#octavia-e-butler — Public Fediverse posts

RE: https://c.im/@icastico/117496834874373850

Reading Octavia Butler's Parable books in the 2020s is definitely a "How did she know?!!!" experience.
#OctaviaEButler #SciFi

"Devil Girl from Mars" :boob_planet: (1954) es una de esas películas de ciencia ficción de la década de los 50 fraguadas a base de pocos dólares, :fry_takemymoney: y que deja un poso que todo lo empapa, para bien o para mal.

Eso le pasó a la autora estadounidense Octavia E. Butler (ganadora de los premios Hugo y Nebula) que declaró que fue precisamente ver "Devil Girl from Mars" en la televisión a los 12 años lo que la impulsó a escribir ciencia ficción.

Dijo... "¡Yo puedo escribir algo mucho mejor que esto!".

Un peliculón muy friki.

#CienciaFicción #CineDeLos50 #OctaviaEButler #PatriciaLaffan #Cine

@Youngbeard

In case you haven't heard, #OctaviaEButler 's Survivor is going back to print.

I'm reading Parable of the Talents by Octavia E Butler. As an American, this part sings loudly to me right now. I carry so much angst about our situation, doubled by the obliviousness of my neighbors who ignore or celebrate our fate. Why are we so blind? Our democracy has a shorter life expectancy than Mitch McConnell.

#fascism #USpol #Trump #USPolitics #Democracy #OctaviaEButler #USA

Books finished in 2026:

29. Wild Seed by Octavia E Butler (1980)
28. Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline (2020)
27. The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable by Terry Pratchett (2001)
26. Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P Newton with J Herman Blake (1973)
25. The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (1955)
24. Granny Made Me An Anarchist by Stuart Christie (2004)
23. The Day of The Triffids by John Wyndham (1951)
22. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970)
21. Secolo Nuovo: Or the Times of Promise, A Novel by Fulvia Ferrari (2021)
20. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels (1880)
19. Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance and Rebellion by Working Class History (2020)
18. The Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley (1922)
17. Small Gods by Terry Pratchett (1992)
16. The Red and The Black by Stendhal (1830)
15. The Book of Sand (1975) and Shakespeare’s Memory (1983) by Jorge Luis Borges
14. Anarchist Feminists In The Philippines From Etniko Bandido (~2016)
13. The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini (1989)
12. Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare: A Guide to the Armed Phase of the African Revolution by Kwame Nkrumah (1968)
11. Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1792)
10. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)
9. Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker (1911)
8. Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1996)
7. Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett (1991)
6. The Nation On No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition by William C Anderson (2023)
5. baedan - journal of queer nihilism - issue one (2012)
4. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)
3. They Will Beat The Memory Out Of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements by Peter Gelderloos (2024)
2. It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935)
1. Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2006)

The first book I've read in the Patternist Series. I thoroughly enjoyed Kindred, the Xenogenesis Series and the Earth Seed books and am so far into this as well.

A being, a man, who takes the bodies of others and has lived for 3,700 years meets a woman who is a powerful healer and shapeshifter hundreds of years old.

This is the first book in the series chronologically by the story's own timeline but it's the fourth published by the author.

#books #book #reading #nowreading #Bookstodon #octaviaebutler #scifi #fantasy

Born this day: 06/22/1947 (d. 02/24/2006)
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction and speculative fiction author who won several awards for her works. Bloodchild (1985) won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler

#Literature #SciFi #ScienceFiction #books #bookstodon #coverart #bookart #bookcovers
#OctaviaEButler @books @scifi @Scifiart @sciencefiction

https://astralcomputing.com

Artwork by John Jude Palencar

On 1 June 1979: American author #OctaviaEButler's breakout novel "Kindred" is published.

On May 14, 2022: #OctaviaEButler receives the first-ever Infinity Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, an award given to those who have died before they could be considered for a Grand Master award.
#RIP 🪽

#OctaviaEButler‘s 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 was released back in 1993, but it is finally getting its film adaptation, 𝘝𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘵𝘺 reports. 🎥🎬

Read it at our 🔗 link in the comments.
#booknews #filmadaptation #bookstodon

https://www.europesays.com/hu/59631/ A 90-es évek kultikus disztópikus sci-fi-jéből készül filmadaptáció #Entertainment #Filmek #HU #Hungarian #Hungary #Magyar #Magyarország #MelinaMatsoukas #Movie #mozi #OctaviaEButler #regényadaptáció #SciFi #Szórakozás

Octavia E. Butlers „Parable of the Sower” bzw. „Die Parabel vom Sämann” gilt als Science-Fiction-Meisterwerk, wurde jedoch erst 27 Jahre nach Veröffentlichung zum Verkaufshit. Melina Matsoukas wird das wegweisende Buch verfilmen. #sfcd #octaviaebutler #sciencefiction

Erst nach 27 Jahren (!) wurde ...

A film version of Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” is in the works! This book predicted so many things that are happening today. I’m excited: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/octavia-e-butler-parable-sower-225524144.html

#FilmMastodon #ScienceFiction #OctaviaEButler #Books

@bookstodon

Prodigy is at its essence: adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
-- Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #OctaviaEButler #Adaptability #Fanaticism #Persistence #Prodigy

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Books

An Ode and a Promise

It is Women’s History Month and so we gather to celebrate sisterhood and necessary delusion. BEWARE OF POTENTIAL SPOILERS.

So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ is a tender, one-sided conversation depicting the deep, platonic love between two women over the course of their lives. I say it’s a conversation because it begins to feel like someone specific is actively listening to this narration as the book goes on. The letter-writer describes the tragedies of one particular aspect of her life while relating the listener’s life in a way that is not quite a comparison but in admiration of how well the listener handled her own challenges.

Still, the letter-writer manages to restore the dignity of her own perspective by explaining why she reacted the way she did versus how people thought she would. She relates the times she found the courage to stand up for herself, what motivated that courage. She manages to show respect for both her own situation as well as her friend’s -the recipient’s- dilemma. Not only that, but she manages to give validity to both her resolution and the friend’s -even though they came to different solutions. It’s quite a mature kind of love that they share, as depicted by the letter.

One of the best things about this book was the palpable recognition of the other’s pain and dignity, the demonstrated (versus theorised) warmth between the two friends.

From what I’ve seen and read of African life, there is a certain taking for granted of the ways in which women experience struggle and pain. It is actually expected that a woman should have a hard life and that part of that endurance is her putting up with all kinds of behaviour from her husband as well as other members of the society. From the description of both lives, we see how they care for each other through societal expectations and norms and all the ways they show it over the years.

This book gave magnitude and acknowledgement to the struggles that the two women faced and did not treat pain as a given, a rite of passage or a noble cause. If you are not suffering nobly for the benefit of somebody else and your entire community, what are you doing with your life? is the tone in many societies. It is brutal how casual people are about a woman’s pain. For that reason alone, this was the right book to read for Women’s History Month.

At the same time, these days in the younger generations there is a whiff of disdain in the air for women who endure -even if the doctrine is still preached and lived. The letter-writer may be framed by some as enduring and ‘lacking self-respect’ but I didn’t see it that way. I thought she tackled her situation the way she could with the resources and obstacles she had. Her choice was what she could manage and she did not lie to herself about the concessions she was making. It is not for black African women to take the solution that seems impossible all the time. They, or we, are not machines -unaffected and constantly running at inhumane rates. And I think the letter writer depicted that in her own way. Sometimes you feel there is only so much you can do and so you act accordingly.

By the way, the letter-writer’s name is Ramatoulaye and the woman I call the listener is Aissatou. The book is set in Senegal, published around 1980.

What of necessary delusion? Here, I’m referring to Lauren Olamina’s inventing a religion to keep herself going through a horrific degradation of her society and environment in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. It reminded me of how black people typically get through hardship in certain environments. My apologies for the generalisation but I mean: I’ve seen people who had to overcome extreme conditions and then adapt to foreign environments act similarly. They set up what surviving would look like and mean to them and then they go forth, regardless of whatever else could go on or what they have to do to get there. That’s why we hold so fast to religions and supernatural beliefs, I suppose.

I’ve heard some black atheists ask why black people insist on believing in the spiritual. I understand it this way: the philosophy is you have to fortify a construct in your mind that you feel cannot fail you and you hold fast to it while also being prepared to do or learn whatever is necessary, forsaking anything that could bring that belief down because it is your fuel and it is how you can survive and keep laughing instead of collapsing from sheer exhaustion and trauma after incredibly difficult circumstances. Because it feels like a duty to not only make it to the other side but to also build something worthwhile where you land. At least this is how we seem to cope. Sometimes what you have to do sounds big and crazy to someone who doesn’t have to do it. But to you, it is simply what you have to do so you find yourself doing it. And it is your faith in whatever you’ve built up in your mind that allows you to do it. Perhaps that’s why to a lot of black people it is not about whether or not God is real, it’s that having a mighty mental construct has simply worked and what works becomes all that matters sometimes. But I digress.

Because of this theme of hope despite brutal circumstances, I found the book comforting because it ended up reading like a survival manual that is centered around how you build mental strength despite your weaknesses and your odds. It was also somewhat realistic because it took into account that Lauren would need other people -and the other people come with their quirks that need to be navigated. No one fits together so perfectly but usually some people will do. Nothing was unduly romanticised, I think, yet… so much hope.

The book brilliantly indicates how you reinforce your sanity during extreme times, and that there needs to be something bigger than just surviving that’s waiting for you at the end of a major struggle. There has to be a whole new mind, complete with beliefs that have replaced the old that did not hold. There has to be a whole new place to grow into, maybe. In the mind and, potentially, in the physical world. And however dangerous this new place could still be, what’s important is that it is promising to some extent and there are people to cultivate it with -whether or not they think exactly the same. That was the best thing about Lauren’s approach to her religion. It did not rob anyone of autonomy and people could take their time to absorb it or reject it altogether. What mattered most was that it worked for her and kept her going. I loved the theme of cooperation instead of domination. That is women at their best for you.

I could have more to say about this book -there’s also the uncanniness of the dates when the events happen, the prophecy of it all, as everyone says- but I want to read Parable of the Talents first.

I read Parable of the Sower in February right after putting it off for October. In the end, I realised it’s best to read the books I find challenging early on in the year. Last year, I put them off then didn’t read some of them at all and put pressure on the later months when I was supposed to be reflecting and rereading leisurely in December. Not doing that again.

But the way she predicts the future, the apocalypse that this book goes through, just upsettingly accurate.

We're like 85% of the way there. Just a couple more things need to go wrong and then I might actually believe #OctaviaEButler is a prophet.

It's eerie. (d g)

On my latest “Looking Back on Genre History” segment on the #StarShipSofa podcast (Episode 774), I discuss four recent works about #ScienceFiction that are perfect for your 2026 #TBR list.
#Biography #History #OctaviaButler #JulesVerne #VintageSF #StarTrek #Books #Bookstodon #OctaviaEButler #SFF

Here is the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/starshipsofa-774-caren-gussoff-sumption/id166360307?i=1000746000785

My 2025 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)

• Graphic created by my father

Here’s to happy reading in 2026! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. As I say year after year, It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. I’m so thankful for the lovely and supportive community of readers, writers, and discussion partners that stop by.

What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2025? Let me know in the comments.

Throughout the later part of the year I’ve dropped hints about a research project. Perceptive readers might have parsed together the contours of the research: late 19th/early 20th century, utopian, African American, the American South, radical politics… It’s taking longer than expected. I’ve read a good ten monographs, five dissertations, countless articles. I’ve written twenty pages. I hoped to have it posted by early in this year. Alas. It’s coming together–slowly. Stay tuned.

Without further ado, here are my favorite novels (I only read a few) and short stories (I read a ton of those) I read in 2025 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive.

Check out my 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021 rundowns if you haven’t already. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2025

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

1. Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984). It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read. It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

• Mark Weber’s cover for the 1st edition

2. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge, a fix-up from two previously published stories “To Leave a Mark” (1982) and “On the North Pole of Pluto” (1980), tells three interconnected tales that all connect to a mysterious monolith left on Pluto (the titular Icehenge). By design Icehenge instead follows the action after the action: men and women attempting to figure out their own place in a world characterizes by lifespans that stretch hundreds and hundreds of years. And its this brilliant interconnection between self-conception and the operations of history that Robinson succeeds and casts his spell. The story is well-told, polished, and filled with fascinating details (technological and sociological).

• Peter Jones’ cover for the 1978 UK edition

3. Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered (1977), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

The vast Confederación is comprised of radically distinct worlds ruled by the entire spectrum of political systems with both alien and non-alien inhabitants. There are few rules: don’t take advantage of indigenous populations and don’t wage wars on neighboring planets. At 22, the naive Otto McGavin, an Anglo-Buddhist, joins the Confederación as an agent to protect the rights of humans and non-humans. But there’s a twist. Under deep hypnosis a construct of Otto McGavin will be created for each mission. He’ll take on the identity–under a sheath of plasticine flesh–of whatever person he needs to be depending on the task.  The story follows Otto on three missions over many years.  The interlocking segments convey the deep trauma Otto must confront before he’s immersed in another persona and sent on another mission. His idealism clashes with the violence he must perpetuate. His sense of self conflicts with the violent actions of his “constructs.” The looming sense of dread and despair must finally have its reckoning.

• Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition

4. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979), 3.75/5 (Good). Full review.

Zoë Fairbairns charts the struggles of the British women’s liberation movement in a dystopic near future. An anti-feminist fringe political party called FAMILY comes to power, simultaneously proclaiming family values while systematically dismantling the welfare state. Benefits effectively eviscerates governmental doublespeak and champions the need to organize and educate in order to fight against patriarchal forces and messianic movements that promise to solve all our ills.

• Colin Hay’s cover for the 1976 edition

5. Edgar Pangborn’s The Company of Glory (1975), 3.5/5 (Good). Full review.

Edgar Pangborn is an unsung SF hero in my book. At his best, he’s a deeply humanistic writer interested in moments of effective metafictional play on the nature of narrative. The Company of Glory (serialized 1974, 1975) is the third novel in the Tales of Darkening World sequence. It forms a prequel to Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964). As with Davy, The Company of Glory attempts to create multiple interlocking layers of narrative, stories within the stories, quotations from various diaries, and the interjections of the overarching narrator of the entire collection of texts who remains anonymous until the final pages. Unfortunately, The Company of Glory is a deeply flawed novel. Recommended only for Pangborn’s fans. Read Davy first if you’re new to his work.

My Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories Reads of 2025 (click titles for my full review)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955), 5/5 (Masterpiece): I featured on a podcast about this story. When the episode is posted, I’ll make sure to link it. Mike Foster spends his school days practicing survival skills–digging, making knives, weaving baskets–in case of a nuclear attack. The kids snicker at him as he walks past. They don’t own a fallout shelter at home. His father refuses to pay into the NATS (National Security fund). If a bomb hit, Mike wouldn’t even be granted access to the school shelter. He’s possessed by a deep, perpetual, encompassing trauma.

2. Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), 5/5 (Masterpiece): A rare reread! Leiber imagines an America transformed after a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The physical landscape mirrors the psychological scars of New York’s inhabitants. Perverse new forms of TV entertainment, in particular male wrestlers pitted against masked women, transfix all audiences.

3. Jack Dann’s “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery. Roger dreams that he is an angel of God guiding mankind through the realm. Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra, Roger’s wife, plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

4. Izumi Suzuki’s“Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021), 4.5/5 (Very Good): A nameless young female main character recounts her interactions her one-time boyfriend. HE wants to reconnect with his mother, who abandoned his family. HE joins a staged show called The Psychoanalysis Room in an attempt to convince his mother to take “pity and come and find” him. She also has a dysfunctional family. Her mother, a TV executive, struggles/refuses to connect to her daughter. Like some manifestation of the modern hikikomori, they often refuse to communicate with others, eat as a group or eat at all for days on end, or leave their dwellings for the sun and vista of the aboveground. Both find solace and escape in the vacuities and artifice of television.

5. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Six astronauts return to earth from a voyage to Mars. But they are not treated as heroes. Instead people flee. I found “Explorers We” a well-crafted existential terror. The story plays with narrative expectation and hints at a cosmic enormity that will, at least in this iteration, remain unknown.

6. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An explorer who feels no pain is hurled mercilessly from planet to plant where is he tortured, experimented upon, and broken again, and again, and again. His sense of time dissipates. Space becomes a hellscape that he cannot escape. And each time he’s lifted back to his scout ship where a mechanical boditech stitches him back together.

7. Jack Dann’s “The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground.  As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

8.  Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody” (1955), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An artificially created Guinevere stands “chained” in a “vending machine” tempting sleepy passengers in an airport with her plaintive calls. I did not know Williamson had this type of vision in him! The surprise of the year!

9. George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L. A.” (1959), 4/5 (Good): A nameless character (“you”) wakes from a recurring dream: “the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945.” A dream of apocalyptic annihilation, in infinite variations. A narrative repetition takes form: Nuclear nightmare. The waking moment. The aimless quest for understanding. Communing with other lost souls. The retreat to the bottle. Fragments of the news suggest a world unraveling.

10. Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Stars Are the Styx” (1950), 4/5 (Good): The premise: Humans created Curbstone, an artificial satellite around Earth, to facilitate the ultimate scientific achievement–near instantaneous transportation across the galaxy. How? Individual spaceships, with a solitary crew person or couple, will be hurled out from Curbstone at various points across the space time continuum. The story revolves around the aging (and rotund) Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, who certifies, counsels, and guides the strange collection of humans who gather at the station willing to take such a risk.

11. Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” (1955), 4/5 (Good): In a drug and alcohol drenched near-future, a group of young adults take a break-neck road drip and stray from the path set out by parents and small town community. Manifesting the SPEED of the car, Matheson’s prose resonates with pulse and hum, snippets of song and signage, slang and youthful lust. It’s frantic. It’s zappy. It’s vibrant. Recommended for fans of the more linguistically experimental (and bleak) of 50s visions.

12. Jack Dann’s “Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation.  And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat.

13. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): he elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials. Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus.

14. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966), 4/5 (Good): Stanisław Ivanovich spends his days submerged in lakes and rivers tagging septopods, a new octopus-like species discovered on Earth. His daughter, Marsha, assists from above. When he emerges from a lake, Marsha is deep in conversation with Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky, an astroarchaeologist implied to be on leave from an expedition. The two scientists–IIvanovich, with his eyes on earthly mystery, and Gorbovsky, untangling the traces of potential intelligences across the cosmos–and Marsha engage in a series of discussions about the nature of the universe.

15. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): Somewhere on the Venusian surface the Valley of Dur, with its amalgamation of gasses, traps unsuspecting denizens who wander into its depths. In the city of Takon, Venusians, six-limbed creatures with silvery hair, ogle the strange beasts extricated and caged and exhibited from the Valley. The child, transfixed by the man’s noises and scrawls, pushes his stylus and pad under the bars. And Morgan Gratz, stranded astronaut and self-confessed murderer, draws for the child the respective locations of their planets.

16. Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good) is a contact with an alien planet tale that’s legitimately odd. A hunting party looking for specimens of alien life in order to dissect, sets off from the spaceship Explorer across an alien planet called Minos. Reasonably, the crew is obsessed with a minute medical analysis of flora and fauna. The hunting party encounters a majestically shaped human who spins a crazy tale of adaptation and disease. 

17. Cherry Wilder’s “The Ark of James Carlyle” (1974), 3.5/5 (Good): Carlyle spends his tour of duty in a hut with a wood platform on small landmass surrounded by an “oily purple sea” on an alien planet. A crisis hits — and he suddenly learns the reason for the singular trees that grow in the center of each island.

18. E. C. Tubb’s“Without Bugles” (1952), 3.5/5 (Good): A naive journalist struggles to confront her heroic idealism, regurgitated through the media, in her attempt to save the Mars colony afflicted with a futuristic case of the black lung.

19.  Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): President Herbert Hoover infamously proclaimed on the eve of the Great Depression that “given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” “Famine on Mars,” published five years into the Great Depression, evokes similar paradigmatic shifts between propagandistic proclamation and harsh reality. Kelly spins a nightmare account of a famine on Mars and a plan to save the starving legions.

20. Gerald Kersh’s “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (1953), 3.5/5 (Good): Kersh imagines a literary version of himself returning to New York City from WWII interacting with a fantastical manifestation of a Wound Man on board the Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary. Corporal Cuckoo, the “Wound Man” in question, regals the narrator (Kersh) with the history of his scarred and mutilated form that mysteriously heals from every injury.

Reading Initiatives

I have continued, resurrected, and created new science fiction short story reading series over the course of the year. Most of the stories I’ve picked for the series are available in some fashion online via links to Internet Archive in each review. I’ve included installments from 2024 in each series below. Feel free to read along with me! And thanks for all the great conversation.

Galaxy Science Fiction Read-through (started 2025)

1. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950)
2. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1950) 

Organized Labor and Unions in Science Fiction (started in 2024)

1. Mack Reynolds’ The Earth War (1964)
2. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979)

The First Three Published Short Fictions by Female Authors (continued from 2021)

1. Cherry Wilder (1930-2002)

Translated Short Stories in Translation (with Rachel S. Cordasco) (started in 2024)

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966)
2.  Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021)

The Media Landscape of the Future (started in 2022)

1. George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966)
2. Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984)
3. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973)

The Search for the Depressed Astronaut  (continued from 2020)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) 
2. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)
3. E. C. Tubb’s “Without Bugles” (1952)
4. E. C. Tubb’s “Home is the Hero” (1952)
5. E. C. Tubb’s “Pistol Point” (1953)
6. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934)

Generation Ship Short Stories (continued from 2019)

1. George Hay’s Flight of the “Hesper” (1952)

Exploration Logs (continued from 2022)

1. Exploration Log 7: Interview with Jordan S. Carroll, author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
2. Exploration Log 8: Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Science Fiction Fandom” (1980)
3. Exploration Log 9: Three More Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
4. Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)
5. Exploration Log 11: Interview with Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, author of Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025)

My Top 4 History Reads of 2025

A large portion of my history reading this year pushed my general interest in labor history and leftist politics backwards into the 19th century. Unusual for me I know! Often I write about what I can write about not what I plan on writing about. A brief caveat worth repeating: I’m a PhD-wielding historian and have a high tolerance for academic texts. That said, I’d classify everything in my list as on the approachable side of things if you know the broad strokes of American history.

1. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp’s Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (2010): This filled a complete hole in my knowledge. While I had encountered history-centric militant abolitionist texts written by black authors, I did not know how they fitted into the larger historiographic project of the era. As my PhD looked at universal histories in the medieval period, I’m a sucker for all kinds of histories of historiography! This is a good one.

2. Deborah Beckel’s Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (2011): I read this one for my research project on a black utopian author. Beckel’s brilliant monograph looks at the race and politics in North Carolina after the end of Reconstruction–a “fusion” government of Republicans and Populists managed to take power (temporarily) from the white supremacist Democratic status quo in the 1890s. Depressing. Fascinating. I’m waiting for an alt-history that uses the 1898 election in North Carolina as a jonbar hinge — hah!

3. Edward K. Spann’s Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for A Cooperative Society in America (1989): While an older monograph, Spann’s work is a fantastic survey of the fascinating range of radical social idealism-inspired communities that proliferated across America. I’m obsessed by left-wing ideologies that permeate the rural world and movements for working-class utopianism. Spann will inspire you to track down newer monographs on the social movements he surveys.

4. Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025): Rightly won the Hugo! I interviewed Carroll in January. In the book, he examines the ways the alt-right uses classic science fiction imagery and authors to mainstream fascism and advocate for the overthrow of the state. This is a short monograph designed to encourage thought. Highly recommended.

Goals for 2026

1. Keep reading and writing.

2. Read more reviews by other bloggers.

3. Cover more SF in translation.

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

This quote points to a difficult reality of collapse and care.

When people are overwhelmed or afraid, resistance isn’t always rejection — it’s often the body protecting itself. Help offered without trust or consent can land as danger.

As we move toward fair share ethics, this matters deeply. Care has to be relational, paced, and responsive — or it risks doing harm even with good intentions.

#OctaviaEButler #FairShareEthics #RelationalCare #SystemsChange #Farmastery

🔴 @dingusmacdongle is going live on our self-hosted Owncast server! 🔴
Join here: https://dingusmacdongle.live/

#RimWorld #SilkSingh #OctaviaEButler #ScienceFictionLive #owncast #livestream #selfhosted

Book Review: Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984)

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984) is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984).1 It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read.2 It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

Note: This novel is not for readers seeking happy adventure or diverting escapism. It is an absolute bludgeon of the novel with a litany of unsettling themes, power dynamics, and disturbing scenes (rape, incest, a beheading, etc.). I apologize for the short review. Despite my appreciation of Clay’s Ark in particular, I struggle to write about Butler’s work.3

As always, there are spoilers below.

The Geography of the Wreckage

California, 2021 A.D. Across an almost “primordial” desert a few scattered “communities were dead or dying” (18). A few foolish, and well-armed, souls brave the distances between urban “enclaves” in armored vehicles. In the cities, the enclaves are “islands” surrounded by “vast, crowded, vulnerable residential areas through which ran sewers of utter lawlessness” (32).

Blake Jason Maslin, a doctor of internal medicine, travels across the expanse with his twin sixteen-year-old daughters (Keira and Rane), both “naive, and sheltered” (32), on a final trip to see a relative. Keira suffers from an untreatable leukemia. She confides that she sees “herself fading away” (6). On the way they’re abducted by Eli, Meda, and their strange, unusually thin, ill-looking, followers. They take Blake and his daughters to an isolated homestead with gardens, solar panels, and strange children that seem to run on all four limbs. “Everybody here looks like me, sooner or later” Meda confesses (23). Under duress, Blake is paired off with Meda, who scratches his face. Rane with Eli. And Keira with Stephen Kaneshiro. The ritualized infection commences.

A few years earlier, an injured Eli, possessed by an extra-human will to survive, happened across the homestead and its original inhabitants, followers of an “angry God” (56). Despite comments about his race, they took him in and cared for him. We soon learn Eli, a geologist, was the sole survivor of a sabotaged spaceship, the titular Clay’s Ark. On their voyage, the crew encountered an alien pathogen that develops a parasitical relationship with those that survive the infection. In return for heightened senses, the infected must infect and impregnate others or bear offspring of the infected. After impregnating the three surviving women of the homestead, Eli plans his first abduction (101). He promises, as if to convince himself that he’s still a human with a moral code, to only spread the disease as much as necessary to satiate the new biological urge. He’ll gather his new “family” at the homestead. They’ll develop a strategy to convince the infected to stay. If someone escapes, the world will be transformed. But everyone knows that isolation will only last so long. Someone will escape.

Both the narrative of Blake and his family and Eli’s simultaneously map the new nature of the wreckage and presage the future apocalyptic transformation that looms.

New Families in the Wasteland

As academic study of Butler’s science fiction abounds, I will only briefly discuss an element that I personally found fascinating–in this instance the unnerving new sense of family and connection Eli and his followers create.4 Butler explains that the works in the Patternist sequence sought to write a good story about a “strange community of people.”5 Butler’s careful world building creates a pervasive sense of social and moral disconnect. The wealthy and privileged, like Blake and his children, rarely travel outside of their urban oasis. The world outside can barely be described as human: “what the rat packs did to each other and to unprotected city-dwellers was not something [Blake] wanted to expose his daughters to” (137). Thus, inside the oases they attempt to “recreate the safe world of […] sixty years past for [their] children” (32). Blake’s trip is an attempt to reaffirm the ties that bind: Keira’s illness, and the fear of imminent death, made her want to visit her grandparents “one last time” (4).

Eli’s arrival in the past at the homestead and his abduction of Blake and his children reveal the strange new family in the wasteland. These are connections formed by “guilt and grief” (87). These are connections compelled through violence and an alien biology. While the children of the infected appear inhuman, they are still children. These are connections welded by the desire to make some semblance of normality in the abnormality of it all. Even Gabriel Boyd, the patriarch of the religious community that took Eli in, must push away the knowledge that Eli caused the devastation, and begs him to take care of Meda, his daughter (85). Rane must confront her desire for Eli. Keira must confront her feelings for Stephen: “You’ve sacrificed my family to spare yours” (93), yet when he puts her arm around her, “she was surprised that the gesture did not offend her” (91). Both girls are underage. How much is the alien microbe responsible for their actions? Blake must juggle his parental responsibility to protect his children with the need to alert the world to the illness. And Keira, in the final calculus of it all, attempts to forge a connection. The effective rendering of the moral landscape, and its networks of power, of the new age is the novel’s most unsettling, and brilliant, element.

Final Thoughts

As with Mind of My Mind (1977), I found Butler’s brutal view of power–and its interplay with relationships, gender, and race–a heady mixture. Perhaps due to the vividly realized dystopian backdrop of the community surrounded by the dry desert air and looming hyper-violent doom, I struggled less with Butler’s deliberately stark, clipped, and direct prose than in the past. I even found a metaphor tucked in here and there that accentuated the horror of it all. Simultaneously, Butler’s use of the two parallel narratives creates a simple but effective way to reveal backstory and the horrifying dichotomy of Eli’s position as bringer of the plague and community builder.

Clay’s Ark (1984) supplants Mind of My Mind (1977) as my favorite in the Patternist sequence. I am including both Wild Seed (1980) and Patternmaster (1976) despite abandoning both (I’ll try one of them again next year). I even think Clay’s Ark challenges Kindred (1979), which I never managed to review, as my favorite Butler novel so far.6

If my earlier caveat did not scare you off, go find a copy.

• Danny Flynn’s cover for the 1991 edition

• Geoff Taylor’s cover for the 1985 edition

Notes

1. A short story “A Necessary Being” was posthumously published in 2014. It takes place after Clay’s Ark (1984) but before her disowned Survivor (1978). I highly recommend Gerry Canavan’s monograph Octavia E. Butler (2016). As I’ve mentioned on the site before, Canavan explores Butler’s frequent rewrites, reconceptualization(s) of earlier material, and abandoned projects via her surviving papers. ↩︎
2. P. C. Jersilds’ After the Flood (1982, trans. 1986) and The Genocides, Thomas M. Disch (1965) might give Butler a run for her money. That said, I found both Disch and Jersild’s novels more grotesques in a Boschian sort of way than an relentlessly bleak moral conundrum. Russ’ We Who Are About To… (1976) also came to mind — but I found humor in her way of telling, not so much with Butler. ↩︎
3. Probably due to the spectacular range of scholarship written about her work. ↩︎
4. A brief search reveals a lot of academic scholarship on the nature of “family” in the novel. I have not read it before writing the review for fear of being dissuaded from writing anything. ↩︎
5. Referenced nabbed from Wikipedia. The article on the sequence cites “An interview with Octavia E. Butler” from 1997 in Callaloo, 20 (1), 47–66. ↩︎
6. I’ve also read and wrote a short review for Dawn (1987). ↩︎

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1980s #bookReview #bookReviews #books #fiction #OctaviaEButler #paperbacks #sciFi #scienceFiction #spaceships

🥳 @chano_san on PeerTube! 🥳
Watch here: https://peertube.anon-kenkai.com/videos/watch/119924

#LetsTry #Silksong #OctaviaEButler #YAFantasy #peertube #livestream #stream #twitch

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
-- Octavia E. Butler

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #OctaviaEButler #Cowardice #Fools #Government #Leadership #Lies #Politics #Wisdom

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Driftwood #Florida

Horsey heroines and strange new worlds… #octaviaebutler #myreading #readindies @OxUniPress

Books about books or favourite authors always make pleasurable reading, and I've covered on the blog a few titles released by Oxford University Press in their 'My Reading' series. The latter is an interesting idea where an author or book is discussed by another writer, and I've very much enjoyed their looks at Dickens, Proust and Colette. However, a new title, released tomorrow,…

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2025/02/12/horsey-heroines-and-strange-new-worlds-octaviaebutler-myreading-readindies-oxunipress/

Yet another prediction from #OctaviaEButler in the 90’s that came true: lethal #Measles epidemics.

Measles for heavens’ sake!! Fucking idiots antivaxxers!!!

From: @arstechnica
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/113964819462034605

Das zweite Buch, dass ich euch ans Herz legen möchte ist das Buch
Kindred von Octavia E. Butler

Im Buch geht es um eine junge Afro-Amerikanerin, die unfreiwillig mehrmalig in die Vergangenheit katapultiert wird und sich dort mit der Sklaverei konfrontiert wird.
"Ein packender Roman über das rassistische System der Sklaverei, familiäre Verstrickungen und gesellschaftliche Verantwortung." – Verlag w_orten&meer

#BlackHistoryMonth #OctaviaEButler #OctaviaButler

My gods, this book!

"Embrace diversity.
Unite--
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed."

Chapter preface, Chapter 17
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler

#ParableOfTheSower
#OctaviaEButler
#OctaviaButler
#IAmReading
#Booksadon

"I've noticed that people who have a little bit of power tend to use it."

The Parable of the Sower, pg 122.
Octavia Butler

#BlackHistoryMonth
#IAmLearning
#OctaviaEButler
#OctaviaButler
#ParableOfTheSower
#IAmReading

@DoomsdaysCW @susurros

Gotta boost mentions of my favorite authors.

#OctaviaEButler

@noiseician at times it seems they are convinced #ParableOfTheSower and #ParableOfTheTalents are not #SciFi #Dystopic novels, but a blueprint for making America great again.

After all, it was #OctaviaEButler who coined the phrase #MAGA back in the 1990s

3/3

De verdad, es difícil de leer en esta actualidad 🥺😢

Que los poderosos violan la ley sin consecuencias, pues claman hacerlo “en nombre de dios” y por “el bien mayor”, lo que a la vista de muchos legitimiza sus acciones.

Qué horror, hace 30 años era ficción y hoy es una realidad.

#OctaviaEButler #TheParableOfTheSower #TheParableOfTheTalents #ParábolaDelSembrador #ParábolaDeLosTalentos

1/3
Por cierto, estoy intentando terminar de leer la #ParábolaDeLosTalentos de #OctaviaEButler, y no puedo con tanto puto coraje que estoy haciendo por lo semejante a la situación actual causada por los cristalibanes fascistas supremacistas blancos del presidente #Jarret, que diga, #Trump.

Que horror con esos hipócritas fariseos, sepulcros blanqueados que le dan un pésimo nombre al de Nazareth. Robando niños a sus familias, usando campos de concentración, tortura, violaciones, asesinatos. 😢

‘Dawn’ Rethinks Personhood

Dawn (1987) by Octavia E. Butler blends a post-apocalyptic theme with that of first contact into a story of sorrow and hope. Butler has the remarkable gift of revealing human emotion with clarity and verve. I wouldn’t say Dawn is a joyful experience but it’s certainly one that lingers on the mind and heart.

Lilith Iyapo wakes to find herself out of the death and decay following Earth’s only nuclear war. At first, she is alone and her solitude is unsettling. Someone is caring for her but whom? When it is time for her to meet her captors nothing could prepare her for the reality.

When Jdahya appears he first has the outline of a man but that is only a temporary lie. Jdahya is not human. Not remotely human. Eyeless and many tentacled Jdahya and the Oankali are aliens. Hideous and unlike anything humans expect. However terrifying the Oankali are in appearance they are not monsters. After the shock of Jdahya’s appearance wears off Jdahya and his mates accept Lilith into their family.

Grateful for her rescue Lilith soon wonders at the Oankali’s motives. She learns that the Oankali travel the stars as traders and they will trade with humanity. In return, the survivors can return to Earth to start again. But what could humans possibly have to trade with such beings and is it a price they can afford to pay?

Dawn is the first installment of Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (a.k.a. Lilith’s Brood trilogy) and it’s quite an opening. With almost no effort Butler draws the reader in with an emotional rawness rarely seen in SF. Butler’s writing exudes confidence not only in her abilities but in her person.

The story follows Lilith Iyapo on her journey of rediscovery of what it means to be a person. Faced with the reality that there is a wider community in the galaxy she must redefine how she sees herself. Lilith may not realise it herself but her actions speak to a great depth of empathy and understanding for people. All people. This emotional depth is exactly the reason why the Oankali need Lilith to train and lead a new group of humans in their awakening.

Butler uses Lilith as a lens through which the reader must also reassess what it is to be a person. Not a human. In Dawn, humans are no longer unique and it is up to the reader to decide if the Oankali are persons. By accepting that the Oankali, beings so utterly alien, are persons then the reader must also accept that all humans, no matter how different from ourselves, are also persons.

How does Butler make the reader see the Oankali as persons? She doesn’t do it by making the Oankali act more human. Instead, she lets the human characters act in their fullest human capacity. Warts and and all.

When Lilith begins waking the other humans it doesn’t take very long for short-sightedness and bigotry to set in. Some people, regardless of the truth, will only accept the lies they tell themselves. Through this self-delusion, they can then justify the most heinous acts imaginable and unimaginable.

Yet, despite the thread of hatred running through the story, there is a clear message of hope. The Oankali don’t just want to trade with humanity they need to trade. The Oankali see humanity in a spark we can’t see in ourselves. This spark is what draws the Oankali to humans but it’s also what repells humans from Oankali. However, like a patient parent, the Oankali are willing to wait.

Dawn is a top-notch SF story that contains all the elements necessary to make it a classic. Fantastic world-building, imaginative technologies, unique and believable alien culture, and great characters. All this is more than enough to make Dawn must-read SF.

However, what makes Dawn such a compelling and worthwhile read is the raw emotional element of the story. Butler is completely unafraid of what the reader might think of the characters and, by extension, herself. This fearlessness is something we don’t see much of anymore in SF and is something it sorely needs again.

Don’t read Dawn because of its social commentary on racism and personhood. And don’t read it because Dawn will make you feel something you might not expect or want. Instead, read it simply because it is one of the best-written stories of SF available. The rest is just a bonus.

Octavia E. Butler, like many authors taken too soon, has a unique and wonderful voice that stands tall over many current works. Now more than ever Butler’s work should be a mainstay in every reader’s catalogue, not just SF readers. If you’ve never read any of Butler’s work then Dawn is the perfect place to begin your journey. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

#BookReview #Dawn #OctaviaEButler

Introduction to Dialectical Materialism. I like how they explain Marx's definition of communism as not being a static form that you can reach, it's part of why, counties governed by communist parties don't regard themselves as having achieved communism. But rather communism is:
“the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (Marx & Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, 2010, p. 49).
I like how they compare this to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6TYyqeB0Lk
#Marxism #DialecticalMaterialism #OctaviaEButler #communism

The L.A. Public Library commissioned me and a writing team to adapt Octavia E. Butler's the Parable of the Sower into a Fate RPG. We're running portions of it at the Octavia Lab at the LAPL Central Branch in DTLA on 12/14! If you're a fan of the novel or Fate, sign up and roll dice with us!

Learn more at https://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/journey-earthseed-tabletop-roleplay-campaign-octavia-e-butlers-parable-universe

RSVP to [email protected]

#octaviaebutler #parableofthesower #lapl #losangelespubliclibrary #fate #evilhatproductions #ttrpg #gamer #dmlife

Today seems like a good day to consult #OctaviaEButler's prescient wisdom again. #ParableOfTheSower #ParableOfTheTalents #SFF #Books

Got this episode of Backlisted podcast on Octavia E. Butler saved for the weekend

#podcasts #OctaviaEButler #reading #books #sciencefiction #SpeculativeFiction

https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/223-octavia-e-butler-parable-of-the-sower

Episode of Backlisted podcast on Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

#sciencefiction #OctaviaEButler #podcasts #books #backlisted

https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/223-octavia-e-butler-parable-of-the-sower

"Question: How long does it take to create a world? - Answer: A lifetime, daydreaming" Octavia E. Butler.

Heute begonnen+beendet: "a handful of earth, a handful of sky - the world of Octavia E.Butler - viele wertvolle Erfahrungen zu #Weltenbau http://discord.gg/ugfrEux und #autorenleben und wie sie sich Vorbilder und Motivatoren nahm die nicht für sie als junge schwarze Frau geschrieben hatten...

#bookstodon #Schreiben #amwriting #octaviaebutler@[email protected]

With my free Monday I'm having a long #Butler weekend: Yesterday and tomorrow #JudithButler, today #OctaviaEButler and also #KieraButler who in @MotherJones explains how Christian Nationalists do support #Trump & as #NAR are a threat to democracy. And how the #TheoBros who support #JDVance want voting rights only for white males, while females, nonwhites and jews have to be subservient... and how they want this to be a plan for the #SCOTUS as well... #uspol #MustRead https://www.motherjones.com/author/kiera-butler/

Festival downtime (re)reading, been meaning to get back to this, since it’s 2024. Seems appropriate at something called Renewal. #SciFi #OctaviaEButler #bmfs