And though I never met her – and our backgrounds and our struggles are in many ways very different – she taught me how to survive too. Her characters, all of them, are survivors – and not just that, they are also healers. Her stories about disability have given me new tools for processing the place of disability in my own life her work on climate and the environment, on animals and on resource extraction and cruel systems of human exploitation, has inspired and terrified me in roughly equal measure. They teach us about communities that don’t throw people away. They teach us about hope: hope and how to live in struggle, if not the hope to fully end struggle. If most of her stories aren’t politically utopian, exactly, they are nonetheless a literature of grief and of consolation. As truly nightmarish as her stories very often are, there is something about them that is healing, centering, that cracks us open and lets us see ourselves in a new way. There’s something more than a bit therapeutic in this work. That’s the source of the ever-reappearing Twitter hashtags #OctaviaKnew and #OctaviaTriedToTellUs.īut what did she know? And what did she see, not just for 2020 or 2022, but for farther into the future? On what would have been her 75th birthday, June 22, what knowledge might Butler have had for us about the next 75 years? That’s why in an annus horribilis of pandemic, ecological crisis, and political turmoil, the book (set in a decaying America of the 2020s) felt more like prophecy than ever. The rest of us are still trying to catch up. Butler saw clearly what would actually come next.
Out of the dizzy techno-optimism of the 1980s and 1990s, Octavia E. There’s a reason, when reading Kindred with students in two courses last fall, I truly felt the book could have been written last year, as if it were responding to right now, rather than published six months before I was born. There’s a reason Parable of the Sower felt to so many people like a handbook for surviving 2020. Butler – but Butler’s fiction isn’t, not really. I may be a bit older now than I was in 1999 – the year I first read Octavia E.
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