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Citation Practice

Octavia Butler was shy as a child. 

Bloodchild

Summary

The story is set in a world where humans or "Terrans" were outsiders to it's serpent-like inhabitants, the Tlics. The story explains how both races came into agreement where they Terrans would be offered infertile eggs in order to better than health and longevity in return for using terran males has host for the Tlic's maggot-like young. The main character, Gan, was to be the host for T'gatoi's young, who had allowed Gan's mother to have offsprings of her own in exchange for this agreement. Gan later bares witness to a birth gone wrong which further his unwillingness to bare T'gatoi's young to the point of threatening suicide. Gan later agrees to go through with the agreement in order to spare his siblings.

The Evening and the Morning and the Night

Summary

The story takes place in a location at or near the University of southern California where Lynn, a student on a "Dilg scholarship", is attending. Lynn is afflicted with DGD or Duryea-Gode disease, a fictional disease where its victim seems drift from awareness of their surroundings, often times turning violent or give into self-mutilating/suicidal tendencies if not acting towards a specific purpose. Lynn is also daughter to parents who both have DGD and eventually succumb to the nature of the disease. Having both parents who had DGD, the group behind the Dilg retreat, a retreat for sufferers of DGD, had interest invested in her and her friend Alan. Shortly after arriving to said retreat, they are told how their out of the blue scholarships came to be. They eventually come to trust Beatrice, a doctor working in DIlg retreat, who explains to them that there is hope for DGD victims, and it doesn't require drugs or horrible quality of life.

Quotes

• "It's their way of denying us credit for our work."
• "you don't want to [trust us], but you do."

Speech Sounds

Summary

In a post-apocalyptic Los Angels, a woman named Rye starts her story on a bus which later breaks down, which eventually turns into violent chaos. A man in police uniform, who is later named Obsidian, arrives to attempt to restore order and later offers Rye a ride in his car in an attempt to help. Rye after a while, takes Obsidian up on his offer, later she realizes Obsidian can still read as well as read maps. After learning this, Rye struggles with an immense amount of jealousy and the thought of killing Obsidian over said jealousy. She later reveals to him that she can speak, unlike her, Obsidian's envy comes and goes. She later convinces him to go home with her. On there way, they come across a man chasing a woman with a knife, they both pull over to intervene, however the woman is shortly after stabbed to death. After injuring the assailant, Obsidian is later shot by him and is instantly killed, and shortly after that , Rye kills the assailant as well. Finally she encounters two children who seem to be immune to disease going around and introduces herself.

Book of Martha

Summary

The protagonist, Martha, starts off in a grey area with who she comes to realize, is God. She begins to think she is dead due to the fact that the last thing she recalls, was working on her novels. God later explains to Martha that she is not dead and that God has a task for Martha; one she can not refuse. God emphasizes on the importance of the stories of Job, Jonah, and Noah, which helps Martha realize that she really has no other choice. Martha is later troubled by God's casual attitude towards the affairs and hardships of human kind, and she is also trouble by the lack of understand of why God would chose her in the first place instead of God doing the work himself. Although God's task seems unreasonable to Martha, God offers her guidance, free to make her will be done, free to ask questions and infinite time. Through the questions Martha uses to probe God and the task at hand, she learns that no matter how much good intentions were behind her ideas, there would always be consequences, consequences that could very well extinguish human existence. Martha eventually comes to a decision and believes the way to bring about change in humans, is through their dreams, which experiences are unique for every individual, thus mitigating the risk and/or severity of negative consequences. In order to avoid regret and despair, she asks for God to rid her of any memory of their meeting and Martha's actions.

• "If it were truly a cage," God said, "you would still be in it, and I would still look the way I did when you first saw me." pg 210
• "That kind of thinking is part of what it means to be adolescent." pg 211
• "But whatever you do, your decisions will have consequences." pg 200

Amnesty

Summary

The setting takes place in what is most likely, the Mojave desert in California, where Fungi-like extraterrestrials called communities, have made a colony, or bubble, for some time. as the main character Noah is given a task to calm new human recruits to work for the Communities, because of how horrible the economy is for the humans. Although these recruits are in the pursuit of income from the Communities, they harbor a lot of resentment towards the Communities, as they had settled on planet earth, taken over their economy and conducted horrendous experiments, much like what we do to laboratory animals. Although an understand has been established between the communities and the human race, many are still unfavorable of the Communities, the new recruits especially, and find Noah questionable once she reveals that she was abducted by the Communities and underwent extreme hardships during her captivity, but she also explained why her captivity brought on by fellow humans, was far worse. She finally somewhat convinces the new recruits to accept their situation and to focus on their employment as the issue of the Communities settling on planet earth, was a hopeless cause that only time could fix.

• "The only difference between the way they treated me and the way the aliens treated me during the early years of my captivity was that the so-called human beings knew when they were hurting me."
• "They haven't asked for my forgiveness and I wouldn't know how to give it if they did. And that doesn't matter. It doesn't stop me from doing my job. It doesn't stop them from employing me"

Butler's Biography

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in June 22, 1947 to parents Octavia Margaret Guy and Laurice James Butler. Octavia Butler was raised in a female dominant house hold comprised of her mother and grand mother, due to the fact that her father had died when she was seven years old. Butler grew up in Pasadena, California, which was culturally diverse amidst the segregation era. Butler would often accompany her mother, who was a house maid, and would witness the disrespect shown to her mother by white holds, thus coming to experience the type of racism which was common in those times. Her mother would salvage magazines and books from her workplace for Butler to read and spark her interest at a young age. Due to her shyness and awkwardness growing up and being a target for other children, she sought the public library as a means to escape or immerse her self in something other than the torment she faced at school. Although her interest in writing was affected by her aunt's advice that people of color could not be writers, she persevered and sought out one of her teacher to publish one of her works in a science fiction magazine. Butler's ambition of becoming a writer finally took off when she attended a workshop for the Screenwriters of America and caught the interest of a known science fiction writer, Harlan Ellison, who encouraged her to partake in another 6 week workshop. Butler would then continue to establish her network in the science fiction writing community and produce well recieved novels and eventually being awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Butler eventually put a hold on her writing due to her worsening health and eventually passed away on February 24, 2006.

• Gant-Britton, Lisbeth. "Butler, Octavia (1947– )." African American Writers. Ed. Valerie Smith. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001
• "Butler, Octavia 1947–2006." Black Literature Criticism: Classic and Emerging Authors since 1950. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2008

Octavia Butler's Aha moment

Octavia Butler's Aha moment was an autobiographical essay submitted to Oprah magazine, by Octavia Butler. The type of source would be that of a magazine. The essay illustrates a good amount of Butler's past, Butler starts off by introducing the setting of her early childhood. Though it does not explain religious or racist experiences, the essay does inform us that Butler grew up poor and raised by her single mother. It also explains what Butler's mother did for a living, which makes it a valuable source for the beginning of my research paper as it deals with Butler's past. As the title suggests, Butler introduces to us what she believes gave her the early inspiration for her writing, and this takes places with her interaction with Baba the dog, and later a Chimpanzee at the zoo during a class trip. Her curiosity with Baba eventually turned into a realization that Baba was someone, just like any other person, this thought further manifested withing Butler during her encounter with the Chimpanzee at the zoo. Butler notes that eyes were a way for her to get an idea of what the other person (or living being) is feeling, she states that what she saw was the "eyes of an unhappy animal". The conditions in which the Chimpanzee was in, caged to be more specific, lead Butler to discover what she truly hated, not just cages but metaphoric ones. What she labels as metaphoric cages, are the ones we humans make for ourselves, cages of "race, gender, or class". This information within her essay is also very useful for my paper because it shows Butler's early discovery of what can be interpreted as " the haves and have nots". One can draw this conclusion by examining how Butler saw the Chimpanzee; a less fortunate living being who was being held captive and oppressed by humans; in other words a worker who received next to nothing in pay and was constantly oppressed by those above him, a topic very closely related to Marxism.

Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler

In Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler, Gregory Jerome Hampton explains how the "The Book of Martha" strongly focuses on religion and how it "polices the borders of social value and disvalue" (Hampton84). It also explains how the degendering of god within "The book of Martha" is evidence of the inequality in the perception of God by society. Hampton examines how Butler's fiction is able to cross several genre boundaries while simultaneously reshaping the genre of science fiction. Hampton also goes on to suggest that Butler writes to encourage minorities to question society's approach to labeling groups by color, class and gender.

Utopian Studies

in Utopian studies, Claire P. Curtis explains how most of Octavia Butler's writing deals with the realism side of her dystopian settings. She focuses on stories like "Speech sounds", "Kindred", and the like. "This paper uses two of the last short stories that Butler wrote for publication, "Amnesty" and "The Book of Martha," to exemplify Butler's rewriting of authority and her engagement with classical political realist ideology." (Curtis). She explains how Butler morphs these dystopia settings into her own "realist utopia:. Curtis present ways "in which Butler creates a realist utopia out of an initial overlap with political realism as understood by Hobbes."