11/30/2023 0 Comments Octavia e butler![]() Butler’s science fiction novels-an alien planet, a destroyed Earth, time travel, and mind control-poems can serve as different planets and galaxies and gateways with its many structures and rhythms and wordplay. And like the many complex worlds and themes of Octavia E. This portrait of her life-in poems, essays, quotations, and photographs-serves as a reminder that certain ideas about our world can be understood simply through rhyme, repetition, meter, and metaphor. Octavia was very much influenced by all that surrounded her-the aftereffects of World War II, the Cold War, space travel, science fiction magazines, the first man on the moon, and even music. "I decided to call this biography a constellation because Octavia’s mind and her imagination were truly complex wonders-bright and far-reaching." “God is change” is repeated throughout her novels in the Parable series. She wanted to convey God in a nursery rhyme, she said. She had written poetry for the first time as a way to explain something greater than ourselves. What if Octavia had written for children? How would she have made some of these big ideas about our world a bit simpler? “Poetry simplifies it,” she said about her novel Parable of the Sower. I imagine there are many young writers who are doing the same. This all began at a young age “to overcome boredom and loneliness,” she once said in an interview. Through pages and pages of articles and hours of listening to her voice and watching her speak during interviews, I discovered that Octavia was extremely passionate about her writing and her stories. I wondered what kind of child Octavia must’ve been to have had such complex thoughts and ideas. She cared intensely about humanity and how we treated one another. She was a deep thinker and wondered about the possible worlds that existed beyond our planet. She even submitted her stories for publication when she found out she could get paid for doing what she loved best. Octavia, like myself, started writing when she was very young. Octavia was kind and generous with her time and she said that she hoped to meet me one day. Much to my delight, her name and number were listed. ![]() Because of this, I called the telephone operator and gave her name and the city she lived in (this was before social media and search engines on the internet). I soon discovered that we shared the very same birthday. I immediately began researching everything about Octavia E. ![]() Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing 'The Water Dancer'.But I watched lots and lots of Twilight Zone episodes-an old black-and-white television series about, well, weird stuff. I didn’t read science fiction back then because I thought they were big books only meant for grown-ups. I felt less alone and less weird because I had been writing these kinds of strange tales since I was a little girl. I had discovered a whole new world of outer space stories, shape-shifting stories, and mind-controlling stories. I read it in a couple of days, and was so amazed by the story that I eventually bought all her books. ![]() I had been taking a creative writing class and my stories were so incredibly strange and otherworldly that a good friend suggested I read Parable of the Sower, Octavia’s tenth novel. Here, Oprah Daily shares an exclusive sneak peak of the forthcoming volume, just in time to say: Happy Birthday Octavia Butler. Now, she has written an ode to her told in poems and prose. Zoboi, who was a National Book Award finalist for her young adult novel American Street, is not just a Butler devotee, but was mentored by the writer. ![]() But the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author who explored themes of gender fluidity, climate change, authoritarianism, and the rise of Big Pharma is perhaps more widely read now than ever, and that phenomenon is destined to grow with the publication Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler by Ibi Zoboi, due out in January of 2022. She would have turned 73 today, June 22, had she not died suddenly in 2006 of a stroke. Octavia Butler was a visionary science fiction writer who predicted the ascension of an American politician who would rise to power with the slogan “Make America Great Again” in her 1998 novel Parable of the Talents. ![]()
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