Finding Estella⇢ an Octavia Butler research pocket

Insomnia III:

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.

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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Erik Söderberg: Fractal Experience part 2