Otherworldly Vision

OCTAVIA BUTLER

Octavia Butler's eleventh novel, Parable of the Talents (Seven Stories Press, $24.95), is the much-anticipated sequel to her 1996 book Parable of the Sower. The new tale follows an epic journey by Lauren Olamina, an early-twenty-first-century African-American who has survived the loss of her family and the destruction of her southern California community by drug-crazed homeless gangs.

These marauders are the most visible threat on the American landscape of 2030. A right-wing religious zealot is in the White House, and the economy has disintegrated. The haves cocoon themselves in walled enclaves.

Olamina, a homeless poet and visionary, founds a new community and way of life that outlive her through her writings in Earthseed: The First Book of the Living. We learn of her through her journals--collected by her only child--long after she is dead. The girl, Larkin, was separated from her mother in infancy.

Butler, 51, a best-selling author long popular on the science-fiction circuit, is gaining cult status among Black readers. ESSENCE talked to her about the genre of which she is a modern master:

ESSENCE: What draws people who aren't hooked on science fiction to your work?

OCTAVIA BUTLER: Too many science-fiction writers extrapolate just from science. I'm extrapolating from what we are right now as human beings and how we are likely to deal with becoming something different, with dramatic change. My characters don't suddenly get new powers. They stay human in the sense that aliens don't come to help them, magic doesn't suddenly work, nobody develops telepathy or anything like that. Sometimes my characters have to work with less than they may have been used to, because that is reality. We're a lot more likely to get sick or have an accident and lose something than develop abilities no one ever had before.

ESSENCE: In creating this catastrophic world of the near future, you seem to be taking social-policy mistakes we are now making to their logical conclusion--whether it's abandoning education, our environment or roads and other facilities, and letting them go to hell,

BUTLER: That's exactly what I did. I paid a lot of attention to the news. When I say the news, I mean trends--the things that matter. What Olamina has to do in the end is learn to work within the system, which is a pretty nasty lesson to learn, when you think about it. But it was what was there, and it's a heck of a lot easier to deal with what's there than to try to reinvent your universe.

ESSENCE: Why are literacy and maintaining a sense of history such important Earthseed values?

BUTLER: Today we seem to be forgetting that a nation is a community of communities. If we forget that, then we start tearing things apart that make the communities work. Too many people look at what's going to do them good right this instant; they don't look one step further ahead. That's why one of the worst "sins" in Earthseed is lack of forethought.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group