermarket... They didn't accept the money, right? And so they didn't allow her to use the bill. And they must have called the police because by the time she left the store and went to the bus stop to wait to take her home, because she didn't drive, right? Two police officers approached her and said, you know, we hear that you have a counterfeit $100 bill. We're going to take it down to the station. And if it's real, you can have it back. So they were kind of playing good cop, bad cop.

And she basically said to them, look, if you were me, what would you think about somebody taking their money? Would you stand for that? And I guess they backed down. She did not suffer fools. And that memory, that sense of outrage became fodder for her fiction.

Now, Butler knew she wanted to be a writer at a very young age. Here she is on a panel discussion from 2002. I was influenced to write science fiction two years after I began writing other things by a bad movie. My response to the movie was, geez, I can write a better story than that. And I thought about it and I realized, geez, anybody could write a better story than that. And my final assumption, however erroneous was, somebody got paid for writing that story. Devil Girl from Mars. But she actually had been telling herself stories from age four and beginning to write the stories down at around age eight.

And then eventually, by the time she was about 12, sending out her manuscripts to be published. At the same time as she was ambitious, she was humble. She wanted to reach a lot of people. She wanted her work to be successful, but she was always surprised when it was. Nisi Schall is also a fiction writer, and I asked her why Butler's writing is so effective. What exactly is her technique? Well, she's certainly good at the kind of thing where you're using all your senses. at the kind of thing where you're using all your senses.

She doesn't throw it all in your face, but you can smell the smoke of the burning houses. And so since she's there, you're there. The other thing, though, is that she doesn't flinch. Her specialty was to think about the things that people would rather not think about. One of the exercises that she gave to a class, which I sat in on, but I remember her asking everyone in the class to write about what they feared, because she thought that the emotion of being repelled and in fear would come out strongly in our work.

And I think she did that a lot herself. Don't you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I feel frankly terrified reading a lot of her work. I mean, I could tell you the things that the fears that I feel through reading the work, but tell me what are the fears that you see of hers that come out through her work? One of the main fears I see is that of losing control of your body in so many different ways. In Bloodchild, which she always called her pregnant man story, it's pretty obvious there are these huge, insectile non-humans who lay their eggs in your body. And it's in some way, I think, connected to the legacy of slavery, because the people who were enslaved had no control over their bodies. And the other fear that comes out in her work over and over is the fear of the triumph of hierarchy, the fear of domination

being the end story of humankind. Octavia Butler was also interested in politics. I was happy to learn that she was an avid NPR listener, and I imagine she probably listened to KPCC in her hometown of Pasadena. And she would get outraged by things like Proposition 187, the 1994 voter initiative in California that tried to deny rights to immigrants. And she did write op-eds and give speeches, but she really preferred to work with metaphors. She didn't think that people wanted to be lectured to. She thought they wanted to be entertained.

I mean, it worked on me. I'm a straight white guy, so I've never experienced what it's like to not have those privileges in the United States. Now, her protagonists were often black women, so it's not like she wasn't writing about race. She got so deeply into the perspective of her main characters, reading her work is like experiencing virtual reality. Her characters also have a deep yearning for connection.

I don't know what that says about Octavia Butler. I couldn't even find out if she ever had any romantic partners. I know some lesbian women have tried to claim her as a role model, but Niecy and another friend of theirs, Nalo Hopkinson, have been trying to correct the record. Nalo and I both have been all over the internet telling people, I'm queer, she wasn't. And here's Colleen Smith. Not only do people want to imagine her as being gay, but they also want to imagine her as being sort of like asexual,

that she wasn't interested in sex at all. It's actually an impossible conclusion to come to when you read her work, you know what I mean? Yeah. Sex is like motivating so much of the characters in every way. Her characters are motivated by very basic needs. Love, food, safety, survival. Butler once wrote about the moment she first became interested in what makes us sentient

beings. Her mother was a maid for a wealthy white family, and she brought young Octavia Butler along to the house. But she finds herself one day staring into the eyes of the family pet, this dog, and that her aha moment was realizing that there are other beings around us besides humans, that she was like totally confronted with the sentience and self-awareness of this dog. They're about the same size and they're both laying on the floor just staring at each other. But it's within the context of her mentioning that her uncle was the gardener and her aunt did the laundry and her mom worked in the kitchen of this home. Often in her stories, we are in the place of that dog.

The idea of dominion, you know, which is what humans have assigned themselves over every other being on the planet, she sort of flips it and imagines what would it mean if there was some being that was able to imagine itself superior to us and imagine themselves benevolently caring for us by holding us captive and determining how we live.

I mean, maybe that's what disturbs me the most about her work. And I mean disturb in a really good way. Is that she doesn't condemn these otherworldly beings who can be selfish and cruel and arrogant. Her protagonists often don't have the power to overthrow their oppressors until maybe the very end. So instead, they try to understand them. Her level of empathy actually frustrates me as a reader, where I'm like, I really wish her character could be harder, be more cruel, be more self-interested, you know? That just wasn't in her nature. In 2006, Octavia Butler died of a stroke. She was only 58 years old.

Besides losing a good friend, Nisi Shaw was devastated because Butler was in the prime of her career. She had just started a new series with Fledgling. Now there was a long period where she was unable to write as far as she was concerned. She wrote things and then she destroyed them. She didn't like them. She considered herself blocked between the end of Parable of the Talents

and the beginning of when she started fledgling. I was really looking forward to the rest of those books with Shori as the protagonist. They were great. She was great. What made me saddest after she died was that I got the immediate feeling that she had lived her entire life so that people would talk about her good when she was gone. Really? How so? Afterwards, I could only say good things about her to the point that the book that I co-edited was sometimes panned because, you know, we didn't say enough bad things about Octavia Butler.

But I look back now and I see how she approached problems, how she responded to people's requests. And she did it because she was leaving behind a reputation. And she knew it. She was an atheist. She didn't believe in an afterlife, but she did believe in having a reputation and she made sure that it was good. And that's what made me sad. Yeah, her reputation. She knew her reputation would be her afterlife to some extent

that's what i would say she knew her reputation would be all the afterlife she had and she made sure that it was a good one and this year we need her words now more than ever. Okay, we're back in the present day, where we still need Octavia Butler more than ever. By the way, if some of those voices sound familiar, I interviewed Nisi Shawl again in my 2022 episode, Postcolonial Worlds. And I talked with Colleen Smith in my 2021 episode, Music from Saturn, which was about the musician Sun Ra. Iona Jameson has continued to write and talk about Octavia Butler. I have links to her recent work in the show notes. It's interesting for me to listen back to that episode from six years ago, because today

I don't feel intimidated by sci-fi literature. I read pretty voraciously. And that journey into speculative fiction really kicked off when I discovered the writings of Octavia Butler. After the break, we'll hear what her work sounds like. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here.

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Shop Old Spice Total Body deodorant now. To give you a sense of Octavia Butler's writing, I asked the actress Elisa Pearl to read from the novel Dawn. Dawn came out in 1987. It was the first of Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series. The books are about an uncomfortably close relationship between human beings and aliens in a post-apocalyptic future. It was also the first novel of hers that I read. So here is Elisa Pearl reading a condensed excerpt of the first two chapters of Dawn. excerpt of the first two chapters of Dawn. air to drive off nightmare sensations of asphyxiation. Lilith Iapo lay gasping, shaking with the force of her effort. Her heart beat too fast, too loud. She curled around it, fetal, helpless. Circulation began to return to her arms and legs in flurries of minute,

exquisite pains. When her body calmed and became reconciled to reanimation, she looked around. The room seemed dimly lit, though she had never awakened to dimness before. She sat up, swayed dizzily, then turned to look at the rest of the room. The bed was what it had always been, a solid platform that gave slightly to the touch and that seemed to grow from the floor there was across the room a doorway that probably led to a bathroom she was usually given a bathroom twice she had not been and in her windowless doorless cubicle she had been forced simply to choose a corner what else did did she have? Very little. There was another platform, perhaps a foot higher than the bed, and there were things on it. She saw the food first.

It was the usual lumpy cereal or stew of no recognizable flavor, contained in an edible bowl that would disintegrate if she'd emptied it and did not eat it. And there was something beside the bowl. Unable to see it clearly, she touched it. Cloth? A folded mound of clothing. She snatched it up, dropped it in her eagerness, picked it up again, and began putting it on. A light-colored, thigh-length jacket and a pair of long, loose pants, both made of some cool, exquisitely soft material that made her think of silk. The jacket adhered to itself and stayed closed when she closed it, but opened readily enough when she pulled the two front panels apart. The way they came apart reminded her of Velcro, though there was none to be seen.

She had not been allowed clothing from her first awakening until now. She had pleaded for it, but her captors had ignored her. Dressed now, she felt more secure than she had at any other time in her captivity. It was a false security, she knew, but she had learned to savor any pleasure, any supplement to her self-esteem that she could glean. Opening and closing her jacket, her hand touched the long scar across her abdomen. She had acquired it somehow between her second and third awakenings, had examined it fearfully, wondering what had been done to her.

What had she lost or gained, and why, and what else might be done? She did not own herself any longer. Even her flesh could be cut and stitched without her consent or knowledge. It enraged her during later awakenings that there had been moments when she actually felt grateful to her mutilators for letting her sleep through whatever they had done to her, and for doing it well enough to spare her pain or disability later. She rubbed the scar, tracing its outline. Finally, she sat on the bed and ate her bland meal, finishing the bowl as well, more for a change

of texture than to satisfy any residual hunger. Then she began the oldest and most futile of her activities, a search for some crack, some sound of hollowness, some indication of a way out of her prison. She had done this at every awakening. At her first awakening, she had called out during her search. Receiving no answer, she had shouted, then cried, then cursed until her voice was gone. There had not been a whisper of response. Her captors spoke when they were ready and not before. They did not show themselves at all. She remained sealed in her cubicle and their voices came to her from above like the light. She imagined herself to be in a large box, like a rat in a cage.

Why? There was no answer. They had refused to tell her. They had asked her questions, simple ones at first. How old was she? Twenty-six, she thought silently. Was she still only twenty-six? How long had they held her captive?

They would not say. Had she been married? Yes, but he was gone. Long gone. Had she been married? Yes, but he was gone. Long gone. Had she had children? Oh God, one child, long gone with his father. If there were an afterworld, what a crowded place it must be now. What work had she done? None. Her son and her husband had been her work for a few brief years. After the auto accident that killed them, she had gone back to college, there to decide what else she might do with her life. Did she remember the war? Insane question. Could anyone who had lived through the war forget it? A handful of people tried to commit humanicide.

They had nearly succeeded. She had, through sheer luck, managed to survive. Only to be captured by heaven knew who and imprisoned. She sat on the bed, dressed, waiting. She sat on the bed, dressed, waiting, tired in a deep, emptied way that had nothing to do with physical weariness. Sooner or later, someone would speak to her. She had a long wait. She had lain down and was almost asleep when a voice spoke her name.

Lilith? The usual quiet, androgynous voice. She drew a deep, weary breath. What? She asked. But as she spoke, she realized the voice had not come from above as it always had before. She sat up quickly and looked around. In one corner, she found the shadowy figure of a man, thin and long-haired. I'm not here to hurt you, he said. No, of course you're not. I'm here to take you outside. course you're not. I'm here to take you outside. Now she stood up, staring hard at him, wishing for more light. Was he making a joke? Laughing at her? Outside to what? She took a step closer to

him, then stopped. He scared her somehow. She could not make herself approach him. Something is wrong, she said. Who are you? He moved slightly. And what am I? She jumped because that was what she had almost said. I'm not a man, he said. I'm not a human being. She moved back against the bed, but did not sit down. Tell me what you are. I'm here to tell you and show you. Will you look at me now?

The lights brightened as she had supposed they would, and what had seemed to be a tall, slender man was still humanoid, but it had no nose, no bulge, no nostrils, just flat, gray skin. It was gray all over, pale gray skin, darker gray hair on its head that grew down around its eyes and ears and at its throat. There was so much hair across the eyes that she wondered how the creature could see. The long, profuse ear hair seemed to grow out of the ears as well as around them. The island of throat hair seemed to move slightly,

and it occurred to her that that might be where the creature breathed. You should notice, he said, that what you probably see as hair isn't hair at all. Come closer and look. She did not want to be any closer to him. She had not known what held her back before. Now she was certain it was his alien-ness, his difference, his literal unearthliness. She frowned, strained to see, to understand. Then abruptly she did understand. Medusa. Some of the hair writhed independently. A nest of snakes startled, driven in all directions. Revolted, she turned her face to the wall. They're not separate animals, he said.

My sensory organs aren't dangerous to you. You'll have to get used to them. No. The tentacles were elastic. At her shout, some of them lengthened, stretching toward her. She imagined small, tentacled sea slugs, nudibranches, grown impossibly to human size and shape, and, obscenely, sounding more like a human being than some humans. Yet, she needed to hear him speak. Silent, he was utterly alien. How many other humans do you have here? And where is here? This is my home. You would call it a ship. This is my home. You would call it a ship. A vast one compared to the ones your people have built. What it truly is doesn't translate. As for how many humans are here, all of you who survived your war,

we collected as many as we could. The ones we didn't find in time died of injury disease hunger radiation cold we found them later is there anything left on earth she whispered anything live i mean oh yes time and our efforts have been restoring it. Restoring it? Why? For use. You'll go back there eventually. You'll send me back? And the other humans? Yes. Why?

His tentacles rippled. I can only say that your people have something we value. You may begin to know how much we value it when I tell you that by your way of measuring time, it has been several million years since we dared to interfere in another people's act of self-destruction. Many of us disputed the wisdom of doing it this time. destruction. Many of us disputed the wisdom of doing it this time. We thought that there had been a consensus among you, that you had agreed to die. Do you understand now what happened to us? I'm aware of what happened. It's alien to me. Frighteningly alien. It's alien to me.

Frighteningly alien. Some of the people we picked up had been hiding deep underground. They had created much of the destruction. And they're still alive? Some of them are. And you plan to send them back to Earth? No. What?

The ones still alive are very old now. We've used them slowly, learned biology, language, culture from them. We awakened them a few at a time and let them live their lives here in different parts of the ship while you slept. Slept? How long have I slept? He 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. He had folded himself compactly into an uncomfortable-looking seated position. 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. You never told me how long you kept me asleep. About 250 of your years. This was more than she could assimilate at once. She said nothing for so long that he broke the silence. Something went wrong when you were first awakened. Someone handled you badly, underestimated you. You are like us in some ways, but you were thought to be like your military people hidden underground. They refused to talk to us too. At first, you were left asleep for about 50 years after that first mistake.

This is your last isolation room. When you're ready, I'll take you outside. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. And I hope you have a very happy and healthy new year. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you really like the show, please give us a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds.

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