Remembering Octavia Butler: Black Sci-Fi Writer Shares Cautionary Tales In Unearthed 2005 Interview

this is democracy now the quarantine report i am amy goodman to once again commemorate

black

history month, as well as the 25th anniversary of democracy now let's move on to one of the last television

interview

s given by the visionary

black

science fiction

writer

octavia

Butler in November

2005

walked into Democracy Now's old firehouse studio just three months later Butler died on February 24, 2006 after falling outside his home outside Seattle, Washington. She was 58 years old. Butler was the first black woman to win the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction. At the time of her writing, she was also the first science fiction

writer

to receive a Macarthur Genius Butler Grant.

Butler's best-known books include the classics Kindred, as well as Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, two-thirds of a trilogy that was never finished. Published in 1993, Parable of the Sower is set in the 2020s. in California, that's right, the 2020s now in California in the midst of a global climate and economic crisis. Octavia Butler described them as

cautionary

tales

. They were what I call

cautionary

tales

if we continue to misbehave by ignoring what we have been ignoring. What we've been doing to the environment, for example, this is what we're likely to end up in her books.

Octavia Butler also wrote about slavery, fascism, religious fundamentalism, and much more. Her work inspired a new generation of black science fiction writers. She has been called the mother of Afrofuturism and Octavia Butler's audience has continued to grow in September. She made the New York Times bestseller list for the first time 50 years after she began writing, almost 15 years after her death. Democracy now. Juan González and I

interview

ed her.

octavia

butler

in november

2005

. it was shortly after hurricane katrina devastated new orleans, president george w bush, the former governor of texas, was in the white house overseeing the us wars in iraq and afghanistan. part of this interview was broadcast live, but part of it was never broadcast it was broadcast before how did you start writing science fiction?

Did you grow up in Pasadena? How did you first get drawn to that kind of writing? Oh, I think I loved it because, well, I started writing it because I saw a bad movie, a movie called The Devil Girl from Mars and I competed with it, but I think I stuck with it because it was so open that it gave me the opportunity to comment on all aspects of humanity. People tend to think of science fiction like oh star wars or star trek and the truth is that there are no closed doors and there are no required formulas, you can go anywhere with that we are talking to octavia

butler

his latest book is incipient he wrote the parable series while katrina was happening in After Katrina, a lot of people were talking about Octavia Butler and how the parable series made them think about that.

I can't be bothered to correct some of the problems we are brewing at the moment. Global warming is one of those problems and I was aware of it back in the 80s. I was reading books about it a lot. of people saw it as, um, as politics, as something very dubious, as something that they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow, um that, and the fact that I think he was paying a lot of attention to education because many of My friends were teachers and education politics were getting scarier. It seemed to me that we were getting to that point where we were thinking more about building prisons than about schools and libraries, and I remember that.

While I was working on the novels, my hometown, Pasadena, had a bond issue that went through to help libraries and I was very happy that it passed because, very often, these things don't happen and they closed a lot of library branches and we were able to reopen them, so not everyone was going in the wrong direction, but a lot of us, a lot of the country still was and what I wanted to write was a novel by someone who came up with solutions of some kind. my character, my main character's solution is that it comes from another religion that it occurs to her that religion is everywhere, there are no human societies without it, whether they recognize this religion or not, so I thought that the Religion could be an answer and, in some cases, a problem. and in, for example, the parable of the sower and the parable of the talents, they are both, so I have people who are leading America to a kind of fascism because their religion is the only one they are willing to tolerate, on the other hand , I have people saying well here is another religion and here are some verses that can help us think in a different way and here is a destiny that is not something we have to wait for after dying octavia butler could you read a little about? parable of the talents um I'm going to read a verse or two um and keep in mind these were written in the early 90's but I think they apply forever in fact this first one I have a character in the books who is someone who is taking over the fascist country and who manages to get elected president and who, interestingly enough, comes from Texas and here is one of the things that my character is inspired to write about this type of situation, it says, choose your leaders wisely and forecast.

To be led by a coward is to be controlled by everything the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and your loved ones into slavery and there's another one I thought I should read because I see it happening so much that the idea occurred to me. So when I heard someone answer a political question with a political slogan and he didn't seem to realize he was quoting someone, he seemed to have thought he had a creative thought there and wrote this verse, be careful too often. we say what we hear others say we think what we are told we believe we see what we are allowed to see worse we see what we are told we see repetition and pride are the keys to seeing and hearing even an obvious lie over and over again Maybe it can be saying it almost by reflex, then defending it because we have said it and finally embracing it because we have defended it and because we cannot admit that we have embraced and defended an obvious lie in this way. without thinking about it without intention we merely echo ourselves and say what we hear others say just one more comment on the human condition I suppose octavia butler many of the themes in your books are about being an outsider talking about that and talking about what it means to be, I mean, here you are a science fiction writer, it's weird the way you weave together issues of race, issues of power, religion, I mean, it's weird to be a black science fiction writer, that's true, um, I When I was getting started there was another man, um Samuel R Delany, and he was one of my teachers and um, we were having a panel discussion in a library one day and someone asked, well, how many of you are there and we looked at each other's faces. to each other and we said?

There are two thirds of them, there was another man in Canada who was writing and he has since gone in a different direction, so things are better now, but there was a time when there was almost no one, I think part of this is It's simply because people do it. what they see other people doing Many years ago, a student came up to me at Michigan State University and she was a young black woman and she said to me, "You know, I always loved science fiction." I always wanted to write it, but I didn't. I think we did that and she was afraid that if she got into that there would be closed doors and life is short so sometimes people don't want to take the risk of running into closed doors.

My friends told me. uh you're doing all this and we thought you were very brave and after a while we decided that you just didn't have any common sense so I never wanted to do anything else when you go on tour and obviously the people that come to the readings are the fans who follow you regularly what your perception of your readers is in terms of what they find most appealing about your writing. I have always had at least three identifiable groups of readers and I remember trying to convince my publishers of this early on and not being successful until I chose a smaller publisher, but my groups tended to have their own independent bookstores.

There are still some independents, but they were black and feminist sci-fi. and they still are and of course they are now part of the mainstream so I am always glad that there are more readers and people know about me. People keep telling me oh, I would have read you before, but I had never heard of you. What about the power of fundamentalist religion? Oh, I grew up in a fundamentalist church. I was raised Baptist. One of my grandfathers was a Baptist preacher and I'm actually grateful for one thing in particular. That consciousness was installed early and it is a monstrous consciousness.

I can't really get my way, I'm not worried about other people catching me, my own conscience will catch me, it's when people start using their religion simply as a way to gain power over other people that scares me and my. I'm afraid that's what's happening in many cases right now, you know, I mean when people deliberately tell lies, creationism, for example, and pretend that it's not really religion, I mean, they know they're lying and , however, it's religious people, something is wrong there, um, when people use their religion to hurt other people to say oh, well, no, you, you have to accept this means of sexual education and not that one, because Our religion says so, it's a bad use, but I guess.

Religion is something so powerful that it is likely to be misused. As we wrap up this interview for young people, you said that you think maybe there are few black female science fiction writers because they haven't seen them before. Well, now there's more. The anecdote I told you was several years ago, but when you were a child there weren't any, so how did you get into it? With my eyes tightly closed, I figured I could do it. I wasn't being brave or even thoughtful. I wanted it and I figured I could have it, so what advice would you give to young people today who want to write?

They definitely should. It is difficult and sometimes impossible. I mean, I'm here. I come from a very long writer's block to be able to recognize the difficulty how long, oh seven years, doesn't mean I wasn't writing writer's block is not what I'm not writing it's when I'm not writing anything worthwhile and for people who suffer from writer's block your advice keep writing keep writing is yes it's the old idea that behavior that is repeated tends to be rewarded tends to be repeated um if you stop writing then you are rewarding yourself by not writing, if you continue Writing after a while, your brain might get the idea.

I'm not sure I said it very clearly, but I hope you know what I mean, except that if you're a writer you can't stop writing. I used to do it. I have a teacher who said that if something can prevent you from being a writer, don't be one.