Further Reading

Podcast Episode

adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon, ‘Parable of the Sower: Chapter 1’, Octavia’s Parables [LINK]

Octavia Butler scholars adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon discuss Parable of the Sower chapter by chapter. They read Butler’s books in the context of twenty first century political struggles and ask what she can teach activists working for better worlds today.

Magazine Article

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, ‘When Goddesses Change’, hoodedutilitarian.com (2014) [LINK]

Activist and writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs reflects on her relationship with Octavia Butler, on Butler’s experience as a Black, feminist science fiction author and on the changing significance of her writing.

Academic Article

Chriss Sneed, ‘Apocalypse, Afrofutures, and Theories of “the Living” beyond Human Rights: Octavia E. Butler’s Parable Series’ in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler (2020) pp. 181-200. [LINK]

Chriss Sneed discusses Parable of the Sower alongside its sequel Parable of the Talents (1998). They write about how afrofuturist narratives like Butler’s can help readers to challenge a human rights framework in which Black people are always measured against a presumed white norm.

Academic Book

Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021) [LINK]

Jayna Brown places Octavia Butler in a tradition of Black utopian writing and music. She sees this tradition as importantly distinct from dominant, white forms of utopianism, arguing that writers like Butler put a greater emphasis on rejecting reality all together.

Background Reading

Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, editors, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003) [LINK]

This is a book which argued that the late twentieth century had seen a rise in a new kind of dystopia, distinct from the classical dystopias of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. It contains essays on Butler’s earlier novels as well as the writing of many of her contemporaries.