#I have Dawn by Octavia Butler as well and I want to give it another go | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sofipitch · 3 years

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Vampire movies, tv shows, and books with BIPOC leads

Movies:

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), A Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), Blacula (1972), Blade (1998), Cronos (1993), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Ganja and Hess (1973), Queen of the Damned (2002), Vampires vs the Bronx (2020), and What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

TV shows:

Vampires (2020), and What We Do in the Shadows (2018)

Books:

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno Garcia, Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler, Minion by L. A. Banks, and Vlad by Carlos Fuentes

Descriptions and some of my opinions under the cut

Movies

Cronos (1993): This is Guillermo del Toro's first movie, but any movie that's both written and directed by him is bound to be good in my book. It's mostly in Spanish so you will need subtitles. Here an old device (powered by a strange insect) that can turn humans into vampires is discovered accidently by a man and his young granddaughter who runs an antique shop. He is then slowly transformed while being hunted by another man who seeks the device out of a desire for immortality. Definitely existential/sympathetic vampire in this one. It also is a horror movie and a lot of the horror is gross-out moments and body horror. Nothing gross having to do with digestive system functions, but I def had some moments were I was like 🤢

Ganja and Hess (1973): This movie is on the artsy side of things, there's not a definable "plot" it's just a man who is struggling with his existence as a vampire and he falls in love with a woman and brings her over too. Not a particularly scary movie, so I'm not sure it should count as horror. This movie is 90% vibes. Trigger warning for suicide.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014): Another movie on the artsy side of things. The "girl" is a vampire living in an Iranian town called "bad city" and she kills men who she sees as disrespecting woman. She finds a guy who is actually okay and also disillusioned with life in "bad city". Only slight horror, associated with most vampire content. This movie is in Farsi. Trigger warning for drug addiction.

A Vampire in Brooklyn (1995): A woman from brooklyn is actually half-vampire and doesn't know it. A vampire comes to brooklyn and wants to convert her to vampiricism completly. This movie has low rating on rotten tomatos and idk why. My guess would be the genre is kind of inconsistent. The main vampire is played by Eddie Murphy and while other aspects of the movie as comedic, he isn't in this movie (he has the range). It's also not particularly scary, so it only let's horror through regular vampire themes. It definetly has that seductive vampire trope, and plays with the idea of giving into being evil (through vampirism).

Blacula (1972): The movie is pretty cheesy, not really on purpose but more because it’s super old and not super well made. It has the plot line of Blacula waking up in modern day and finding a women who looked like his old wife and wanting to fall in love with her, which is up there in my least favorite vampire tropes. It’s still an interesting movie in how strikingly 70s it is, the people who find and buy Blacula’s coffin are a biracial gay couple who sell antiques, so that were pretty cool. The main issue with this movie is it’s hard to tell if you are supposed to be rooting for Blacula, because all he wants is to be with his girl, but he also kills A LOT of people, all innocent bystanders. The movie is too middle ground on taking a stance on vampirism that it doesn’t say much at all. Also the sound editor need to be fired, there are wind chimes playing during most blood sucking scenes and there’s no background audio for the finally fight scene, just like thuds, the audio is constantly unintentionally hilarious.

What We do in the Shadows (2014): This is a mockumentary on these vampire housemates. It's an absolute classic, it has provided tons of memes. One of the co-directors and main characters is played by Taika Waititi, who is Polynesian and Jewish. I love his movie and his sense of humor. This movie isn't scary but does have some slight gore (large amounts of blood).

Blade (1998): This was a marvel movie before it became the franchise it is today. It's a dark action movie where the protagonist, Blade, is both a vampire hunter and a vampire himself. So, while he is fighting evil he is constantly tempted by his nature as a blood drinker. This movie has some very cool horror aspects that make it rated R, which marvel plans to remake this movie and make it PG-13 (boo 🙄). This movie goes hard on the themes of fighting vampiric nature, which is a theme I love in vampire films.

Vampires vs the Bronx (2020): This movie is about a group of kids who discover the real estate company gentrifying the Bronx is actually a group of vampires. Honestly, the connection between vampirism and gentrification is a really good one. This movie has strong Stranger Things, The Lost Boys vibes, in that it’s kids going up against supernatural forces. It’s pretty endearing and nice light watch. There’s lots of tributes to other vampire films, either directly (like, Blade, they reference this movie a lot) or more indirectly (The Lost Boys, and Fright Night). It’s not really scary, this is a more family-friendly movie.

Honorable mention: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996): The leads in this movie are white, however this movie has a pretty diverse cast, with most of the vampires played by POC. This is a super violent film, but in a fun over-the-top way. It's not until half-way through the movie the vampires are revealed. The story follows two bank robbers who make this vacationing family drive them across the border to Mexico, where they will rendezvous with partners after staying at a bar. Little did they know the place was owned by vampires who feed on travelers. Warning for Quentin Tarantino's very obvious foot fetish, there are 2 scenes in the film that are very obvious about this.

Honorable mention: Queen of the Damned (2002): While the lead for this movie is still a white vampire, it's the vampire Akasha played by Aaliyah who really steals the show. She's both the antagonist and the love interest and gets to play a fun and complex evil character. While most fans of the Vampire Chronicles don't like how unfaithful this adaptation is to the books, Aliyah's performance still tends to be a favorite. I haven't seen this movie so I can't attenst to anything else about it, but it is worth mentioning.

TV shows

What we do in the shadows (2018): This is a spinoff of the movie, made by the same ppl, with the same premise, it just has different characters. One of the main vampires, Nandor, is from what is modern-day Iran. His familiar turned bodyguard/vampire hunter, Guillermo, is Latinx. This show is great about representation overall and doesn't use any traits or identity of the characters as the butt of the joke. It's overall goofy and loveable and I can't recommend it more. Slight horror but mostly to remind you of the genre the main characters (especially Guillermo) find themselves in.

Vampires (2020): In this series the main character is half-vampire. Vampires are a genetically different race from humans. The main character has kept her v as impure traits at bay (she can go out in the sun) by taking pills given to her by her vampire mother, but when she stops taking them she begins slowly transforming. I've only watched the first episode so far, the only horror is typical blood-drinking associated with vamps. It's available on Netflix, and if you watch in English, I recommend turning the audio to the original French and watching with subs. At first I was watching in English (it automatically loaded this way) but the dub doesn't match the lip movements super well and it was driving me crazy. I wasn't sure if I could watch it before it occurred to me to change the settings.

Books

Vlad by Carlos Fuentes: This book was written by Fuentes when vampires were at the height of their popularity, but Fuentes didn't like how much vampire media had deviated from the horror genre (for example, Twilight). So he wanted to make an actual horror vampire story, and this one packs a punch for sure. I was gripping my chest in shock and disgust while reading this. The premise is very similar to Dracula, except this time Dracula is moving to modern day Mexico City. It is from the point of view of the real-estate agent finding Dracula a house.

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno Garcia: This book also takes place in Mexico City, however this time humans have known about the existence of vampires for a while, and Mexico City is supposed to be a vampire free zone. However, a conflict between two rival vampire groups is taken to Mexico City, where the main character Atl, and her new human companion/blood source, Domingo, have to fight and run from corrupt Mexico city cops, rival vampires, and human gangs. This book has an extremely fresh take on vampires, solving the problem of conflicting lore in ever piece of media by having multiple species of vampires, with different traits and weaknesses. This book is full of cool vampire lore for it's universe, but at the same time it's not overwhelming. The mood and setting alters from neon-noir (think Blade Runner) and classic gothic. I adored this book and highly recommend it to everyone.

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler: This book is a more science fiction leaning vampire take. It's not gothic or existential, vampires are simply another species that have been living on Earth besides humans. The vampires have a ritualistic relationship with those humans they feed from, called symbionts. The main character, Shori, is a new genetically engineered vampire, she is black, which makes her less sensitive to the sun and other vampires. However, a mysterious group has been killing and attacking vampire settlements, and she has to struggle to stay alive, while also seeking revenge. While this book is a fresh take on vampires, it has heavy Adult/Minor relationship content that I didn't enjoy and ultimately skewed my perception of the book (Shori looks like a 10 year old and has sex with adult humans, but is 53 years old, but that's out of a 500 year lifespans, and they repeatedly state that she is a child-vampire). There's an in-universe explanation that the vampire culture is different from humans, but still. Still, this book is highly acclaimed so some ppl can enjoy it despite it's glaring flaws.

Minion by L. A. Banks: This is the only book I haven't read yet, but I have looked into the reviews and summaries. This seems like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer style vampire book, it focuses on the main character, who is a vampire slayer. She is black and Caribbean and would prefer to be a DJ but she is the only one who can hunt vampires (again, very similar to Buffy). From the reviews these vampires are not sympathetic or romantic, they are cold-blooded killers. Since I haven't read it yet I can't tell you if this book (and subsequent series) is more action or horror focused or both.

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letterboxd · 4 years

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The Pantomimes of Racism.

Aaron Yap surveys the cinema landscape of slavery narratives, from The Birth of a Nation to Roots to Sankofa to Us, as he talks to writer-director duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz about their new addition to the catalog, Antebellum.

“It was important to us that we not serve as co-conspirators to further erasure of American history and not white-wash the past.” —Gerard Bush

Given its deep-seated psychic baggage as America’s original sin, slavery remains among the most contentious of subject matters to be portrayed in film. Widely embraced depictions are rare, while the notoriety of those tactless, or simply racist, offenders generally looms large in conversation.

Lest we forget, cinema itself was birthed in a vat of virulent racism. A monumental accomplishment like DW Griffith’s groundbreaking The Birth of a Nation (1915) was also a monument to the Ku Klux Klan. Likewise, Victor Fleming’s highly regarded Civil War-era romance Gone with the Wind (1939) presents the viewer with a problematic dichotomy: it’s an extraordinary feat of filmmaking, deeply—even perversely—intoxicating, but all its extravagant, impassioned melodrama cannot wash away the odious stain of its Black caricatures and pro-Confederacy cheerleading.

At the extreme end of this spectrum lurks the stomach-churning shockumentary tactics of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971). So deliberately pornographic in its attempts to upset and shock under the guise of educational, telling-it-like-it-is accuracy, this mondo opus might be the least easily recommendable movie ever—a film that once prompted Pauline Kael to deem it “the most specific and rabid incitement to race war.”

When citing respectable dramatizations of slavery, the Emmy-winning miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley’s sprawling bestseller Roots (1977) is still considered a benchmark. Without sacrificing the horrific authenticity of the experience, it was captivating, commercial television, but most crucially, a long-overdue corrective, centering African-Americans in a screen telling of their history. Also notable, both for its Black-centered storytelling and the ultra-independence of its 1983 release, is the little-seen Sankofa by Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima—a member of the LA Rebellion (and father of Merawi Gerima, whose debut Residue has just landed on Netflix). Sankofa transports a contemporary African-American fashion model back in time to a slave plantation; it’s both a reckoning and an awakening, in honor of the “stolen spirits of Africa”.

Yet “white savior” narratives are prevalent to this day, whether it’s the well-meaning, virtuous legal theater of Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) or the blaxploitation-tinged revisionist fantasia of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012). Even Steve McQueen’s much-lauded adaptation of abolitionist Solomon Northup’s memoir 12 Years a Slave (2013) isn’t completely untethered from the assistance of a white hand.

Perhaps something thornier like Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo (1975), frequently written off as a lurid, trashy potboiler imagining of the slave trade, deserves more than a cursory look for the way it removes clearly delineated archetypes of heroes and villains, and cathartic beats of obstacle and triumph, from the slave narrative. It exposes the poisoned capitalist pathology that produces the system—observing how souls, constantly besieged by hubris, greed and frail egos, self-implode as the unchecked power that comes with the commodification of human bodies grows.

Kiersey Clemons and Janelle Monáe in ‘Antebellum’.

Now available digitally after its theatrical release was abandoned due to Covid, Gerard Bush and Christopher Rez’s Antebellum contributes another complicated, fascinating wrinkle to the nuances of slavery cinema. The film arrives at a particularly volatile time, with additional resonance provided by the on-going, extremely topical plight of inequity faced by Black Americans.

Employing the malleable, high-concept language of genre to connect the sins of the past with the present—imagine something in the vicinity of Blumhouse doing Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, or rebooting Sankofa for that matter—Antebellum is of a piece with the gathering momentum behind the popularity of recent Black-centered genre fare, from Jordan Peele’s horror outings Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) to recent HBO shows like Watchmen and Lovecraft Country. The temporal tricksiness of the film’s narrative structure means spoiler-free synopsizing is a fool’s errand, but “it’s not a traditional horror”, Renz says, proffering “a thriller with horror elements” to describe it.

What is clear from the get-go is that something’s a little off, and the film potentially has one foot in The Twilight Zone. Opening with a quote from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”), Bush and Renz, who shared writing and directing duties, waste no time thrusting us—via a visually stunning five-minute one-take tracking shot—onto an impossibly beautiful Louisiana plantation where we’re introduced to Eden, the first of two roles played by Janelle Monáe, a slave whose plans to escape are brutally thwarted by Confederate officers.

The filmmakers maintained vigilance in their recreation of trauma and the slave experience. “It was important to us that we not serve as co-conspirators to further erasure of American history and not white-wash the past,” says Bush. “But it was always of equal importance that we not engage in gratuitous violence. It was all for a meaning and purpose. So much of it is off-screen—we don’t have any physical whipping or anyone at the whipping post or any of that. This is to inform and educate and move the story forward. It’s not meant to serve as some sort of entertainment for violence sake.”

Gabourey Sidibe, Janelle Monáe and Lily Cowles in ‘Antebellum’.

Similarly, Bush says they were deliberate in their approach to using racial epithets of its time. The N-word is conspicuously absent for a film set in the Antebellum South. “It gives the audience an off-ramp to say, ‘That’s not language I would use so that’s not me, so I don’t have to engage in this and I don’t have to confront it’. These are the pantomimes of racism. The N-word and those words—they’re meant to dehumanize but just because you’re not hearing the word in the public square anymore—because it is no longer socially appropriate—doesn’t mean that all of the brutality and inequity that the word, the avatar, represented doesn’t exist anymore. It was important to us that we use the same language as Gone with the Wind in a way that they would refer to the enslaved people as the inferiors.”

In a purposefully disorienting plot shift, Antebellum moves off plantation grounds in its second act to establish Monáe’s second role, Veronica, a successful present-day academic promoting her new book Shedding the Coping Persona. Although the physical subjugation and barbarity of the past have disappeared, insidious micro-aggressions and hints remain, including the sinister presence of Jena Malone’s Southern antagonist Elizabeth, who also appears in both timelines.

For this portion, the film allows Veronica, who’s assertive, confident, free—the seeming mirror opposite of Eden—to live powerfully in her moment. Often accompanied by her bestie Dawn (a rambunctious, scene-stealing Gabourey Sidibe), these scenes foreground intersectionality, reflecting Bush and Renz’s desire to show Black women in a way that was familiar to them. “We’re surrounded by extraordinary Black women we see doing extraordinary things all the time.” Bush says. “We just don’t see it depicted on screen and we were determined that we had our opportunity, we were going to do that.”

Christopher Renz and Gerard Bush on the set of ‘Antebellum’.

Stylish, visually stunning and effectively pointed, Antebellum marks a natural career progression for Bush and Renz, who began in advertising before moving into social advocacy work. “For Christopher and [me], that competitive side from advertising is what lent itself so beautifully to our waking up one day and saying we didn’t want to sell champagne for the rest of our lives, but that we needed to tell stories that mattered, especially after Trayvon was murdered.”

“Once we decided to make movies it was because we didn’t see anything in the marketplace that looked like us. I don’t think that with the finite amount of time that we have in our lives, from when we’re born to when we transition and exit out of this place, that you want to waste it committing your life to something you don’t think you can be the best at that—that you can make meaningful contribution.”

Related content

Adam Davie’s Black Life in Film list

Letterboxd member Anjelica Jade’s review of Antebellum for Vulture

Haile Gerima’s 2019 TIFF Talk about Sankofa and independent filmmaking

Cece’s list of lighthearted movies with Black characters in them because we deserve movies that aren’t about slavery, racism, police brutality and the like

Follow Aaron on Letterboxd

#antebellum #janelle monae #christopher renz #gerard bush #bush and renz #sankofa #haile gerima #get out #jordan peele #letterboxd

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blackkudos · 6 years

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Octavia Butler

Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, nicknamed the "Genius Grant".

Early life

Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, the only child of Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshine man. Butler's father died when she was seven, so Octavia was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in what she would later recall as a strict Baptist environment.

Growing up in the racially integrated community of Pasadena allowed Butler to experience cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of racial segregation. She accompanied her mother to her cleaning work and witnessed her entering white people's houses through back doors. Her mother was treated poorly by her employers.

From an early age, an almost paralyzing shyness made it difficult for Butler to socialize with other children. Her awkwardness, paired with a slight dyslexia that made schoolwork a torment, led her to believe that she was "ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless," becoming an easy target for bullies. As a result, she frequently passed the time reading at the Pasadena Public Library and writing reams and reams of pages in her "big pink notebook". Hooked at first on fairy tales and horse stories, she quickly became interested in science fiction magazines such as Amazing Stories (aka Amazing), Galaxy Science Fiction (aka Galaxy), and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and began reading stories by John Brunner, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon.

At age 10, she begged her mother to buy her a Remington typewriter on which she "pecked [her] stories two fingered". At 12, watching the televised version of the film Devil Girl from Mars (1954) convinced her she could write a better story, so she drafted what would later become the basis for her Patternist novels. Happily ignorant of the obstacles that a black female writer could encounter, she became unsure of herself for the first time at the age of 13, when her well-intentioned aunt Hazel conveyed the realities of segregation in five words: "Honey ... Negroes can't be writers." Nevertheless, Butler persevered in her desire to publish a story, even asking her junior high school science teacher, Mr. Pfaff, to type the first manuscript she submitted to a science fiction magazine.

After graduating from John Muir High School in 1965, Butler worked during the day and attended Pasadena City College (PCC) at night. As a freshman at PCC, she won a college-wide short story contest, earning her first income ($15) as a writer. She also got the "germ of the idea" for what would become her best-selling novel, Kindred, when a young African American classmate involved in the Black Power Movement loudly criticized previous generations of African Americans for being subservient to whites. As she explained in later interviews, the young man's remarks instigated her to respond with a story that would give historical context to that shameful subservience so that it could be understood as silent but courageous survival. In 1968, Butler graduated from PCC with an associate of arts degree with a focus in History.

Rise to success

Even though Butler's mother wanted her to become a secretary with a steady income, Butler continued to work at a series of temporary jobs, preferring the kind of mindless work that would allow her to get up at two or three in the morning to write. Success continued to elude her, as an absence of useful criticism led her to style her stories after the white-and-male-dominated science fiction she had grown up reading. She enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, but then switched to taking writing courses through UCLA Extension.

During the Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters' Guild of America, West, a program designed to mentor minority writers, her writing impressed one of the teachers, noted science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison. He encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania. There, Butler met the writer and later longtime friend Samuel R. Delany. She also sold her first stories: "Child Finder" to Ellison, for his anthology The Last Dangerous Visions (still unpublished), and "Crossover" to Robin Scott Wilson, the director of Clarion, who published it in the 1971 Clarion anthology.

For the next five years, Butler worked on the series of novels that later become known as the Patternist series: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), and Survivor (1978). In 1978, she was finally able to stop working at temporary jobs and live on her writing. She took a break from the Patternist series to research and write Kindred (1979), and then finished the series with Wild Seed (1980) and Clay's Ark (1984).

Butler's rise to prominence began in 1984 when "Speech Sounds" won the Hugo Award for Short Story and, a year later, Bloodchild won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Novelette. In the meantime, Butler traveled to the Amazon rainforest and the Andes to do research for what would become the Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). These stories were republished in 2000 as the collection Lilith's Brood.

During the 1990s, Butler worked on the novels that solidified her fame as a writer: Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). In 1995, she became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship, an award that came with a prize of $295,000.

In 1999, after her mother's death, Butler moved to Lake Forest Park, Washington. The Parable of the Talents had won the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award for Best Science Novel and she had plans for four more Parable novels: Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay. However, after several failed attempts to begin The Parable of the Trickster, she decided to stop work in the series. In later interviews, Butler explained that the research and writing of the Parable novels had overwhelmed and depressed her, so she had shifted to composing something "lightweight" and "fun" instead. This became her last book, the science-fiction vampire novel Fledgling (2005).

Writing career

Early stories, Patternist series, and Kindred: 1971–1984

Butler's first work published was Crossover in the 1971 Clarion Workshop anthology. She also sold the short story Childfinder to Harlan Ellison for the anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. "I thought I was on my way as a writer," Butler recalled in her short fiction collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. "In fact, I had five more years of rejection slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me before I sold another word."

Starting in 1974, Butler worked on a series of novels that would later be collected as the Patternist series, which depicts the transformation of humanity into three genetic groups: the dominant Patternists, humans who have been bred with heightened telepathic powers and are bound to the Patternmaster via a psionic chain; their enemies the Clayarks, disease-mutated animal-like superhumans; and the Mutes, ordinary humans bonded to the Patternists.

The first novel, Patternmaster (1976), eventually became the last installment in the series' internal chronology. Set in the distant future, it tells of the coming-of-age of Teray, a young Patternist who fights for position within Patternist society and eventually for the role of Patternmaster.

Next came Mind of My Mind (1977), a prequel to Patternmaster set in the twentieth century. The story follows the development of Mary, the creator of the psionic chain and the first Patternmaster to bind all Patternists, and her inevitable struggle for power with her father Doro, a parapsychological vampire who seeks to retain control over the psionic children he has bred over the centuries.

The third book of the series, Survivor, was published in 1978. The titular survivor is Alanna, the adopted child of the Missionaries, fundamentalist Christians who have traveled to another planet to escape Patternist control and Clayark infection. Captured by a local tribe called the Tehkohn, Alanna learns their language and adopts their customs, knowledge which she then uses to help the Missionaries avoid bondage and assimilation into a rival tribe that opposes the Tehkohn.

After Survivor, Butler took a break from the Patternist series to write what would become her best-selling novel, Kindred (1979) as well as the short story "Near of Kin" (1979). In Kindred, Dana, an African American woman, is transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early nineteenth century Maryland. She meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, a black freewoman forced into slavery later in life. In "Near of Kin" the protagonist discovers a taboo relationship in her family as she goes through her mother's things after her death.

In 1980, Butler published the fourth book of the Patternist series, Wild Seed, whose narrative became the series' origin story. Set in Africa and America during the seventeenth century, Wild Seed traces the struggle between the four-thousand-year-old parapsychological vampire Doro and his "wild" child and bride, the three-hundred-year-old shapeshifter and healer Anyanwu. Doro, who has bred psionic children for centuries, deceives Anyanwu into becoming one of his breeders, but she eventually escapes and uses her gifts to create communities that rival Doro's. When Doro finally tracks her down, Anyanwu, tired by decades of escaping or fighting Doro, decides to commit suicide, forcing him to admit his need for her.

In 1983, Butler published "Speech Sounds," a story set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where a pandemic has caused most humans to lose their ability to read, speak, or write. For many, this impairment is accompanied by uncontrollable feelings of jealousy, resentment, and rage. "Speech Sounds" received the 1984 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

In 1984, Butler released the last book of the Patternmaster series, Clay's Ark. Set in the Mojave Desert, it focuses on a colony of humans infected by an extraterrestrial microorganism brought to Earth by the one surviving astronaut of the spaceship Clay's Ark. As the microorganism compels them to spread it, they kidnap ordinary people to infect them and, in the case of women, give birth to the mutant, sphinx-like children who will be the first members of the Clayark race.

Bloodchild and the Xenogenesis trilogy: 1984–1989

Butler followed Clay's Ark with the critically acclaimed short story "Bloodchild" (1984). Set on an alien planet, it depicts the complex relationship between human refugees and the insect-like aliens who keep them in a preserve to protect them, but also to use them as hosts for breeding their young. Sometimes called Butler's "pregnant man story," "Bloodchild" won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award.

Three years later, Butler published Dawn, the first installment of what would become known as the Xenogenesis trilogy. The series examines the theme of alienation by creating situations in which humans are forced to coexist with other species to survive and extends Butler's recurring exploration of genetically-altered, hybrid individuals and communities. In Dawn, protagonist Lilith Iyapo finds herself in a spaceship after surviving a nuclear apocalypse that destroys Earth. Saved by the Oankali aliens, the human survivors must combine their DNA with an ooloi, the Oankali's third sex, in order to create a new race that eliminates a self-destructive flaw in humans—their aggressive hierarchical tendencies. Butler followed Dawn with "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" (1987), a story about how certain female sufferers of "Duryea-Gode Disease," a genetic disorder which causes dissociative states, obsessive self-mutilation, and violent psychosis, are able to control others afflicted with the disease.

Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989) the second and the third books in the Xenogenesis trilogy, focus on the predatory and prideful tendencies that affect human evolution, as humans now revolt against Lilith's Oankali-engineered progeny. Set thirty years after humanity's return to Earth, Adulthood Rites centers on the kidnapping of Lilith's part-human, part alien child, Akin, by a human-only group who are against the Oankali. Akin learns about both aspects of his identity through his life with the humans as well as the Akjai. The Oankali-only group becomes their mediator, and ultimately creates a human-only colony in Mars. In Imago, the Oankali create a third species more powerful than themselves: the shape-shifting healer Jodahs, a human-Oankali ooloi who must find suitable human male and female mates to survive its metamorphosis and finds them in the most unexpected of places, in a village of renegade humans.

The Parable series: 1993–1998

In the mid-1990s, Butler published two novels later designated as the Parable (or Earthseed) series. The books depict the struggle of the Earthseed community to survive the socioeconomic and political collapse of twenty-first century America due to poor environmental stewardship, corporate greed, and the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor. The books propose alternate philosophical views and religious interventions as solutions to such dilemmas.

The first book in the series, Parable of the Sower (1993), features a fifteen-year-old protagonist named Lauren Oya Olamina, and is set in a dystopian California in the 2020s. Lauren, who suffers from a syndrome causing her to literally feel any physical pain she witnesses, decides to escape the corruption and corporatization of her community of Robledo. She forms a new belief system, Earthseed, in order to prepare for the future of the human race on another planet. Recruiting members of varying social backgrounds, Lauren relocates her new group to Northern California, naming her new community "Earthseed".

Her 1998 follow-up novel, Parable of the Talents, is set sometime after Lauren's death and is told through the excerpts of Lauren's journals as framed by the commentary of her estranged daughter, Larkin. It details the takeover of Earthseed by right-wing fundamentalist Christians, Lauren's attempts to survive their religious "re-education", and the final triumph of Earthseed as a community and a doctrine.

In between her Earthseed novels, Butler published the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995), which includes the short stories "Bloodchild", "The Evening and the Morning and the Night", "Near of Kin", "Speech Sounds", and "Crossover", as well as the non-fiction pieces "Positive Obsession" and "Furor Scribendi".

Late stories and Fledgling: 2003–2005

After several years of suffering from writer's block, Butler published the short stories "Amnesty" (2003) and "The Book of Martha" (2003), and her second standalone novel, Fledgling (2005). Both short stories focus on how impossible conditions force an ordinary woman to make a distressing choice. In "Amnesty", an alien abductee recounts her painful abuse at the hand of the unwitting aliens, and upon her release, by humans, and explains why she chose to work as a translator for the aliens now that the Earth's economy is in a deep depression. In "The Book of Martha", God asks a middle-aged African American novelist to make one important change to fix humanity's destructive ways. Martha's choice—to make humans have vivid and satisfying dreams—means that she will no longer be able to do what she loves, writing fiction. These two stories were added to the 2005 edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Butler's last publication during her lifetime was Fledgling, a novel exploring the culture of a vampire community living in mutualistic symbiosis with humans. Set on the West Coast, it tells of the coming-of-age of a young female hybrid vampire whose species is called Ina. The only survivor of a vicious attack on her families that left her an amnesiac, she must seek justice for her dead, build a new family, and relearn how to be Ina.

Butler bequeathed her papers including manuscripts, correspondence, school papers, notebooks, and photographs to the Huntington Library.

Themes

The critique of present-day hierarchies

In multiple interviews and essays, Butler explained her view of humanity as inherently flawed by an innate tendency towards hierarchical thinking which leads to intolerance, violence and, if not checked, the ultimate destruction of our species.

"Simple peck-order bullying", she wrote in her essay "A World without Racism," "is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world." Her stories, then, often replay humanity's domination of the weak by the strong as a type of parasitism. These superior beings, whether aliens, vampires, superhuman, or a slave masters, find themselves defied by a protagonist who embodies difference, diversity, and change, so that, as John R. Pfeiffer notes "[i]n one sense [Butler's] fables are trials of solutions to the self-destructive condition in which she finds mankind."

The remaking of the human

In his essay on the sociobiological backgrounds of Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, J. Adam Johns describes how Butler's narratives counteract the death drive behind the hierarchical impulse with an innate love of life (biophilia), particularly different, strange life. Specifically, Butler's stories feature gene manipulation, interbreeding, miscegenation, symbiosis, mutation, alien contact, non-consensual sex, contamination, and other forms of hybridity as the means to correct the sociobiological causes of hierarchical violence. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai note, "[i]n [Butler's] narratives the undoing of the human body is both literal and metaphorical, for it signifies the profound changes necessary to shape a world not organized by hierarchical violence." The evolutionary maturity achieved by the bioengineered hybrid protagonist at the end of the story, then, signals the possible evolution of the dominant community in terms of tolerance, acceptance of diversity, and a desire to wield power responsibly.

The survivor as hero

Butler's protagonists are disenfranchised individuals who endure, compromise, and embrace radical change in order to survive. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai note, her stories focus on minority characters whose historical background makes them already intimate with brutal violation and exploitation, and therefore the need to compromise to survive. Even when endowed with extra abilities, these characters are forced to experience unprecedented physical, mental, and emotional distress and exclusion to ensure a minimal degree of agency and to prevent humanity from achieving self-destruction. In many stories, their acts of courage become acts of understanding, and in some cases, love, as they reach a crucial compromise with those in power. Ultimately, Butler's focus on disenfranchised characters serves to illustrate both the historical exploitation of minorities and how the resolve of one such exploited individual may bring on critical change.

The creation of alternative communities

Butler's stories feature mixed communities founded by African protagonists and populated by diverse, if similar-minded individuals. Members may be humans of African, European, or Asian descent, extraterrestrial (such as the N'Tlic in "Bloodchild"), from a different species (such as the vampiric Ina in Fledgling), and cross-species (such as the human-Oankali Akin and Jodahs in the Xenogenesis trilogy). In some stories, the community's hybridity results in a flexible view of sexuality and gender (for instance, the polyamorous extended families in Fledgling). Thus, Butler creates bonds between groups that are generally considered to be separate and unrelated, and suggests hybridity as "the potential root of good family and blessed community life."

Relationship to Afrofuturism

Butler's work has been associated with the genre of Afrofuturism, a term coined by Mark Dery to describe "speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture." Some critics, however, have noted that while Butler's protagonists are of African descent, the communities they create are multi-ethnic and, sometimes, multi-species. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai explain in their 2010 memorial to Butler, while Butler does offer "an afro-centric sensibility at the core of narratives," her "insistence on hybridity beyond the point of discomfort" exceeds the tenets of both black cultural nationalism and of "white-dominated" liberal pluralism.

Influence

In interviews with Charles Rowell and Randall Kenan, Butler credited the struggles of her working-class mother as an important influence on her writing. Because Butler's mother received little formal education herself, she made sure that young Butler was given the opportunity to learn by bringing her reading materials that her white employers threw away, from magazines to advanced books. She also encouraged Butler to write. She bought her daughter her first typewriter when she was ten years old, and, seeing her hard at work on a story, casually remarked that maybe one day she could become a writer, causing Butler to realize that it was possible to make a living as an author. A decade later, Mrs. Butler would pay more than a month's rent to have an agent review her daughter's work. She also provided Butler with the money she had been saving for dental work to pay for Butler's scholarship so she could attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, where Butler sold her first two stories.

A second person to play an influential role in Butler's work was American writer Harlan Ellison. As a teacher at the Open Door Workshop of the Screen Writers Guild of America, he gave Butler her first honest and constructive criticism on her writing after years of lukewarm responses from composition teachers and baffling rejections from publishers. Impressed by her work, Ellison suggested she attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, and even contributed $100 towards her application fee. As the years passed, Ellison's mentorship became a close friendship.

Point of view

Butler began reading science fiction at a young age, but quickly became disenchanted by the genre's unimaginative portrayal of ethnicity and class as well as by its lack of noteworthy female protagonists. She then set to correct those gaps by, as De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai point out, "choosing to write self-consciously as an African-American woman marked by a particular history" —what Butler termed as "writing myself in". Butler's stories, therefore, are usually written from the perspective of a marginalized black woman whose difference from the dominant agents increases her potential for reconfiguring the future of her society.

Audience

Publishers and critics have labelled Butler's work as science fiction. While Butler enjoyed the genre deeply, calling it "potentially the freest genre in existence", she resisted being branded a genre writer. Many critics have pointed out that her narratives have drawn attention of people from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds. She claimed to have three loyal audiences: black readers, science-fiction fans, and feminists.

Interviews

Charlie Rose interviewed Octavia Butler in 2000 soon after the award of a MacArthur Fellowship. The highlights are probing questions that arise out of Butler's personal life narrative and her interest in becoming not only a writer, but a writer of science fiction. Rose asked, "What then is central to what you want to say about race?" Butler's response was, "Do I want to say something central about race? Aside from, 'Hey we're here!'?" This points to an essential claim for Butler that the world of science fiction is a world of possibilities, and although race is an innate element, it is embedded in the narrative, not forced upon it.

In an interview by Randall Kenan, Octavia E. Butler discusses how her life experiences as a child shaped most of her thinking. As a writer, Butler was able to use her writing as a vehicle to critique history under the lenses of feminism. In the interview, she discusses the research that had to be done in order to write her bestselling novel, Kindred. Most of it is based on visiting libraries as well as historic landmarks with respect to what she is investigating. Butler admits that she writes science fiction because she does not want her work to be labeled or used as a marketing tool. She wants the readers to be genuinely interested in her work and the story she provides, but at the same time she fears that people will not read her work because of the "science fiction" label that they have.

Adaptations

Parable of the Sower was adapted as Parable of the Sower: The Concert Version, a work-in-progress opera written by American folk/blues musician Toshi Reagon in collaboration with her mother, singer and composer Bernice Johnson Reagon. The adaptation's libretto and musical score combine African-American spirituals, soul, rock and roll, and folk music into rounds to be performed by singers sitting in a circle. It was performed as part of The Public Theater's 2015 Under the Radar Festival in New York City.

Awards and honors

Winner:

2012: Solstice Award

2010: Inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame

2005: Langston Hughes Medal of The City College

2000: Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the PEN American Center

1999: Nebula Award for Best Novel – Parable of the Talents

1995: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant

1988: Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novelette – "The Evening and the Morning and the Night"

1985: Locus Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"

1985: Hugo Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"

1985: Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"

1984: Nebula Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"

1984: Hugo Award for Best Short Story – "Speech Sounds"

1980: Creative Arts Award, L.A. YWCA

Nominated:

1994: Nebula Award for Best Novel – Parable of the Sower

1987: Nebula Award for Best Novelette – "The Evening and the Morning and the Night"

1967: Fifth Place, Writer's Digest Short Story Contest

Critical reception

Most critics praise Butler on her unflinching exposition of human flaws, which she depicts with striking realism. The New York Times regarded her novels as "evocative" if "often troubling" explorations of "far-reaching issues of race, sex, power". The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction called her examination of humanity "clear-headed and brutally unsentimental" and Village Voice's Dorothy Allison described her as "writing the most detailed social criticism" where "the hard edge of cruelty, violence, and domination is described in stark detail." Locus regarded her as "one of those authors who pay serious attention to the way human beings actually work together and against each other, and she does so with extraordinary plausibility." Houston Post ranked her "among the best SF writers, blessed with a mind capable of conceiving complicated futuristic situations that shed considerable light on our current affairs."

Scholars, on the other hand, focus on Butler's choice to write from the point of view of marginal characters and communities and thus "expanded SF to reflect the experiences and expertise of the disenfranchised." While surveying Butler's novels, critic Burton Raffel noted how race and gender influence her writing: "I do not think any of these eight books could have been written by a man, as they most emphatically were not, nor, with the single exception of her first book, Pattern-Master (1976), are likely to have been written, as they most emphatically were, by anyone but an African American." Robert Crossley commended how Butler's "feminist aesthetic" works to expose sexual, racial, and cultural chauvinisms because it is "enriched by a historical consciousness that shapes the depiction of enslavement both in the real past and in imaginary pasts and futures."

Butler has been praised widely for her spare yet vivid style, with Washington Post Book World calling her craftsmanship "superb". Burton Raffel regards her prose as "carefully, expertly crafted" and "crystalline, at its best, sensuous, sensitive, exact not in the least directed at calling attention to itself."

Death

During her last years, Butler struggled with writer's block and depression, partly caused by the side effects of medication for her high blood pressure. She continued writing and taught at Clarion's Science Fiction Writers' Workshop regularly. In 2005, she was inducted into Chicago State University's International Black Writers Hall of Fame.

Butler died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, aged 58. Contemporary news accounts were inconsistent as to the cause of her death, with some reporting that she suffered a fatal stroke, while others indicated that she died of head injuries after falling and striking her head on her walkway. Another suggestion, backed by Locus magazine, is that a stroke caused the fall and hence the head injuries. After her death, the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established by the Carl Brandon Society to provide support to students of color to attend the Clarion West Writers Workshop and Clarion Writers' Workshop, descendants of the original Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop where Butler had gotten her start 35 years before.

Scholarship fund

The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established in Butler's memory in 2006 by the Carl Brandon Society. Its goal is to provide an annual scholarship to enable writers of color to attend the Clarion West Writers Workshop and Clarion Writers' Workshop, descendants of the original Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, where Butler got her start. The first scholarships were awarded in 2007.

Selected works

Series

Patternist series

Patternmaster (Doubleday 1976; Avon 1979; Warner 1995)

Mind of My Mind (Doubleday 1977; Warner 1994)

Survivor (Doubleday 1978)

Wild Seed (Doubleday 1980; Warner 1988, 2001)

Clay's Ark (St. Martin's Press 1984; Ace Books 1985; Warner 1996)

Seed to Harvest (Grand Central Publishing 2007; omnibus excluding Survivor)

Xenogenesis series

Dawn (Warner 1987, 1989, 1997)

Adulthood Rites (Warner 1988, 1977)

Imago (Warner 1989, 1997)

Xenogenesis (Guild America Books 1989; omnibus)

Lilith's Brood (Warner 2000; omnibus)

Parable series (also referred to as the Earthseed series)

Parable of the Sower (Four Walls, Eight Windows 1993; Women's Press 1995; Warner 1995, 2000).

Parable of the Talents (Seven Stories Press 1998; Quality Paperback Book Club 1999; Women's Press 2000, 2001; Warner 2000, 2001)

Standalone novels

Kindred (Doubleday 1979; Beacon Press 1988, 2004).

Fledgling (Seven Stories Press 2005; Grand Central Publishing 2007).

Short story collections

Bloodchild and Other Stories (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1995; Seven Stories Press, 1996, 2005; second edition includes "Amnesty" and "The Book of Martha").

Unexpected Stories (2014, includes "A Necessary Being" and "Childfinder")

Essays and speeches

"Birth of a Writer." Essence 20 (May 1989): 74+. Reprinted as "Positive Obsession" in Bloodchild and Other Stories.

"Free Libraries: Are They Becoming Extinct?" Omni 15.10 (Aug. 1993): 4.

"Devil Girl from Mars: Why I Write Science Fiction." Media in Transition. MIT 19 February 1998. Transcript 4 October 1998.

""Brave New Worlds: A Few Rules for Predicting the Future." Essence 31.1 (May 2000): 164+.

"A World without Racism." NPR Weekend Edition Saturday. 1 September 2001.

"Eye Witness: "Butler's Aha! Moment." O: The Oprah Magazine 3.5 (May 2002): 79–80.

Wikipedia

#Octavia Butler #06-22 #02-24

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thedogsled · 7 years

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QOTD - reference

Pre-season 13

The best journeys answer questions that in the beginning you didn’t even think to ask – Jeff Johnson

Forget what we became, what matters is what we’ve become, and our potentials to overcome - Aniekee Tochukwu Ezekiel

Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved – WJ Bryan

New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings – Lao Tzu

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing – Elbert Hubbard

Anger: an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured – Mark Twain

Education is the kindling of a flame not the filling of a vessel - Socrates

Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide – Marva Collins

13.01 - Lost & Found

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone – Harriet Beacher Stowe

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life – Bertolt Brechy

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve – George Bernard Shaw

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end – Seneca

We must travel in the direction of our fear – John Berryman

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope – Epictetus

A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure – Pico Iyer

13.02 - The Rising Son

Cease endlessly striving for what you want to do and learn to love what must be done – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning – Sam Shepard

If you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun – APJ Abdul Kalan

History is a vast early warning system – Norman Cousins

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell. You see, I have friends in both places – Mark Twain

To succeed in life you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone – Reba McEntire

13.03 - Patience

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age – Jeanne Moreau

Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams – Ralph Waldo Emerson

It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wears you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe – Mohammed Ali

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste death but once – William Shakespeare

Indifference and neglect often do more damage than outright dislike – JK Rowling

Too many people know the price of everything and the value of nothing – Oscar Wilde

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a ride!” – Hunter S Thompson

13.04 - The Big Empty

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious – Oscar Wilde

The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned to momentum – Frances Willard

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward – CS Lewis

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul – Victor Hugo

One can never creep when one feels an impulse to soar – Hellen Keller

In every day, there are 1,440 minutes. That means we have 1,440 daily opportunities to have a positive impact – Les Brown

13.05 - Advanced Thanatology

Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny – Christopher Markus

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them – Henry David Thoreau

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope – Dr. Seuss

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm – Willa Cather

The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. It’s about what you’re made of, not the circumstances – Unknown

The hardest thing in life is to learn which bridge to cross and which to burn – David Russel

When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower – Alexander Den Heijer

Bravery never goes out of fashion – William Makepeace Thackray

13.06 - Tombstone

Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly – Morticia Addams

A ship is safe in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for – William G T Shedd

The roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that made all the difference – Robert Frost

Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway – John Wayne

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future – Oscar Wilde

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that – Martin Luther King

13.07 - War of the Worlds

Remember that just because you hit rock bottom doesn’t mean you have to stay there – Robert Downey Jr

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on – Franklin D Roosevelt

Never love anybody who treats you like you’re ordinary – Oscar Wilde

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision – Helen Keller

To thrive in life you need three bones – A wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone – Reba McEntire

We build too many walls and not enough bridges – Isaac Newton

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds – Albery Einstein

13.08

Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality – Lewis Carroll

Practice like you’ve never won. Perform like you’ve never lost.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us – Charles Bukowski

Life has a way of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen at once – Paulo Coelho

13.09/13.10 - The Bad Place/Wayward Sisters

Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow – Helen Keller

Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all deadly sins – Edith Wharton

You can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them – Shanda Rhimes

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back – Maya Angelou

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials . You need something scary to overcome – Maragaret Atwood

I would rather wait with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light – Helen Keller

The further we’ve gotten from the magic and mystery of our past, the more we’ve come to need Halloween – Pata Guran

I desire the things which will destroy me in the end – Sylvia Plath

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself – Chimomanda Ngazi Cidichie

Maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it – Jodi Picoult

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are – Anaois Nin

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to pick up the pieces when it’s all over – Octavia Butler

If your dream is only about you, it’s too small – Ava DuVerney

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any – Alice Walker

#spn qotd #speculation #spoilers #s13 spoilers #spn spoilers #quote of the day #i realized i needed all this information in one place #because in retrospect they're even more exciting #so excited #season 13 #quotes #resources #i probably misspelled some of these #what is and what will be

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christymtidwell · 7 years

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I don’t often read biographies. I only have 12 books on my Goodreads shelf labelled “biography” that I’ve actually read, and a couple of those might be stretching the definition a bit (e.g., Kate Bolick’s Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, which includes biographical sketches as part of a more autobiographical project). Looking over the short list of biographies I’ve actually completed, it appears I’m primarily drawn to biographies of women, including the following: Rachel Carson, Judith Merril, George Eliot, James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), Rosa Luxemburg, Octavia E. Butler, and Shirley Jackson. The list also includes Rachel Ignotofsky’s Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World, which is a collection of short, illustrated biographical sketches of female scientists throughout history. There are only three books on the list that are about men (and here I want to mention Philippe Girard’s Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life, which I listened to on a long car ride and would highly recommend).

I’m not sure what it is that has me reading mostly biographies of women. It’s not a conscious choice to focus on women. Some of this focus certainly grows out of my scholarly interests; my dissertation was about feminist science fiction and feminist science, after all. Rachel Carson, Judith Merril, James Tiptree, Jr., and Octavia E. Butler are all relevant to that work. But my dissertation didn’t focus on any of these women and didn’t require biographical research anyway.

Certainly there’s also an element of admiration in my choices. All of these are biographies of women whose work I value: Rachel Carson’s scientific work as well as her writing about science; James Tiptree, Jr.’s brilliant and disturbing fiction, much of it reflecting on gender and sex; Judith Merril’s writing and editorial work and the way she helped shape science fiction as a genre; Octavia Butler’s revelations of power in her fiction (I especially love Dawn); Rosa Luxemburg’s fight for freedom and justice. And so on.

Another unfortunate pattern, however, seems to be that the biographies I have enjoyed most (is enjoyed the right word? perhaps not) are those of women who have led somewhat painful, constrained lives: Rachel Carson, James Tiptree, Jr., Octavia Butler, Shirley Jackson.

This pattern seems especially to be highlighted by Ruth Franklin’s recent biography of Shirley Jackson (Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, 2016), which I just finished reading. Franklin emphasizes Jackson’s always strained relationship with her mother, her feeling of never fitting in anyplace, the hurtful ways her husband (scholar Stanley Hyman) treated her, frequently lukewarm responses to her fiction with a couple of significant exceptions, the tension she felt between her life as wife and mother and her life as writer, her late-in-life agoraphobia and serious anxiety, and her early death. Despite some real success as a writer and what seem like largely positive relationships with her children, Jackson’s life is marked by pain, anxiety, and a sense of her lack of freedom.

Reading her fiction with this in mind is illuminating. For instance, her work frequently circles around the supernatural. She typically stops short of relying on the supernatural as an explanation, but it is always a possibility, and it was something she studied for years.

Witchcraft, whether she practiced it or simply studied it, was important to Jackson for what it symbolized: female strength and potency. The witchcraft chronicles she treasured–written by male historians, often men of the church, who sought to demonstrate that witches presented a serious threat to Christian morality–are stories of powerful women: women who defy social norms, women who get what they desire, women who can channel the power of the devil himself. (261)

Shirley Jackson didn’t identify herself as a feminist, but she certainly fits into a feminist tradition. And Franklin points out how her observations about her own life, as well as her fiction, presage Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Like many women of the time, Jackson felt she had little to no control over her own life, little to no say in what was possible. Witchcraft, even as a thought experiment, allowed a window out of that world of control.

Later, Franklin’s discussion of The Haunting of Hill House includes a significant, telling detail about Jackson’s sense of the book and, potentially, about her sense of herself. At one point, Franklin observes that, in her notes, Jackson referred to a particular line as the “key line” of the novel. This line comes after Eleanor has been clutching Theodora’s hand in fear as she hears a child crying for help in the next room. When the lights go on, however, Theodora is not in bed with her but in the bed across the room: “Good God,” Eleanor says, “whose hand was I holding?” This line always gives me chills but I hadn’t considered it as central to the book in the way Jackson apparently did.

Franklin’s interpretation builds upon Jackson’s biography:

The people we hold by the hand are our intimates–parents, children, spouses. To discover oneself clinging to an unidentifiable hand and to ask “Whose hand was I holding?” is to recognize that we can never truly know those with whom we believe ourselves most familiar. One can sleep beside another person for twenty years, as Shirley had with Stanley [Hyman] by this point, and still feel that person to be at times a stranger–and not the “beautiful stranger” of her early story. The hand on the other side of the bed may well seem to belong to a demon. (414)

This is an intriguing reading that I will have to consider when I re-read the novel. Whether I find it convincing as a reading of this line or not, however, it is a compelling take on Shirley’s mindset and the feelings about her marriage she struggled with for many years.

Franklin’s biography – as in these two examples – provides potentially useful ways of reading Shirley Jackson’s work through her biography. The next instance raises questions about the limits of such readings, however.

Late in her life, when she became (temporarily) unable to leave her house, she found herself also unable to write. Franklin writes, tying Jackson’s anxiety to her relationship with Stanley, “It was an issue of control, she thought. How could she wrest control of her life, her mind, back from Stanley? And if she could, would her writing change?” (477). Jackson wrote in her diary at this time, “insecure, uncontrolled, i wrote of neuroses and fear and i think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety.” Her books do all seem to wrestle with anxiety and fear, and this is the source of much of their power. Would she write such books if she were a happier woman? If the world made room for her to be who she needed to be? Likely not. But what other books might she have written instead? Her books gather force from her anxiety and fear, but to leave it there is to discount her talent and skill as a writer. I suspect that a less unhappy version of Shirley Jackson could still have been a brilliant writer, but she might have spoken to different concerns. Or perhaps she would still have reflected these fears, for they are not unique to her or to her situation as a woman in an unhappy marriage in the mid-20th century.

Some of Jackson’s commentary on her own writing from earlier in her life indicates the broader reach of her ideas:

In a publicity memo written for Farrar, Straus around the time The Road Through the Wall appeared–only a month before “The Lottery” was written, if the March date on the draft is accurate–Jackson mentioned her enduring fondness for eighteenth-century English novels because of their “preservation of and insistence on a pattern superimposed precariously on the chaos of human development.” She continued: “I think it is the combination of these two that forms the background of everything I write–the sense which I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction, which may be the devil and may be intellectual enlightenment.” In all her writing, the recurrent theme was “an insistence on the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behavior.” (224)

I take this as a reminder that although her personal demons may have shaped her writing, these feelings and themes are not unique to her or to people with similar problems. In fact, this quote seems to sum up horror fiction in a nutshell: rationality attempts (and fails) to control that which is beyond rational, humanity attempts (and fails) to control itself or its “wickedness.”

Shirley Jackson & Biography I don't often read biographies. I only have 12 books on my Goodreads shelf labelled "biography" that I've actually read, and a couple of those might be stretching the definition a bit (e.g., …

#biography #gender #horror #reading #shirley jackson

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sophygurl · 7 years

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10,000 Worlds; 10,000 Feminisms: What Even IS Feminist Science Fiction Anyway? - Wiscon 41 panel write-up

These tend to be long and only of interest to specific segments of folk so click the clicky to read.

Disclaimers:

I hand write these notes and am prone to missing things, skipping things, writing things down wrong, misreading my own handwriting, and making other mistakes. So this is by no means a full transcript.

Corrections, additions, and clarifications are most welcome. I’ve done my best to get people’s pronouns and other identifiers correct, but please do let me know if I’ve messed any up. Corrections and such can be made publicly or privately on any of the sites I’m sharing these write-ups on(tumblr and dreamwidth for full writings, facebook and twitter for links), and I will correct ASAP.

My policy is to identify panelists by the names written in the programming book since that’s what they’ve chosen to be publicly known as. If you’re one of the panelists and would prefer something else - let me know and I’ll change it right away.

For audience comments, I will only say general “audience member” kind of identifier unless the individual requests to be named.

Any personal notes or comments I make will be added in like this [I disagree because blah] - showing this was not part of the panel vs. something like “and then I spoke up and said blah” to show I actually added to the panel at the time.

10,000 Worlds; 10,000 Feminisms: What Even IS Feminist Science Fiction Anyway?

Moderator: Julie C. Day. Panelists: Jackie Gross (ladyjax), Lauren Lacey, (Kini Ibura Salaam was listed, but unable to make the panel due to travel issues)

#10000Worlds - lots of livetweets if you want to see more, also lists of recs including stuff I’m sure I missed

Julie introduced herself, saying this was her first WisCon, she is a writer, and “I am weird.”

Lauren introduced herself and talked about teaching at Edgewood college - teaches contemporary speculative fiction and directs the women and gender studies program. She recently taught a class on contemp. global feminisms.

Jackie introduced herself as a writer of fanfic (ladyjax on AO3), and also teaches at UC Berkley. Used to work for a women’s bookstore. Motherlands was the first feminist book she read at age 13. She said she started out as a feminist, and then a black feminist, and then a lesbian black feminist.

Julie started off the questions about SF as feminism being a broad category, so make it personal, and asked the panelists to list off a couple of best/worst works of feminist SF.

Lauren said a not-fave of hers is Sheri Tepper’s work, specifically Beauty. Revised fairy tales are ways that SFF writers were re-appropriating fairy tales. As feminists, we should be asking ourselves what do we keep - not just in our fiction but in general (example: the institution of marriage - what’s good about it, what it isn’t, etc.).

Lauren listed Angela Carter’s work as an example of her favorite feminist SF.

In regards to Tepper’s work, Lauren said that instead of re-working fairy tales, Tepper was just doing the same things. She also talked about dystopian narratives as being about how everything sucks, and thinks the point of feminist SF should be about giving hope.

Jackie brought up Daughters of a Coral Dawn by Katherine Forrest, which she hates with the fire of a thousand suns. It was hyped up, but she thought it was bad, although she likes Forrest’s other works.

Julie talked about feminist fiction as a reflection of how things are vs. pathways forward to something better - not necessarily perfect but better as opposed to the dystopian/utopian paradigm.

Jackie discussed the idea of entry points where you find yourself in a narrative. She references Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast Chronicles, which brings you from the past to the present to the future, and Shelly Singer’s The Demeter Flower - “we seem to go to the woods a lot!” It’s like something goes wrong, women pack it up and head for the woods. There are lots of similar stories, you read them to see how this story does this kind of narrative differently. Charnas has others in this genre, also Motherlands.

Jackie laments that dystopias now are for the sake of the dystopia vs. being commentary on where we’re going wrong and how to change that. [I disagree but get where she’s coming from]

Jackie tells us that the director of Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, shot a film series with the idea of slow dystopia called Futurestates.

Julie asked the panelists about the function of YA dystopias. The teen state is about identity and rebellion, coming of age and opposition to authority.

Jackie posited that there is a difference between a dystopia and a distaster.

Lauren said a story doesn’t have to be just a dystopia or utopia, it can combine elements of both. She mentioned Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler’s Parable series as dystopias that represent the hope of resistance/rebellion.

She also brought up the New Wave 70′s stories where there was this narrative of women just entering SF (when actually we’ve always been here). At this time, there were a lot of feminist utopias - all female societies where men show up. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gillman is an earlier example of this type of feminist utopia.

Lauren talked some more about the timelines of these kinds of stories - the 90′s had an explosion of the more dystopian type, but they always existed as well. The dominate culture latched on to this kind of prepatory dystopia around that time.

Jackie said that she feels differently about Handmaid’s Tale now than in the 80′s when it came out. “All of this has happened to My people already.” Can/should the show give us stories of the people who were wiped out instead of just saying “they’ve killed all of these people” as part of the narrative. For example, in a conversation with a friend, they were wondering - how would the hood react when this started - because the hood is armed up.

She also talked about Womanseed by Sunlight, which has this idea of different people and groups of people who left society at different points eventually finding one another and joining up. Another example is Steve Barnes’ series that begins with the book Streetlethal about 2 different extremes of people working together.

Julie brought up Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea as examples where the narrative makes us relate to the main character so much that we’re pulled in to their reality. The real victim is the mad woman in the attic, but we don’t see that at first because of the point of view character.

Lauren said that a good writer will flag those silences so that we see who isn’t being represented by the main narrative. James Tiptree does this well. Literary theory asks the question - who can speak, and how can they speak.

Julie talked about feminist SF as being intersectional. An example is Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and how reading this, she was exposed to ideas of gender identity much sooner than she would have otherwise. SFF leaves room for more expansion of ideas - gives permission for more and lets you experience things and transforms you in different ways.

Jackie emphasized getting away from the mainstream - especially look for gay and lesbian publishers. She mentions Return to Isis by Jean Stewart - things go bad, a new society develops, but there is war with others. Also Swords of the Rainbow, and Gilda Stories. Basically, seek out things that won’t get published by mainstream publishers.

Another example she gave was Space Traders by Derrick Bell, which asks the question - what happens when aliens show up and say they’ll solve all your problems if you give us all of your black people. It’s told as a fable that’s already happened.

She talked about how early copies of Octavia Butler’s Dawn featured a white woman, so it took awhile when reading the book to realize the main character was black. There was an another example like this that I missed the title and author of, but when the publisher was asked why they did this with the cover, the response was that 1) black people don’t read scifi [UGH] and 2) white people won’t read a book if there’s a black person on the cover [DOUBLE UGH].

Lauren brought up the fact that Indigenous fiction is sold as “Native American” fiction even if it should be put in other genres. She agrees about looking outside the mainstream. The mainstream is what publishes think sells, so we have to seek this other stuff out to find it, and also to send the message of what we want to see more of.

Julie talked more about gay and lesbian publishers still being very necessary.

Jackie added that Barnes and Noble might sell a book by one of these publishers, but it’s the only copy they have, and if it’s a book in a series they won’t have the other books, plus it will be shoved into the LGBT section in the corner. On the other hand, when Jackie was hand-selling books in a feminist bookstore, it meant being able to say “this is book #5 - do you want me to get 1-4 for you?”

Amazon’s name was taken from a woman’s bookstore - it’s important to remember our history. Mama Bear’s was the last woman’s bookstore in California.

Lauren brought up that on Amazon, it can be harder to find certain things because people can bid to be at the top of search lists. Amazon and Google are rigged - making smaller publishers and self-published books harder to find.

An audience member shouted out - “Library catalogs are not rigged!”

Julie stated that there are many narratives to tell and asked the panelists if things have changed?

Lauren said it’s dangerous to historicize the present, but there are ways in which the dominant popular culture has embraced SFF and it’s interesting to look at the ways that has contained the genre.

She added that we should check out WisCon’s Guests of Honor and Tiptree noms for examples of all of the great stuff out there right now. She said that 10 years ago when she was studying SF, people were surprised that it was a thing you could do - but now people are getting it more.

Jackie said she was fortunate to have studied the golden age of SF. She added that she was a Tiptree judge a few years ago - it’s not all necessarily feminist, but there’s a lot that is. She recommended All That Outer Space Allows by Ian Sales. In this story, women write SF but it’s seen as sort of housewife stuff. This ends up meaning that only women can see spaceships when they come.

Jackie also said that reading everything for the Tiptree judging showed her that while not everything she had to read was great - yes, there are indeed 10,000 narratives out there.

Jackie and Lauren discussed how people are looking for more Hunger Games-like stories, but that doesn’t work for everyone. Authors can’t keep telling the same thing over and over.

Julie discussed how publishers, editors, etc. may not connect to certain narratives, but that has more to say about them and their own biases than about the stories not getting published.

An audience member asked if there was a word for created societies that are neither dystopian nor utopian. Julie offered heterotopia. An example is Le Guin’s Dispossessed.

Another audience member said they are looking for publishers of contemporary feminist SF - not feminist fantasy and especially not romantic fantasy.

Jackie suggested Aqueduct Press, but also said not to discount the romantics. For example, Romantic Times reviews a lot of SF. Romance can be a gateway genre to SF.

An audience member brought up Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy as having a balance of dystopia and utopia, where the utopian society is based on reproductive technologies. (Either this audience member or Lauren on the panel - my notes aren’t clear which) stated that their students love that, as well as Octavia Butler’s work.

Another audience rec is Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire. Jackie seconds this rec and added that it’s a real mind bender.

Jackie said that utopias can get so boring, whereas many dystopias are like - well that’s kinda how life is.

An audience member said that as a male, he enjoyed the wave of feminist utopias because he found they were the only ones he actually wanted to live in - not like the male-written ones he’d previously read.

Jackie mentions The Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearheart as another in this genre.

An audience member asked Lauren about finding feminist SF on a global level. Lauren said it’s out there but in the US, we don’t tend to like reading stuff that comes from elsewhere, so it’s harder to find.

Jackie said that everything nominated for Tiptree is easily findable on their website. Also manga is get-able.

Lauren talked about how a lot of work from writers in India gets described as fantasy but there are genre issues there due to people writing about Hindu traditions and getting labeled “fantasy.”

Jackie mentioned the discussions that happened recently on twitter in regards to Justine Larbalestier and Magical Realism genre issues - post-modern female authors just tend to get labeled that way and it can be problematic.

An audience member brought up Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing. Jackie talked about it as coming from the SFF and woman’s spirituality movements, and added that San Fransisco SFF slipstream fic is a whole thing.

At this point of the panel a ton of recommendations got tossed out, but I’d stopped taking notes because I had to hurry off to the green room for my own panel in the next time slot. Do check out the twitter hashtag as the livetweeters were pretty diligent about getting those listed.

#10000worlds #wiscon #wiscon 41 #wiscon41 #wc41 #10000 worlds #10000 feminisms #wiscon panel write-ups #feminist science fiction

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