The Life of Octavia Butler | Hacker News Reader

The Life of Octavia Butler

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Wow, I have long been a fan of Butler but this article was fabulous. The Parable books were good, but the special thing about Butler’s writing is how each series is as different from her other works as her work is different from all he rest of science fiction. It is a rich rich source of interesting ideas that expand your conceptual space. Xenogenesis, DNA traders save the remnants of humanity; Patternist: psychic battles and diseases that improve us at the cost of our humanity; Kindred, the shocking intersection between slave times and now; Wild Seed, life as someone that can shape shift and lives thousands of years; Flesgling, a weirdly sexy albino vampire overturns the vampire hierarchies; and so many short stories that leave you going “whoa.”

So don’t stop with the Parables, if you like expanding your conceptual space.

I would add that if you want a quick intro to her writing style and diversity, her short story collection “Bloodchild and Other Stories” is great.

What’s a good short stories book you’d recommend?

So far I’ve read Lilith’s Brood and a post-apocalyptic book about a girl traveling after her town was destroyed, first in a trilogy.

For anyone new to Octavia Butler, she has a short list of novels and basically all are good. The list sorted by popularity is a good start: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/29535.Octavia_E_Butler

Kindred is excellent and the most popular for good reason. But it as much American history as it is sci-fi. Dawn is my favorite of hers and very sci-fi. Parable of the Sower is also an excellent place to start, more of a post-apocalyptic story.

I second the recommendation of Dawn, or the Xenogenesis trilogy in general. Couldn’t really get into her other novels.

Her sudden death was a shock to me and to many sci-fi fans around the world. I really hoped that Xenogenesis series would gain one more volume. I think Octavia would have written it if not for her untimely death. The last book seems to end too abruptly. Still _well worth your time_ to read the whole series if you haven't already.

Wish I could read Xenogenesis for the first time again.

I lived in Pasadena for a couple years. The public library on Walnut St is a fantastic public space, a great place for a reader to grow up.

It is closed due to structural issues for the time being I believe. The smaller Hill Av branch is also good.

Parable of the Butler: A science-fiction pioneer finds posthumous fame - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26055878 - Feb 2021 (16 comments)

When Science Fiction Becomes Real: Octavia E. Butler's Legacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12629109 - Oct 2016 (8 comments)

https://archive.ph/OKZn8 For anyone who never reads vulture but somehow reached their monthly limit (???)

One of the big tragedies of this moment politically is that so many progressives who love Butler novels like "Parable of the Sower"—or who would love them if they had read them—think that the urgent drive to establish human civilization among the stars is just a vanity project for rich white men or, worse, a billionaires' conspiracy to escape the earth.

Butler saw the push to the stars as something that could give humans a common purpose and save us from the terminal infighting that happens when we lack one.

It's too bad she isn't alive now to set people straight.

> Butler saw the push to the stars as something that could give humans a common purpose and save us from the terminal infighting that happens when we lack one.

This will only happen after we do something about capitalism, if we ever do.

You mean inventing something better, ie some AI mix? Because anything else mankind tried so far was a disaster and suffering of much bigger proportions.

Some portion of that suffering was thanks to capitalist ideologues who actively worked to undermine the success of alternative systems. We don’t really know how well other systems work in the modern world because we haven’t really given any of them a fair shake.

A successful system is robust to tampering from external and internal actors.

by that logic, US democracy and capitalism arent successful either (see Russian election tampering and OPEC influence on US/global economy)

And yet, the US and capitalism are both still around, and their continued existence ensures we don't get people in comments sections claiming that we don't know how capitalism works as a system because _real_ capitalism still hasn't been tried.

This is like the spiderman meme where they're all pointing at each other. One flavor of capitalism fights another, is it any surprise that a capitalist wins or that the overall result is a strengthening of the military-industrial complex due to increased defense spending?

How about a more interesting question. Do you believe capitalism is the best or most just way to organize an economy which is possible, that it is "the end of history?" Do you think on an infinite timeline, assuming no extinction of the species or any other confounding factors, humanity will never come up with a better way to organize our economy?

Given what the US did to the socialist South American states in Operation Condor, this is equivalent to "might makes right," which is no good basis for a political system.

Andre the Giant wasn't such a tough guy as a newborn, but that doesn't mean I could've wrestled him at his prime.

This is a Just So Story. "The fact that I killed him proves that he was weak and deserved to die." You can do better.

This kind of does happen in the part of the Parable series of books, at least the two that she finished, one can see the outline of what the heroine starts. It's one of the more hopeful dystopian future apocalypse books I've read, and a lot of bad stuff happens to get to that point. Xenogenesis gets there a totally different way.

I’m pretty sure she’d have strong opinions about folks like Musk owning and controlling the means for that push.

Perhaps Musk is the necessary evil to point out it is possible to push us to the stars, despite his many flaws.

I think it's a safer bet that Butler would assert that there is a unity between means and ends (which is to say, that the means you employ define the ends it is possible to reach, eg, an evil approach will only yield evil results) then it would be to bet that Butler was an "ends justify the means" type.

What makes you think she would assert that?

I'm fairly sure she was an anarchist, but not positive. This is a principle in anarchist thought.

If not, she would certainly sympathize with anarchism, based on her views I do know, which is why I qualified it as "more likely" rather than being certain.

Having run in anarchist circles when I was younger, it's strange to hear people talk of anarchism as a consistent set of ideas when the reason it holds such a special place in my heart is that there were so many different conceptions of it, many of them incompatible with each other. Which conception are you referring to here? Presumably not anarcho-capitalism.

It's my understanding that means-ends unity is central to the critique of state power and broadly shared by anarchists. Anarcho-capitalists reject basically everything in anarchism except anti-statism, so you can't really compare them to other flavors in a sensible way most of the time, and I regard the name anarcho-capitalists as a misnomer and I call them libertarians or anti-state capitalists or what have you (though I respect their right to label themselves as they please). I don't know that anarcho-capitalists reject means-ends unity as much as they have different ends in mind.

Anarchism may not be a single set of ideas but it's certainly a distinct lineage that descends from certain critiques of capitalism, hierarchy/state power, and Marxism (means-ends unity being essential to the critique of Marxism, eg, that a proletarian state will become oppressive for the same reason any other state becomes oppressive).

For instance, it's broadly held by anarchists that a society should be voluntary and not based on coercion. If someone called themselves an anarchist but was, say, in favor of aggressive policing, I'd wonder what the heck they meant by "anarchist".

The protagonist in Parable of the Sower is more or less anarcho-communist.

Perhaps waiting until we can find better 'leaders' than Musk is a necessary evil that will make it possible to push us to the stars.

From the article: "The Oankali tell Lilith humanity is doomed because of “two incompatible characteristics”: intelligence and a hierarchical nature."

That perspective points more towards perceived problems with anyone owning and controlling any large organization for any reason, doesn't it? It's basically 'power corrupts and the more power any single individual has, the more corrupted they become.'

Now, can you run large organizations with focused goals in what we'd call a democratic manner? Maybe a kind of multi-level (i.e. hierarchical) democracy, because why would you want someone with six months of experience having the same decision-making power as someone with six years of experience? Similarly, why would you want people not directly involved with the work (absentee owners and shareholders) making decisions about what kind of decisions the organization should make (i.e. which spaceship design is the best)?

It's entirely possible that humans have yet to invent the optimal organizational structure for coordinated efforts towards goals like establishing a viable human ecosystem on Mars, etc. Science fiction is of course an arena where such concepts can be speculated about, that's part of its value.

Stephen Baxter has a similar thread in a lot of his writing. A unifying purpose makes us one tribe. Basing it on a scientific target means we avoid most of the headaches and cruft that other cultural transcription and binding agents suffer.

Why not target intelligence surviving the heat death of the universe?

Personally I think COVID disproved this hypothesis. The part of the movie where the aliens land and attack us all, regardless of identity, did happen. The unifying did not.

I think we have to find a way to peacefully and productively coexist as a multiplicity of tribes.

COVID showed that it occurs when we are a politically fragmented society with sprawling wealth inequality.

COVID didn't break us. It showed us were our weak points are.

We _choose_ what unifies us.

Hmm, that is interesting, but I think about this like, the failure to make the vaccine open source or generally available, the polarization around masks and every COVID measure, and how we are still not rallying around existential problems like climate.

But perhaps this is a United States bias on my part?

I really doubt Butler would be in favor of these particular people pursuing space for these particular goals. Something tells me that a leftist black woman would see Musk, who holds antifeminist views, who seems like he wants to personally rule mars, who's wealth literally originates from apartheid, and who's power comes from deep pockets and not from creating a movement of dedicated survivors who achieve power through collective action, as the wrong person to be involved in space exploration.

That’s why I wish she was here: to articulate an alternative view

You may enjoy Becky Chambers's To Be Taught, if Fortunate and Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden. Neither is very Butlerian in its writing but they's taking aim at the same question of how we may do space colonization without space colonialism.

Politics makes strange bedfellows! We live in a strange enough timeline that it wouldn't surprise me if she was in support of "these people". It would certainly be a choice that would provoke and make people think hard about what it is they truly value.

Are you speculating that based on familiarity with her work or general principles about how things may work? Given what you say about the timeline being strange, and how that seems to be what motivates this speculation, I suspect maybe you haven't had a great deal of exposure to her, and so this conversation about her views on space travel might give you a skewed impression of how important to her space travel was? And therefore, how likely she'd be to make profound compromises for those views?

No familiarity -- just my observation of artists and authors being particularly inscrutable people.

Gil-Scott Heron probably said it better, but until people's basic needs are met, I think space exploration has the opposite effect, making people feel disenfranchised rather than united.

Exactly. I'm sure I argued the opposite at some point, but as time goes on Musk, Bezos and others look more like petulant bored rich people, and not explorers or role models of any kind. To most people it's "whitey on the moon".

>"whitey on the moon"

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Gil Scott-Heron!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

The motivations are secondary to our capabilities.

The truth is we're not ready to set up shop on a more hostile planet. We'd need to be able to spend 10x the resources our current total society can afford to properly seed a Mars colony. Any actual attempts made this century will lead to horrific failure. I can't imagine future generations will have a good taste in their mouth about colonizing Mars when they remember what happened to the first colony.

Colonizing Mars an important avenue for the continuing legacy of intelligent life in the universe. It must be taken seriously. Such half-assed attempts that are being discussed by Musk and NASA today only reduce the prospects of humans surviving past Earth. We need to become masters of Earth before we could ever hope to take on a bigger challenge.

> We need to become masters of Earth before we could ever hope to take on a bigger challenge

Wasn't the same argument made against going to the moon?

Notice we have no moon colony.

Visiting is trivial compared to independently thriving.

We also need, like, a reason. Even if we can... why? (and "survive the apocalypse" is a pretty bad reason since there are zero other bodies in our star system that are better for humans to live on than even a nuked, climate-changed Earth—anything short of a crust-melting impact would be easier and cheaper to survive with Earthbound bunkers, excepting things that would also wreck other bodies in our star system)

Which reasons, as for 99% of everything else like that humans have ever done, will likely be economic or military. When it makes dollar-sense to do it, we'll go. Not sooner. Not really, and not for the long haul.

I'm doubting we'll do large-scale human colonization of space for a long, long time, if ever. We might do mostly-robotic asteroid mining within the next 100 years, and a couple visits to e.g. Mars might be made, but nothing serious.

Was the moon landing, or even the entire space race, about a "challenge" or pantsing the Soviets? Despite all the mythologizing we now do about the last century's dabbling in manned space missions, we sure seem to have abandoned the concept now that there's no geopolitical dickwaving to accomplish.

On a slightly different tangent, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress [0] suggests that whosoever sets up the lunar catapult first will likely become "masters of Earth". I think I'm going to start learning Chinese! [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-aims-for-a-permanent-moon-ba...

> Wasn't the same argument made against going to the moon?

Was the argument wrong? If it was wrong, are the reasons it was wrong applicable to the current situation?

> masters of Earth

I think this is unfortunate phrasing closer to the problem than the solution.

If progressives not getting behind capitalists and autocrats building their own personal fiefdoms on Mars is the big tragedy of the moment, I'm not entirely sure what a small tragedy would be. A stubbed toe? A temporary shortage of Don Perignon?

I'm surprised the Parable series hasn't been made into a tv or film series. any theories?

There's a movie coming: https://shadowandact.com/a24-sets-octavia-butlers-parable-of...

There's a bunch of Octavia Butler adaptations now, surprisingly. Kindred, Wild Seed, and Dawn are also being developed for TV or film.

I am looking forward to Wild Seed more than I looked forward to LOTR. Altho with similar trepidation about being true to author intent. I will watch Kindred but it will be hard to watch, even the graphic novel I haven’t finished.

This is a great overview of the book i read: "The Cost of Evolution | Xenogenesis Trilogy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjrXHaDYb7w

> “Reagan is the tool of utterly self-interested, fatally shortsighted men — men who deem it a virtue to be indifferent to human suffering,” she wrote. “We will probably go on solving our problems by borrowing from the future until we are forced by the consequences of our own behavior to change.”

I can't help but long for the day when this quotation is out of date.

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