1/1/2024 0 Comments Octavia butler shirtFiction, speculative fiction especially, has long been a way for people with and without institutional power to share paradigm shifting, society-bending ideas - those that imagine worlds without prisons, worlds of slave revolt, worlds of exquisite and unquestioned gender and sexual queerness. That Black people have been talking about and imagining space exploration through speculative fiction is extremely un-corny. Or Steven Barnes talking about Grendel in space. Or Rivers Solomon talking about an outer space plantation ship. And there was nothing corny about Samuel Delany talking about galaxies of genderqueer space. This is why there was nothing corny about Octavia Butler explicitly visioning a world in which a Black woman is leading space exploration. Movement organizers know this deeply - the work of building a political movement is the work of building human relationships. It’s about how the Creature responds to having been made. Speculative fiction writers have known this since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein: the novel isn’t about how Frankenstein makes his Creature. There is nothing esoteric about organizing human behavior in response to new and challenging environments, resources and constraints - which is also what space exploration (and ultimately, life in space) is about, when it’s not being about spaceships and physics. Without intervention, the possibilities and parameters of space exploration will be defined by and for the very rich, or at least, the very elite. It shouldn’t be. Wealthy white men are establishing a space exploration program in which private companies vie to control the territory, with precisely zero regulations about how this program will go on to shape humanity's future in space. State run companies like NASA in the U.S., Roscosmos in Russia and the ESA in Europe increasingly rely on private companies for space flight. Upon hearing about the discovery of phosphine on Venus in August - which suggests the possibility of life - Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck vowed to launch the first (private) flight to Venus. This summer billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX beat out billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic to become the first private company to send humans into orbit. But the landscape (spacescape?) outside of Earth looks different. On Earth, Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx organizers and activists around the world are leading movements to combat the root causes of these catastrophes: white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. Meanwhile, in real life, the global death toll from the coronavirus nears one million historic wildfires burn the Western United States and Canada while tropical storms flood the South and the United States is under the catastrophic mismanagement of a President who also promised to make America great again. Spoiler alert: her followers end up moving to space. Her goal? To get them to join her religion, Earthseed, the foundational tenet of which is that humans should start a new society amongst the stars. As she flees from a burned and dry Los Angeles and the politics of a violently conservative Presidential candidate promising to “make America great again” (distressingly prescient!), Lauren Olamina organizes the people she meets. Specifically, it leads us into outer space through a movement shaped by the novel’s protagonist: a revolutionary Black woman. And Butler’s vision led us straight into outer space. And while I’d hate to be reading the book for the first time right now - it’s too distressingly prescient - I am grateful that we have Butler’s vision. This September, it made the New York Times Bestsellers list - a first for Butler, though she was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” award, and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards throughout her career. Published in 1993, Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, is enjoying a surge in readership. Like so much else in Butler’s Parable series, it’s directly relevant to movements being led by Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latinx people today. I always thought the part in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower where a Black revolutionary organizer wants to lead Black and brown people to space was corny. If you’re interested in sharing your opinion on any cultural, political or personal topic, create an account here and check out our how-to post to learn more.
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