Finding Estella⇢ an Octavia Butler research pocket

Why Estella? Octavia E. Butler often went by her middle name, Estelle, and often as Estella, to differentiate herself from her mother, whose name she shared!

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https://twitter.com/thecriticalis/status/712970717260824576

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Fund us and vote for #octaviabutler (or something else of course!)

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Junot Diaz on nerd culture and our place within it.

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This is from an interview he did Fanbros podcast. It’s the best episode of one my favorite casts. I recommend finding it on iTunes or stitcher and giving it a listen.

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also relevant for harry potter (cuz who else gets told ” she’s brilliannt for a muggleborn ) and hunger games, and plenty of episodes of doctor woh

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This is a talk I gave on Octavia Butler at the American Studies Association conference in November 2014. As you can see from the title, it covers a lot. It's a survey of ideas, with some comments on the difference between afrofuturism and astrofuturism. Most of my discussion on Butler comes at the end!

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Insomnia III:

The great Dame of science fiction gives 13 wonderful tips on writing. High School kids should check out #3 and 5 in particular.

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"I recently met a Black teenager who told me she didn’t like to read. And I said, “But there are so many great books out there and many of them are being made into movies. Did you see The Hunger Games?” And she had. After we parted ways I thought to myself, “What do Black girls do when they’re watching The Hunger Games? Do they identify with Katniss more than Rue?" I thought of Jacqueline Bobo and her work on Black women as cultural readers. So many of us walk into the theater knowing that Hollywood is going to screw us over. And so we’re already prepared to navigate around stereotypes and extract meaning from the film."

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"It is quite baffling that one of the most celebrated sci-fi authors of our time (and not just black authors - of all sci-fi authors), has yet to see a single one of her novels adapted to film, given how adaptation-happy Hollywood is, especially in recent years."

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I’m going to expand a little bit on why I’m rooting for this movie to get made. bulleted for your viewing pleasure:

The author of this book is Octavia Butler.  If you don’t know who Octavia Butler is, well, she was a black, queer, writer of sci-fi/speculative fiction, whose work is absolutely singular for the award-winning womanist and afrofuturist renderings. Even after her untimely death, she still remains a titan of the genre. She is my favorite writer.

The director who is desperately trying to raise money to make this happen is Ernest Dickerson, the cinematographer behind those gorgeously filmed Spike Lee movies (Do The Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, and Malcolm X) and a director of some of your favorite TV shows  including Dexter, The Wire, The Vampire Diaries, Sleepy Hollow, and The Walking Dead.

The protagonists are subjects you never see in mainstream movies, an interracial family.

The challenges presented are morally oblique, which always makes the best sci-fi. There is no one right or wrong answer here; just examination and choices.

This for me is sci-fi for the future.  It’s not about a white guy saving the world or being persecuted by the world. Nor is it about a white girl in a tight space suit firing a laser-gun. It’s about people dealing with some imaginative futuristic challenges. It’s brutal, and hopeful, and frightening.

I hope with every fiber of my being that this gets made.   

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Octavia Butler’s Message to the Grassroots - COLORLINES

A group of progressive organizers want to take Octavia Butler’s lessons from the page and into the streets.

“A lot of our movements are shaped defensively, necessarily,” Brown says. “It can be easy to set our dreams only on the horizon of what seems possible in circumstances largely controlled by oppressive systems. It feels like radical work to actually stretch our imaginations and recenter ourselves in the long arc of what we need to survive.”

Now, the focus is on the thousands of dollars raised for the anthology and writing workshops. “Octavia did this, gave us a blueprint of a right-wing America, an alien colonization, and more,” says Brown. “What are the scenarios we need to familiarize our minds with before they happen? It feels like a way we take explicit responsibility for the future.”

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Have been thinking a great deal about the politics of the imagination and how people begin to envision a better world; really fascinated to see activists so openly embrace creative work as a critical part of their organizing not divoriced from a broader political praxis

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Erik Söderberg: Fractal Experience part 2

My Amp Goes To 11: Twitter | Instagram

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Open Road media, the publisher for Octavia Butler’s “new” Unexpected Stories, has put together this excellent video for the book. Includes an awesome Samuel R. Delaney siting!

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"The world of science fiction is one of possibilities. Afrofuturism is a cultural movement that increasingly reflects the current mood of optimism about the political and economic future of the continent. This, as I’ve discovered, is an important genre. That more young African women such as Beukes, Wahiu and Okorafor are joining, and even leading the ranks is not only exciting but also necessary. If one of the central claims of Afrofuturism is the ability to reclaim the past, this will then be a movement that will give expression to the political, cultural and artistic aspirations and frustrations of a new generation of young African women."

--Panashe Chigumadzi, “Girls of Afrofuturism: The future is in our past”

(h/t  Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network)

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Opened a folder, and there were some pictures that I *think* never got published. Trying to track down the photographer now...

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In my article in The Root, I note how Butler had to push back against very experienced writers who wanted her to “write  black.”

In this snippet, Octavia Butler is letting off steam in one of the many drafts of her original afterword to “Childfinder,” a story that has been recently released in Unexpected Stories.

Even though she understood that her mentors were doing their best to help her sell— and obviously missing the emotional havoc wrought by their suggestions— Butler stood firm, and was eventually proven correct in her decision to follow her own writerly vision.

We can also catch a hint of emotional need: “I write so I won’t have to look.” This is particularly striking, and somewhat contradictory, since in other notes Butler attests that the setting for “Childfinder” mirrored one of her own early homes. Clearly, she looked.

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Octavia Butler Fans Psyched Over 2 New Science Fiction Tales, by Marisa Parham

Stop by TheRoot.com to check out my review article about the two new Octavia Butler stories released this week! 

It’s an extraordinary discovery for fans of the late science fiction writer, with new stories being published this week.