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More April Memage amongst a lot of other things.
[Proceed with caution, I'm cranky from lack of sleep and assorted aches and pains. But hey at least the sinus headache is gone. It's been lurking for the last five days, but now, it's finally gone. I think the barometric pressure shifted? It also got colder, so hello radiators. And sigh, overcast again, but we keep getting smatterings of blue sky and sun. The purple roses drooped, so I had to dispose of them, I have two that are hanging in there. Feeling a touch lonely and depressed at the moment, and kind of impotent? Some nitwit just called me to ask for money for "the officers"?
ME: Hello
(Long pause)
Male Voice: Christopher?
ME: No.
Male Voice: Oh sorry, at least I got one of you -
Me: No, you have the wrong number -
Male voice: I'm calling for the Officers, we wouldn't turn you away for help, so if you could give -
Me: You got the name wrong, and I wouldn't give any money to the officers at the moment. But thanks for trying.
Male voice: Oh sorry, thanks for listening, bye now.
Sigh. I feel at times like I'm a nameless and faceless entity living in a senseless world.
Work was well, work.
*****
More April Meme-mage:
12. Do you like playing card games? Which is your favourite?
I'm not into games. I've played card games and actually have done very well at them, then promptly forget the rules. I used to like Solitare and Uno.
13. Have you ever made yoghurt or kefir?
No.
14. What’s your geography knowledge like? If you were given a world map, how many countries could you confidently identify?
Fair to middling? I'm fine to an extent, but there are areas in the world such as ahem, Eastern Europe and the Middle East that like to change their geographical boundaries constantly. As does Africa and Central America.
So I get confused. The geographical map has changed at least five-six times since I was learned it all in junior high.
15. Have you a good sense of direction, or do you rely on maps/online navigation? When was the last time you got lost?
No. I have no sense of direction at all. I rely completely on maps. I rarely get lost, because I rely completely on maps. I always have one. That said - I did get lost once in Greenwood Cemetery, because I did not have a map and had to use the phone to orient myself.
16. Today, in 1850, the French artist Madame Tussaud died. She is known for her wax sculptures of famous figures and for founding Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London. Have you ever visited the London Wax Museum or any other wax museum worldwide? What did you think of the likenesses of the models?
Yes, I visited Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum way back in the 1980s. It was okay. The models were fairly close in the likeness to what I know of the the actual people - but without having seen any of them in person? It's hard to know for sure. Mainly I found the Museum kind of creepy? Wax museums creep me out. I blame 1960s and 70s schlock horror films.
***
Fandom news...
* Sarah Michelle Gellar Gets a Lead Role in another series ahead of the Buffy Reboot
"A new Buffy the Vampire Slayer series was confirmed earlier this year with Sarah Michelle Gellar attached, but the actress, who is also featured as a recurring character in Dexter: Original Sin, will be featured in a big role in a new TV series that’s being compared to The White Lotus. Per Deadline, Gellar, who starred as the titular vampire slayer on Buffy from 1997 until 2003, has been tapped to star in and executive produce Bad Summer People.
Bad Summer People is based on the 2023 bestselling novel of the same name by Emma Rosenblum. So far, Cara DiPaolo (No Good Deed) has been tapped to write and executive produce the series, which will be produced by Linden Productions (Family Switch), and A+E Studios (The Lincoln Lawyer). A+E Studios will develop the Bad Summer People series in-house before taking it to buyers. Riva Marker and Deanna Barillari with Linden Productions and JoAnne Colonna are producing the show."
Basically it's a drama about nasty wealthy people. These are in right now, for reasons that are beyond me.
"The novel has been compared to the Max series The White Lotus. Bad Summer People takes place in the picturesque fictional town of Salcombe, Fire Island, and focuses on a series of life-altering events that start happening when a body is found off the side of the boardwalk. The show will mainly follow “frenemies” Jen Weinstein and Lauren Parker, who have spent summers on Fire Island together for years along with their husbands Sam and Jason. However, secrets and grudges come to the surface during one particular summer."
In my head - Buffy goes to find help being a Watcher or maybe form a new Watcher Council for the new slayer, because honestly she has better things to do? And hunts down Liam and William running a record store, band, and detective agency out of London.
Liam has an art studio and gallery where he's selling his art and creating album covers and t-shirts for the punk rock band - William is fronting a punk band, and handling the record store which is a front for the agency. Fred and Cordelia are living with them. William is hanging with Cordy - who is from another alternate universe, where she was the slayer, and he'd stumbled upon her. And Liam is hanging with Fred - who also was from the same AU. Both Liam and William shanshued or got back their humanity now, and have "retired" from the demon killing gig. Happy in London, living somewhat normal human lives, they aren't exactly willing to become Buffy's new Watcher Council. Much arguing ensues.
*****
Book recommendations
* For those interested in the Crisis in Gaza:
Born Jewish in Nazi Germany, My Journey to Become Anti-Zionist by Suzanne Ross
" This is not a scholarly piece. It is not a research paper. I am not a historian. It is about the changing of my consciousness from accepting many or even most of the tenets of Zionism in the aftermath of the creation of the State of Israel (when I was 11 years old) to becoming an anti-Zionist. The pivotal historical moment was, of course, the creation of the State of Israel, the “Nakba” (Arabic for disaster). To explain my ideological, religious, and political changes in becoming the anti-Zionist Jew I am today, I had to place these personal turning points in the context of what was happening in Palestine. I chose the particular historical moments I focused on based on their impact on me, not on the relative significance of each moment in the history of Palestine or Zionism. I have written this piece, challenging as it has been, because I thought a step-by-step analysis of my own ideological and political transformation might be helpful for other Jews or other supporters of Israel to use to transform their own misinformation and distorted consciousness. My view of Israel changed as the years went on. The process developed from my years as a Yeshiva student in the U.S. to my very slow recognition of the falseness of the narrative I had been presented with at school and in the community. There was an equally slow process of rejecting this narrative and eventually becoming the Palestine solidarity activist and militant anti-Zionist I am today."
* Speculative Science Fiction by Black Women
I'm working my way through Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which is actually quite good. Octavia Butler was a speculative science fiction writer during the 20th Century and a more than adept wordsmith and writer. (I read Kindred by her - and it is among the few Time Travel novels that blew me away and worked.) Parable of the Sower was first published in 1993, thirty years ago, but the book takes place in 2024-2025. Yes, it takes place now. It's very odd reading a science fiction novel that is taking place in present time, when it was written thirty years before. I find myself checking to see how close the novel is to real events. (Frighteningly so, in some respects? However no where near as bleak. She's writing about an apocalyptic world that a young fifteen year old girl with empathetic abilities (she literally feels the pain of anyone or anything in close proximity to her as if it is happening to her) works to survive within, along with her family and how she does it.)
Octavia Butler Article in the New Yorker
Octavia Butler’s tenth novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought and rising seawater. The middle class and working poor live in gated neighborhoods, where they fend off the homeless with guns and walls. Fresh water is scarce, as valuable as money. Pharmaceutical companies have created “smart drugs,” which boost mental performance, and “pyro,” a pill that gives those who take it sexual pleasure from arson. Fires are common. Police services are expensive, though few people trust the police. Public schools are being privatized, as are whole towns. In this atmosphere, a Presidential candidate named Christopher Donner is elected based on his promises to dismantle government programs and bring back jobs.
“Parable of the Sower” unfolds through the journal entries of its protagonist, a fifteen-year-old black girl named Lauren Oya Olamina, who lives with her family in one of the walled neighborhoods. “People have changed the climate of the world,” she observes. “Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” She places no hope in Donner, whom she views as “a symbol of the past to hold onto as we’re pushed into the future.” Instead, she equips herself to survive in that future. She practices her aim with BB guns. She collects maps and books on how Native Americans used plants. She develops a belief system of her own, a Darwinian religion she names Earthseed. When the day comes for her to leave her walled enclave, Lauren walks west to the 101 freeway, joining a river of the poor that is flooding north. It’s a dangerous crossing, made more so by a taboo affliction that Lauren was born with, “hyperempathy,” which causes her to feel the pain of others.
By writing black female protagonists into science fiction, and bringing her acute appraisal of real-world power structures to bear on the imaginary worlds she created, Butler became an early pillar of the subgenre and aesthetic known as Afrofuturism. (Kara Walker cites her as an inspiration; and, as Hilton Als has pointed out, Butler is the “dominant artistic force” in Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade.”) In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Kellyanne Conway made a strong case for George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” when she used the phrase “alternative facts” and sent the novel to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” also experienced a resurgence in sales, and its TV adaptation on Hulu inspired protest costumes. But for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler’s novel and its sequel may be unmatched.
Butler was born in 1947, in Pasadena, California, and raised by her grandmother and mother, who worked as a maid. Her father, a shoe shiner, died when she was seven. As a child, she often accompanied her mother to work at a wealthy Pasadena household, where the help entered through back doors. In one of Butler’s first stories, “Flash—Silver Star,” which she wrote at the age of eleven, a young girl is picked up by a U.F.O. from Mars and taken on a tour of the solar system.
Butler ignored the received idea that black people belonged in science fiction only if their blackness was crucial to the plot. (In 1979, a fellow-science-fiction writer advised Butler that points about race might better be made with extraterrestrials.) As she wrote in a 1980 essay for the magazine Transmission, titled “Lost Races of Science Fiction”: "No writer who regards blacks as people, human beings, with the usual variety of human concerns, flaws, skills, hopes, etc., would have trouble creating interesting backgrounds and goals for black characters.” She later made a habit of explaining, as here to the Times, “I wrote myself in, since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing. I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.”
In “Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories,” an exhibition of Butler’s papers at the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California, which runs through August 7th, there is tangible evidence of her outsize resolve. Over the decades, as she was writing her most popular novel, “Kindred,” and two highly regarded series—her five-part Patternist books and her Xenogenesis trilogy—Butler was filling personal journals with affirming mantras. “I am a bestselling writer,” one entry, dated 1975, reads. “I write bestselling books.” She closes: “So be it! See to it!” She was still talking to herself in this manner in 1988, even though by then she had won both a Hugo and a Nebula award, science fiction’s highest honors. “I shall be a bestselling writer,” she writes in a notebook that year. “So be it! See to it!”
By the time she began working on the Parable books, in 1989, Butler was in her forties and had written nine novels. The series, she decided, would be her “If this goes on…” story. In colorful diagrams, Butler extrapolated her vision of a near-future dystopia from what she read in the news, forecasting what kind of collapse might result if the forces of late-stage capitalism, climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence, and the tech industry continued unhampered. (“More Hispanics,” she writes in one notebook. “More High Tech.”) Butler took a cyclical view of history. She also thought social progress was reversible. As the public sphere became hollowed out, a fear of change would create an opening for retrograde politics. With collapse, racism would become more overt.
The sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” published in 1998, begins in 2032. By then, various forms of indentured servitude and slavery are common, facilitated by high-tech slave collars. The oppression of women has become extreme; those who express their opinion, “nags,” might have their tongues cut out. People are addicted not only to designer drugs but also to “dream masks,” which generate virtual fantasies as guided dreams, allowing wearers to submerge themselves in simpler, happier lives. News comes in the form of disks or “news bullets,” which “purport to tell us all we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, verbal one-two punches. Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.” The Donner Administration has written off science, but a more immediate threat lurks: a violent movement is being whipped up by a new Presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot who is running on a platform to “make American great again.”
In Butler’s prognosis, humans survive through an intricate logic of interdependence. Soon after leaving her family’s walled neighborhood, Lauren discerns that her natural allies are other people of color, including mixed-race couples, since they are likely to become targets of white violence. Several of the migrants who join Lauren’s pack and the community she later establishes, Acorn, turn out to also be “sharers,” the term for people with hyperempathy. But Butler is not making a sentimental case for the value of empathy. In the day to day of the Parable books, hyperempathy is a liability that makes moving through the world more complicated and, for tactical reasons, requires those who have it to behave more ruthlessly. When defending herself against attackers, Lauren often must shoot or stab to kill, or else risk being immobilized by the pain she inflicts. In one particularly dark manifestation of the syndrome, she is raped and experiences both her own pain and the pleasure of her rapist.
In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship. The grant, she hoped, would enable her to finish four more books she had planned for the Parable series. But the story, she found, was “too depressing.” She changed course and wrote a vampire novel, her last book, “Fledgling,” which came out in 2005. The following year, Butler died unexpectedly, at the age of fifty-eight, when she fell and hit her head outside her home, north of Seattle. In her lifetime, Butler insisted that the Parable series was not intended as an augur. “This was not a book about prophecy,” she said, of “Talents,” in remarks she delivered at M.I.T. “This was a cautionary tale, although people have told me it was prophecy. All I have to say to that is: I certainly hope not.”
Parable of the Sower is also on the Banned Books list.
* Audio Books
Finished Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo and working my way through the sequel. The Crooked Kingdom. Six of Crows were my favorite characters in the Shadow and Bone series on Netflix. And the audio book is a treat. It has six narrators, actually seven or eight narrators - one for each character's point of view, since the chapters are split by points of view, similar to GRR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. This is geared towards a more post-adolescent or New Adult reader, than the adult audience that Song of Ice and Fire targeted. The writing is simpler, and the characters for the most part younger. Although, admittedly one of my issues with GRR Martin's series was that all the lead or main point of view characters aka heroes of the piece were well under the age of 20. It was kind of disturbing watching kids be tortured, raped, and go to war. This series is similar, albeit less violent - it's not hard to be less violent.
Also, while Martin's was Western European (specifically British), this series is Eastern European, and Russian in language and mythology. And Bardugo is a better plotter and not quite as long winded. Martin was a television writer - specializing in characterization - plotting, suffice it to say, was not his strong suit. Evidenced by the fact that he managed to write himself so deftly into a corner, along with half his characters, that he wasn't able to write his way out of it - enough to finish the epic series or provide the television series with a satisfying ending. That, my friends, is an example of bad plotting. Barduogo in stark contrast is a decent plotter - she's plotting a heist and does it rather well, furthering each character and she has six to work with along the way. Martin kept adding characters, to the point in which I lost track of how many points of view he had, and so had he. Rule 1 when writing a series of novels, limit the number of characters you have to keep track of - or you may lose track of your plot and the characters. (See GRR Martin as an example.)
It's better than expected. Or I'm rather enjoying it more than I thought I would. I'm on a fantasy/science fiction kick at the moment, having gotten burned out on romance novels. This happens to me. I binge a genre to the point in which I eventually get burned out on it. Then after an extensive break? I may zig-zag back to it. The only genre this has not happened with is the sci-fi/fantasy genres. I'm not quite sure why.
ME: Hello
(Long pause)
Male Voice: Christopher?
ME: No.
Male Voice: Oh sorry, at least I got one of you -
Me: No, you have the wrong number -
Male voice: I'm calling for the Officers, we wouldn't turn you away for help, so if you could give -
Me: You got the name wrong, and I wouldn't give any money to the officers at the moment. But thanks for trying.
Male voice: Oh sorry, thanks for listening, bye now.
Sigh. I feel at times like I'm a nameless and faceless entity living in a senseless world.
Work was well, work.
*****
More April Meme-mage:
12. Do you like playing card games? Which is your favourite?
I'm not into games. I've played card games and actually have done very well at them, then promptly forget the rules. I used to like Solitare and Uno.
13. Have you ever made yoghurt or kefir?
No.
14. What’s your geography knowledge like? If you were given a world map, how many countries could you confidently identify?
Fair to middling? I'm fine to an extent, but there are areas in the world such as ahem, Eastern Europe and the Middle East that like to change their geographical boundaries constantly. As does Africa and Central America.
So I get confused. The geographical map has changed at least five-six times since I was learned it all in junior high.
15. Have you a good sense of direction, or do you rely on maps/online navigation? When was the last time you got lost?
No. I have no sense of direction at all. I rely completely on maps. I rarely get lost, because I rely completely on maps. I always have one. That said - I did get lost once in Greenwood Cemetery, because I did not have a map and had to use the phone to orient myself.
16. Today, in 1850, the French artist Madame Tussaud died. She is known for her wax sculptures of famous figures and for founding Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London. Have you ever visited the London Wax Museum or any other wax museum worldwide? What did you think of the likenesses of the models?
Yes, I visited Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum way back in the 1980s. It was okay. The models were fairly close in the likeness to what I know of the the actual people - but without having seen any of them in person? It's hard to know for sure. Mainly I found the Museum kind of creepy? Wax museums creep me out. I blame 1960s and 70s schlock horror films.
***
Fandom news...
* Sarah Michelle Gellar Gets a Lead Role in another series ahead of the Buffy Reboot
"A new Buffy the Vampire Slayer series was confirmed earlier this year with Sarah Michelle Gellar attached, but the actress, who is also featured as a recurring character in Dexter: Original Sin, will be featured in a big role in a new TV series that’s being compared to The White Lotus. Per Deadline, Gellar, who starred as the titular vampire slayer on Buffy from 1997 until 2003, has been tapped to star in and executive produce Bad Summer People.
Bad Summer People is based on the 2023 bestselling novel of the same name by Emma Rosenblum. So far, Cara DiPaolo (No Good Deed) has been tapped to write and executive produce the series, which will be produced by Linden Productions (Family Switch), and A+E Studios (The Lincoln Lawyer). A+E Studios will develop the Bad Summer People series in-house before taking it to buyers. Riva Marker and Deanna Barillari with Linden Productions and JoAnne Colonna are producing the show."
Basically it's a drama about nasty wealthy people. These are in right now, for reasons that are beyond me.
"The novel has been compared to the Max series The White Lotus. Bad Summer People takes place in the picturesque fictional town of Salcombe, Fire Island, and focuses on a series of life-altering events that start happening when a body is found off the side of the boardwalk. The show will mainly follow “frenemies” Jen Weinstein and Lauren Parker, who have spent summers on Fire Island together for years along with their husbands Sam and Jason. However, secrets and grudges come to the surface during one particular summer."
In my head - Buffy goes to find help being a Watcher or maybe form a new Watcher Council for the new slayer, because honestly she has better things to do? And hunts down Liam and William running a record store, band, and detective agency out of London.
Liam has an art studio and gallery where he's selling his art and creating album covers and t-shirts for the punk rock band - William is fronting a punk band, and handling the record store which is a front for the agency. Fred and Cordelia are living with them. William is hanging with Cordy - who is from another alternate universe, where she was the slayer, and he'd stumbled upon her. And Liam is hanging with Fred - who also was from the same AU. Both Liam and William shanshued or got back their humanity now, and have "retired" from the demon killing gig. Happy in London, living somewhat normal human lives, they aren't exactly willing to become Buffy's new Watcher Council. Much arguing ensues.
*****
Book recommendations
* For those interested in the Crisis in Gaza:
Born Jewish in Nazi Germany, My Journey to Become Anti-Zionist by Suzanne Ross
" This is not a scholarly piece. It is not a research paper. I am not a historian. It is about the changing of my consciousness from accepting many or even most of the tenets of Zionism in the aftermath of the creation of the State of Israel (when I was 11 years old) to becoming an anti-Zionist. The pivotal historical moment was, of course, the creation of the State of Israel, the “Nakba” (Arabic for disaster). To explain my ideological, religious, and political changes in becoming the anti-Zionist Jew I am today, I had to place these personal turning points in the context of what was happening in Palestine. I chose the particular historical moments I focused on based on their impact on me, not on the relative significance of each moment in the history of Palestine or Zionism. I have written this piece, challenging as it has been, because I thought a step-by-step analysis of my own ideological and political transformation might be helpful for other Jews or other supporters of Israel to use to transform their own misinformation and distorted consciousness. My view of Israel changed as the years went on. The process developed from my years as a Yeshiva student in the U.S. to my very slow recognition of the falseness of the narrative I had been presented with at school and in the community. There was an equally slow process of rejecting this narrative and eventually becoming the Palestine solidarity activist and militant anti-Zionist I am today."
* Speculative Science Fiction by Black Women
I'm working my way through Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which is actually quite good. Octavia Butler was a speculative science fiction writer during the 20th Century and a more than adept wordsmith and writer. (I read Kindred by her - and it is among the few Time Travel novels that blew me away and worked.) Parable of the Sower was first published in 1993, thirty years ago, but the book takes place in 2024-2025. Yes, it takes place now. It's very odd reading a science fiction novel that is taking place in present time, when it was written thirty years before. I find myself checking to see how close the novel is to real events. (Frighteningly so, in some respects? However no where near as bleak. She's writing about an apocalyptic world that a young fifteen year old girl with empathetic abilities (she literally feels the pain of anyone or anything in close proximity to her as if it is happening to her) works to survive within, along with her family and how she does it.)
Octavia Butler Article in the New Yorker
Octavia Butler’s tenth novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought and rising seawater. The middle class and working poor live in gated neighborhoods, where they fend off the homeless with guns and walls. Fresh water is scarce, as valuable as money. Pharmaceutical companies have created “smart drugs,” which boost mental performance, and “pyro,” a pill that gives those who take it sexual pleasure from arson. Fires are common. Police services are expensive, though few people trust the police. Public schools are being privatized, as are whole towns. In this atmosphere, a Presidential candidate named Christopher Donner is elected based on his promises to dismantle government programs and bring back jobs.
“Parable of the Sower” unfolds through the journal entries of its protagonist, a fifteen-year-old black girl named Lauren Oya Olamina, who lives with her family in one of the walled neighborhoods. “People have changed the climate of the world,” she observes. “Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” She places no hope in Donner, whom she views as “a symbol of the past to hold onto as we’re pushed into the future.” Instead, she equips herself to survive in that future. She practices her aim with BB guns. She collects maps and books on how Native Americans used plants. She develops a belief system of her own, a Darwinian religion she names Earthseed. When the day comes for her to leave her walled enclave, Lauren walks west to the 101 freeway, joining a river of the poor that is flooding north. It’s a dangerous crossing, made more so by a taboo affliction that Lauren was born with, “hyperempathy,” which causes her to feel the pain of others.
By writing black female protagonists into science fiction, and bringing her acute appraisal of real-world power structures to bear on the imaginary worlds she created, Butler became an early pillar of the subgenre and aesthetic known as Afrofuturism. (Kara Walker cites her as an inspiration; and, as Hilton Als has pointed out, Butler is the “dominant artistic force” in Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade.”) In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Kellyanne Conway made a strong case for George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” when she used the phrase “alternative facts” and sent the novel to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” also experienced a resurgence in sales, and its TV adaptation on Hulu inspired protest costumes. But for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler’s novel and its sequel may be unmatched.
Butler was born in 1947, in Pasadena, California, and raised by her grandmother and mother, who worked as a maid. Her father, a shoe shiner, died when she was seven. As a child, she often accompanied her mother to work at a wealthy Pasadena household, where the help entered through back doors. In one of Butler’s first stories, “Flash—Silver Star,” which she wrote at the age of eleven, a young girl is picked up by a U.F.O. from Mars and taken on a tour of the solar system.
Butler ignored the received idea that black people belonged in science fiction only if their blackness was crucial to the plot. (In 1979, a fellow-science-fiction writer advised Butler that points about race might better be made with extraterrestrials.) As she wrote in a 1980 essay for the magazine Transmission, titled “Lost Races of Science Fiction”: "No writer who regards blacks as people, human beings, with the usual variety of human concerns, flaws, skills, hopes, etc., would have trouble creating interesting backgrounds and goals for black characters.” She later made a habit of explaining, as here to the Times, “I wrote myself in, since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing. I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.”
In “Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories,” an exhibition of Butler’s papers at the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California, which runs through August 7th, there is tangible evidence of her outsize resolve. Over the decades, as she was writing her most popular novel, “Kindred,” and two highly regarded series—her five-part Patternist books and her Xenogenesis trilogy—Butler was filling personal journals with affirming mantras. “I am a bestselling writer,” one entry, dated 1975, reads. “I write bestselling books.” She closes: “So be it! See to it!” She was still talking to herself in this manner in 1988, even though by then she had won both a Hugo and a Nebula award, science fiction’s highest honors. “I shall be a bestselling writer,” she writes in a notebook that year. “So be it! See to it!”
By the time she began working on the Parable books, in 1989, Butler was in her forties and had written nine novels. The series, she decided, would be her “If this goes on…” story. In colorful diagrams, Butler extrapolated her vision of a near-future dystopia from what she read in the news, forecasting what kind of collapse might result if the forces of late-stage capitalism, climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence, and the tech industry continued unhampered. (“More Hispanics,” she writes in one notebook. “More High Tech.”) Butler took a cyclical view of history. She also thought social progress was reversible. As the public sphere became hollowed out, a fear of change would create an opening for retrograde politics. With collapse, racism would become more overt.
The sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” published in 1998, begins in 2032. By then, various forms of indentured servitude and slavery are common, facilitated by high-tech slave collars. The oppression of women has become extreme; those who express their opinion, “nags,” might have their tongues cut out. People are addicted not only to designer drugs but also to “dream masks,” which generate virtual fantasies as guided dreams, allowing wearers to submerge themselves in simpler, happier lives. News comes in the form of disks or “news bullets,” which “purport to tell us all we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, verbal one-two punches. Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.” The Donner Administration has written off science, but a more immediate threat lurks: a violent movement is being whipped up by a new Presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot who is running on a platform to “make American great again.”
In Butler’s prognosis, humans survive through an intricate logic of interdependence. Soon after leaving her family’s walled neighborhood, Lauren discerns that her natural allies are other people of color, including mixed-race couples, since they are likely to become targets of white violence. Several of the migrants who join Lauren’s pack and the community she later establishes, Acorn, turn out to also be “sharers,” the term for people with hyperempathy. But Butler is not making a sentimental case for the value of empathy. In the day to day of the Parable books, hyperempathy is a liability that makes moving through the world more complicated and, for tactical reasons, requires those who have it to behave more ruthlessly. When defending herself against attackers, Lauren often must shoot or stab to kill, or else risk being immobilized by the pain she inflicts. In one particularly dark manifestation of the syndrome, she is raped and experiences both her own pain and the pleasure of her rapist.
In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship. The grant, she hoped, would enable her to finish four more books she had planned for the Parable series. But the story, she found, was “too depressing.” She changed course and wrote a vampire novel, her last book, “Fledgling,” which came out in 2005. The following year, Butler died unexpectedly, at the age of fifty-eight, when she fell and hit her head outside her home, north of Seattle. In her lifetime, Butler insisted that the Parable series was not intended as an augur. “This was not a book about prophecy,” she said, of “Talents,” in remarks she delivered at M.I.T. “This was a cautionary tale, although people have told me it was prophecy. All I have to say to that is: I certainly hope not.”
Parable of the Sower is also on the Banned Books list.
* Audio Books
Finished Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo and working my way through the sequel. The Crooked Kingdom. Six of Crows were my favorite characters in the Shadow and Bone series on Netflix. And the audio book is a treat. It has six narrators, actually seven or eight narrators - one for each character's point of view, since the chapters are split by points of view, similar to GRR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. This is geared towards a more post-adolescent or New Adult reader, than the adult audience that Song of Ice and Fire targeted. The writing is simpler, and the characters for the most part younger. Although, admittedly one of my issues with GRR Martin's series was that all the lead or main point of view characters aka heroes of the piece were well under the age of 20. It was kind of disturbing watching kids be tortured, raped, and go to war. This series is similar, albeit less violent - it's not hard to be less violent.
Also, while Martin's was Western European (specifically British), this series is Eastern European, and Russian in language and mythology. And Bardugo is a better plotter and not quite as long winded. Martin was a television writer - specializing in characterization - plotting, suffice it to say, was not his strong suit. Evidenced by the fact that he managed to write himself so deftly into a corner, along with half his characters, that he wasn't able to write his way out of it - enough to finish the epic series or provide the television series with a satisfying ending. That, my friends, is an example of bad plotting. Barduogo in stark contrast is a decent plotter - she's plotting a heist and does it rather well, furthering each character and she has six to work with along the way. Martin kept adding characters, to the point in which I lost track of how many points of view he had, and so had he. Rule 1 when writing a series of novels, limit the number of characters you have to keep track of - or you may lose track of your plot and the characters. (See GRR Martin as an example.)
It's better than expected. Or I'm rather enjoying it more than I thought I would. I'm on a fantasy/science fiction kick at the moment, having gotten burned out on romance novels. This happens to me. I binge a genre to the point in which I eventually get burned out on it. Then after an extensive break? I may zig-zag back to it. The only genre this has not happened with is the sci-fi/fantasy genres. I'm not quite sure why.