[HN Gopher] The Life of Octavia Butler
___________________________________________________________________
The Life of Octavia Butler
Author : prismatic
Score : 80 points
Date : 2022-11-25 22:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vulture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vulture.com)
| holmesworcester wrote:
| 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.
| phlarbough wrote:
| 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.
| rospaya wrote:
| 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".
| maxbond wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jtr1 wrote:
| That's why I wish she was here: to articulate an alternative
| view
| morelisp wrote:
| 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.
| dnissley wrote:
| 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.
| maxbond wrote:
| 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?
| dnissley wrote:
| No familiarity -- just my observation of artists and
| authors being particularly inscrutable people.
| willis936 wrote:
| 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.
| musicale wrote:
| > 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?
| willis936 wrote:
| Notice we have no moon colony.
|
| Visiting is trivial compared to independently thriving.
| sverona wrote:
| > 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.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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.
| elliekelly wrote:
| 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.
| pieix wrote:
| A successful system is robust to tampering from external
| and internal actors.
| liamN wrote:
| by that logic, US democracy and capitalism arent
| successful either (see Russian election tampering and
| OPEC influence on US/global economy)
| pieix wrote:
| 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.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm pretty sure she'd have strong opinions about folks like
| Musk owning and controlling the means for that push.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| Perhaps Musk is the necessary evil to point out it is
| possible to push us to the stars, despite his many flaws.
| maxbond wrote:
| 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.
| dnissley wrote:
| What makes you think she would assert that?
| maxbond wrote:
| 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.
| dnissley wrote:
| 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.
| maxbond wrote:
| 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".
| [deleted]
| tomrod wrote:
| 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?
| maxbond wrote:
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| maxbond wrote:
| 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?
| vkou wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| jonstewart wrote:
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| It is closed due to structural issues for the time being I
| believe. The smaller Hill Av branch is also good.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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)
| dagaci wrote:
| This is a great overview of the book i read: "The Cost of
| Evolution | Xenogenesis Trilogy"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjrXHaDYb7w
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| I second the recommendation of Dawn, or the Xenogenesis trilogy
| in general. Couldn't really get into her other novels.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| janosett wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| diffxx wrote:
| > "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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| https://archive.ph/OKZn8 For anyone who never reads vulture but
| somehow reached their monthly limit (???)
| abraxas wrote:
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| Wish I could read Xenogenesis for the first time again.
| tonymet wrote:
| I'm surprised the Parable series hasn't been made into a tv or
| film series. any theories?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-26 23:00 UTC)