I am an Octavia Butler stan. I’ve read everything she ever published (and didn’t retract) years ago. Everything that is, except the Parables series. Bleak dystopian futures with aliens who’s gene altering prowess rival the zerg, or telepathic unions and immortal shapeshifting healers? Totally here for that. Near future climate collapse dystopia with barely any speculative elements to be seen? Uh, I bounced off it literal decades ago. (published in ’93) and didn’t come back to it until now. Oddly, it was the sole speculative element of the fiction that I encountered that made me tap out. Science fiction vulnerability? Extra empathetic pain? College age me couldn’t take it.
And coming back to it, it now seems to be her most prophetic work. Climate change catastrophe that isn’t really being addressed. Widening inequality. Wage slavery. The police as a dangerous, unreliable, gang. Racism as the core element of society that doesn’t go away.
I wasn’t ready for it at the time. A lot of those problems have been around for awhile. And I wasn’t aware of them, or interested in them, or willing to face them. And now? It is a hard, bleak, violent world that Octavia depicts. One where people disappear without explanation and without reason; where people do anything to survive; where people hurt one another arbitrarily.
I knew there was a big loss coming at the end. And she did not disappoint. One thing about Octavia is the way her works devastate her characters and emotionally challenge her readers. But another, just as important, is the way she talks about people picking themselves up and moving on after the loss. Moving into the space made by that loss and living and growing there, knowing that each loss is real, and it hurts, but that we pick ourselves up and keep going. And maybe that is why I love her work so much.