The afterword for “Speech Sounds” was elucidating. Octavia Butler revealed that she had lost faith in humanity in a misanthropic manner when her friend was diagnosed with myeloma. On a bus ride she had witnessed a fight between two people that highlighted the lengths human beings will go to in order to establish nonsensical and misconstrued differences that allow us to ignore the individual in front of us and only visualize a nonentity in need of an ass kicking. That experience was the catalyst and inspiration behind “Speech Sounds.” This information spoke volumes about the creative process and how artists construct stories from their experiences. However, if you read closely, you notice the prescience that science fiction authors have. Octavia Butler was in a category with Phillip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke. Able to make predications about the future state of existence and, while off the proverbial mark at times, hit rather close to home. This passage I extracted from “Speech Sounds” immediately led me to associations from Butlers experience and exaggeration of said experience to the current experiences of society under the COVID-19 pandemic. Language and the way we communicate has irrevocably changed under our new conditions. And analogous to “Speech Sounds,” some people have maintained the ability to fluently communicate and others have been reduced to guttural grunts that resemble “intellectual impairment.” When particular demographics of people express feelings of confinement and imprisonment under COVID-19 SAFETY regulations (with the largest possible emphasis on SAFETY) they do it with actions that resemble “chimpanzees” (as Rye noted in “Speech Sounds”). People choose to burn mask’s rather then productively communicate through different methods. A United States Representative called COVID-19 vaccinations the “mark of the beast” (which implies being vaccinated is the mark of Satan). That is the greatest example I could provide of illness causing language to be be “lost or severely impaired.” This U.S. Representative should be followed around by John Williams “The Imperial March” because she is Darth Vader reincarnated, attempting to destroy the galaxy with anti-intellectual rhetoric. All flights into political fancy aside, we should be able to recover our misanthropic feelings through the method that cured Octavia Butler of her initial pessimism; creative works. Ah, mon cher, take a leap into the creative!










