This semester we’ve talked a lot about scent and the powerful role it can play on people. There have been some really great posts that I remember by John Panus and, most specifically, Laura Major about senses, in particular smell. Laura talked about it as one of the things that ‘brings people together’ and John talked about how intuitive and ‘trusting’ we may have to be when it comes to sense. I was reminded of these posts recently when I read an article in the New York Times titled “Art for the Knowing Nose.” Continue reading Smelly Art →

As I was reading Dawn, I could not help but notice the potential significance (if, that is, there is any) of the main character’s name: Lilith. There are many myths concerning her throughout cultures and religions but as someone who has studied particular parts of the Bible, my first thought was the Lilith that is briefly mentioned within the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. When looking up the precise meaning of her name on Google, I came to find that Lilith is derived from lilitu, meaning “of the night”, which is ironic considering that the title of this first book in this series is Dawn.  Continue reading Lilith: “Of the Night” →

The term I’ve coined as social general is loosely defined as anyone who feels their duty in life is to better humanity by righting social injustices. Octavia Butler emphasizes her social generals within Dawn. The Oankali have developed into social general’s, in which they save humans on Earth from their “suicide.” Social generals feel extreme self-fulfillment when they help those below them. Continue reading Social Generals →

I had meant to post this earlier, but I of course forgot to do so. So although I wasn’t present in class on Friday for the discussion on Bloodchild, from what I’ve gathered from recent posts it seems as though at least part of the discussion pertained to Butler’s assertion in the afterword that, despite what many have claimed, the story is not about slavery. As Clarissa and Audrey have already insisted, respectively, a great deal of our interpretation of this story is dependent upon the context in which we read it. For me, when I first read Bloodchild, it was within Dr. McCoy’s African American Literature class, so nearly everything we read I would immediately fit within the narrative we were building in the class, which almost always was related to African diasporic cultural tradition(s) as well as the issues of slavery and its aftermath. At that time, when I reached the afterword to Bloodchild, I had already convinced myself of the seemingly inextricable links between the relations of power and subjection dealt with in the story and those of American reproductive slavery. In a sense, the afterword pushed back against my assumptions, instead offering another host of themes around which Bloodchild was centered and toward which I could redirect attention, including male pregnancy, botflies, and “paying the rent.”

Continue reading Bloodchild Revisited →

As I read Octavia Butler’s interview “Sci-Fi Visions: An Interview with Octavia Butler” with Rosalie G. Harrison in Conversations with Octavia Butler, she asked Butler what her early writing years were like. Butler described how frustrating they were and how English teachers were individuals that she had to escape from. She described how when she was in school, science fiction was indeed the one genre that never went over well with her English teachers. When Butler wrote science fiction for her English teachers, she was accused of plagiarism because of how strange it sounded to them. As a future English teacher, this situation really stood out to me because unless I was absolutely sure that a student copied an assignment I would never accuse them of doing so simply because what was written was strange/science fiction.

Throughout her involvement in a class called “Writing for Publication”, Butler learned that she had to write one way for her English teachers and another way for publishers (which I wish was not the case). Within this interview, she states that “I learned to write one way for English teachers and another way for myself . . . I discovered that there is one kind of writing that does not go over well with publishers and that was the kind English teachers seem to like” (3). I found this to be sad, because students should not have to hide their passion of writing within a specific genre from their English teachers simply because it is “strange.” I feel like this forces people to lie about who they are as a writer.

On page 4 of this interview, another aspect that stood out to me was Butler’s freedom that she aquired through writing science fiction. After completing the entirety of Butler’s Seed to Harvest, I felt that Butler definitely played by her own rules while creating the diverse and complicated plots of Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, and Patternmaster. I absolutely agree that science fiction is a free genre, and I feel like not enough people praise it for this specific reason. Butler has written about Vampires (Fledgling), a deadly disease, quests of creating the ultimate breed, the desire of aquiring ultimate power and control, and the list goes on. Octavia Butler was definitely a free writer who defined her own ways of writing for herself and for her audience.

Upon learning that Patternmaster is the first book that Octavia Butler wrote in the Patternist series, I immediately began to wonder what it would have been like if we had read the series in the order that Butler wrote the books, or read this book first instead of last. The order in which Butler chose to write this series intrigues me. I wish that she had originally planned to write the series in chronological order – it would certainly make the series appear less disorganized. Nevertheless, I understand why she chose to write the series in that order as a writer myself. After writing one book, sometimes the writer can become addicted to the characters. From there the writer wishes to expand their backgrounds and continue to be a part of their world. In Conversations with Octavia Butler, there is an article titled “Persistence” that was in a magazine. In the article, Butler explains how she “kept taking [her characters] back in time, after wondering, ‘How’d they get like that?’ And that’s how the various novels got plugged into wherever they are on that timeline” (181).

Reading them in chronological order made Patternmaster a bit of a let-down. I was expecting this let-down, so ultimately I didn’t care as much, but if she had started to write this series from Wild Seed, I think that the last book would have been much stronger and more suspenseful. However, Butler didn’t write the series that way so there is no use in going over this idea. Instead, we can question how our experience of Patternmaster would have been different if we had read the series in the order that it was written, rather than reading it chronologically. A classmate of ours, Ashley Allen, mistakenly began to read Patternmaster before the other books in the series, making her perspective a rather interesting one. I decided to interview her, desiring to see what her initial thoughts of Patternmaster were before she read the other books. Continue reading Interview with Ashley Allen on Patternmaster →

Reading the afterword in Bloodchild made me evaluate all the interpretations that lie within the short story. Butler discusses the three levels of her story which are love, coming of age, and being a pregnant man. One statement that Butler made in the Afterward drew may attention a lot. When Butler stated, “It amazes me that some people have seen Bloodchild as a story of slavery. It isn’t” (Butler, 30). While reading Bloodchild a reader could interpret Butler’s tropes as links to slavery. In Bloodchild we read that “there were whole Terran families wiped out in reprisal back during assassinations” (Butler, 12). A reader here could possibly interpret that Butler is discussing the systematic killings of blacks during slavery.

In an interview with Potts Butler states that she was trying to create an alien, but that you’re not suppose to regard it as evil. I questioned whether or not Butler is trying to place another trope by saying the centipede is not evil. Furthermore, I started to think about centipedes and other insects. Often we associate insects with negative terms such as, gross, nasty, creepy, etc. Therefore, how as readers could we not regard the centipede as evil? Then I thought of a similar creature the caterpillar, which turns into a graceful butterfly. The transition from caterpillar to butterfly is where the descriptive terminology changes.I wondered if the centipede like the caterpillar could ever be defined in a positive light? This question made me think of the love story, and as Butler stated if the centipede could ever be adorned by another species? The idea of the caterpillar/butterfly analogy comes from a spoken word poem from Kendrick Lamar’s “Mortal Man.” The spoken word poem starts at 10:30 in the track. There’s also a link to the interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmfWA3SdNpA

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/potts70interview.htm/

A few weeks ago, Kayla voiced her concern about sustainability in Clay’s Ark. She was concerned there would not be enough food on earth when appetites became insatiable as a result of the disease. At first I believed that Clayarks would have little to no problem acquiring sufficient food, considering that earth is capable of producing more food than necessary and that a large portion of the population would be killed by the disease. However, my post became a lot more complicated when Dr. McCoy informed me that California will run out of water in one year. Because the issue of sustainability and sharing resources between coexisting peoples is such a large part of Butler’s novels, I think it is important to discuss real life crises of sustainability, namely, world hunger and the California water crisis, within the context of Butler’s work.

Continue reading That Sustainability Question →