her brand of science fiction, specifically parable of the sower, speech sounds, and some of her other more grounded work is precisely what you're looking for i think. her genius is that while most of the sci-fi preceding her written by white men created far-flung worlds and futures to explore current questions, butler flipped the whole genre on it's head by interrogating the near-future as a consequence of the present and still calling it sci-fi because it still met all of the heuristics for the genre
parable of the sower will break your brain in a terrifying, constantly-looking-over-your-shoulder and never-looking-at-stuff-the-same way but perhaps now more than ever that is a testament to her genius as a writer
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I was very late to learning about the visionary brilliance of Octavia Butler. I embarrassingly had never heard of her even though the local ICA had an entire outward facing wall wrapped with her image and a quote. Sometimes tunnel vision can really lead you astray so it’s always best to be searching with an open mind. I’ve had a hard time with reading since quarantine, I think it has something to do with an exorbitant amount of screen time destroying what was left of my spreading diminished attention span. I trudged through book after book this past year not being able to sink my teeth into anything until I found Parable of the Sower. This book has made me fall in love with reading again. Instead of rewatching the Sopranos for the millionth time, I look forward to my time each day with the book’s chronicler, Lauren Olamina, and her Earthseed musings. A novel fraught with dystopia that feels more like today’s news than the science fiction label it got when published in 1993. I haven’t finished it quite yet, but I have been telling everyone they should read it, truly inspiring and makes me want to approach each day with more empathy and hope no matter how much despair we are hit with each day. God is Change.
Mar 25, 2021
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Anything and everything by her. She is sci-fi/speculative fiction queen.
Apr 5, 2024
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truly original sci fi while also making me think deeply about human nature
Mar 1, 2024
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Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024