Parable of the Butler: A science-fiction pioneer finds posthumous fame | Hacker News Reader

Parable of the Butler: A science-fiction pioneer finds posthumous fame

harpers.org

49 pointsapollinaire16 comments

This might be related to the fact that at least one of her books is "hidden" in a scene in "The OA" [1] that happens to be, in my opinion, one of the most interesting science fiction TV series made in the last years (Netflix. Unfortunately, cancelled after the 2nd season).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_OA

Does it get better in the 2nd season? I've watched the first, and consider it to be 13 hours of my life completely wasted. The show was just dragging the viewers along pointless tangents, never ultimately revealing whether the "magic"/"tech" in the story exists, or the protagonist is just delusional.

I mean, the "is it real or not" is the point of the show :)

The second season is...different. I loved the first season, but had more difficulty with the second. Its not bad, and offers -a few- answers, but if you don't like the unexplained/mysterious aspects of the first season, definintely skip the second.

> I've watched the first, and consider it to be 13 hours of my life completely wasted

I really enjoyed the first season. I've "trained" myself to enjoy TV / movies that "get nowhere" as long as they manage to keep my attention. And "The OA" does that.

> Does it get better in the 2nd season?

Regarding the 2nd season, I'm my opinion, there are _a lot_ of scify TV series that start more or less well /interesting (Colony & Falling skies are 2 examples of this). But - I take it to get people interested fast - make big bets in their first season, and then keeping that rhythm proves an impossible task. Falling Skies, for instance, was a complete disappointment. It's like you get people to invent nukes and in the next season they go back to fight with bows & arrows.

I want to keep this spoiler free, but let me tell you this: The 2nd season of "The OA" gets effing weird. Like, really. It's not as hardcore as "Legion", where you need to grow a 2nd brain to understand what the heck is going on, or high fantasy tune as "American Gods" but I found it really entertaining - although at points the story drags a little - but they managed to build / invent a rather interesting universe, that unfortunately we'll never get to see again.

Is Butler’s criticism that there were almost no non-white characters in science-fiction really so acute after the 1960s? Larry Niven and Poul Anderson, for example, made it clear that some of their protagonists were of non-white races, and Anderson's cast of characters often aimed to be a veritable United Nations representing every region on Earth.

I think its a different kind of representation. "The Expanse" book series, for instance, also features this sort of "UN" representation of many people form many kinds of ethnic background, and this is really great! However, the experiences of these characters is divorced from those of many non-white people living in the U.S. (this will of course all vary by the country of the audience). There is also a matter of who is the main or POV character, and who are secondary characters.

Butler, however, offers a different kind of representation. For one, her main protagonists are black. And, at least in the parable books, she focuses on a near future where the experiences of the black protagonists would be more familiar to black readers. Third, these are black characters written by a black women, who can draw on her own experience to more effectively capture and communicate the experiences of black women.

Representation in sci-fi is tricky, because once you start getting too far away from the current time period, you start to lose out a lot of the cultural experiences that people can relate to. N.K. Jemisin's "The Broken Earth" series does a decent job of capturing the experiences of non-white people living in the U.S. in a deep and thoughtful way, while maintaining an abstract fantasy/sci-fi setting.

I'm ashamed to say I've never read any of Butler's novels, although I've been aware of her since I got into SF in my teens.

I too hadn’t read any of her stuff but I had not heard of her until just a few years ago. After reading the parables and kindred I am a bit dumbfounded I hadn’t heard of her before. Her genre is the stuff I have thrived on since I was a teen. I’m honestly a little pissed (maybe partly at myself) since the reason probably has a lot to do with her skin color and gender. Anyway I’d highly recommend the parables as a starting point. They seem especially prescient today and were a great read.

Am I the only one who finds her books terrible? She is just not a good writer compared to the sci-fi greats.

Wow, I completely disagree. What I've read of hers the writing has been great. Tight. No waste. But still very evocative.

Tastes vary, so you are probably not alone, but I for one enjoyed her books greatly.

So the article is just the title? Cool.

It's a lot longer than that, about 30 paragraphs. Tried scrolling down?

It seems to be behind a paywall or otherwise doesn't load completely.

The archive has it: https://archive.is/BBAsb

For uBlock Origin in medium mode (on Firefox), you need to allow all for harpers.org and netdna-ssl.com.

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