Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction

This message comes from Amazon Pharmacy. Waiting in line at the pharmacy takes time away from anything else you would rather be doing. Amazon Pharmacy delivers meds to you fast. Health hack unlocked. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy, health care just got less painful. Welcome back to ThruLine Book Club. Today, we're talking about one of our favorite authors, Octavia Butler. Does it ever seem to you that there are people among us who hold up the sky and make the rivers flow? People who are just like other people, just like the rest of us, only different. They're the structural beams in the house we all share, the house that has a sky for a roof. And usually they don't wanna call attention to themselves. They just wanna be who they are, do what they do with as little interference as possible. Octavia comes to my mind as first among that group of people. In her books, she showed us the horrors and the great good that humans can create, and the choices that she made in her books and in her life always gave us new ways of seeing. She was a beacon of hope, sometimes even when she wasn't trying. These novels are not prophetic. These novels are cautionary tales. These novels are if we are not careful, you know, if we carry on as we have been, this is what we might wind up with. You have to think about what kind of world you wanna live in, and I don't think there's a person alive who would want to live in the world that I've written about, but we can arrange it. The problems that I write about are problems that we can do something about. That's that's why I write about them. All that you touch, you change. You're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR. All that you change changes you. Will we go back in time? The only lasting truth is change. To understand the present. God is changed. Today, Octavia Butler's World. All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change. I found myself over the years returning to this quote over and over. It helps me so much when change comes and is unexpected, and especially when change comes and is undesired. My name is Adrienne Maree Brown, and I am a writer and an Octavia Butler scholar. Adrienne Maree Brown is one of a growing group of Octavia's, quote, unquote, children writers, thinkers, scholars, activists who see themselves as her spiritual descendants in a way and who look to Octavia Butler as a leader, a guide. In that vein, Adrienne Maree Brown co edited a book called Octavia's Brood, and she co hosts a podcast called Octavia's Parables. I am actually so enthralled with Butler's thinking that I have a tattoo that runs down my left arm, starts up on my shoulder. And it's just my own handwriting. I wrote …