The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler

Gregory J. Hampton, Kendra R. Parker, Gregory J. Hampton, Kendra R. Parker

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350079656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Octavia E. Butler is widely recognized today as one of the most important figures in contemporary science fiction. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering Butler's complete works from the bestselling novel Kindred, to her short stories and major novel sequences Patternmaster, Xenogenesis and The Parables, this is the most comprehensive Companion to Butler scholarship available today. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including: · Cyborgs and the posthuman
· Race and African American history
· Afrofuturism
· Gender and sexuality
· New perspectives from Religious Studies, the Environmental Humanities and Disability Studies
· New discoveries from the Butler archives at the Huntington Library The book includes a comprehensive bibliography of works by Butler and secondary scholarship on her work as well as an afterword by the novelist Tananarive Due.

PART ONE

Dawn

CHAPTER ONE

What Octavia E. Butler Feared Most about Human Nature

STEVEN BARNES

I am not sure, but I might have been introduced to her by Harlan Ellison at Phoenix Worldcon (“Iguanacon”) in 1978. Just in passing. Over the years I would encounter her at science fiction conventions and book signings, but it wasn’t until I moved back to my childhood home near the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles that we really got to know each other. She lived on West Boulevard in the left half of a duplex, and it was walking distance from my late mother’s house, so we began to get together for dinner, and as she did not drive I would sometimes provide transportation to some of her functions: signings and research outings. We shared a special bond. At that time, the amazing Samuel R. Delaney (who I definitely met in 1978 at that convention) had retired from the science fiction field, so Octavia and I were the only people of color, certainly the only black Americans we knew of in the field. It was unspeakably lonely, and we found comfort in connection and shared experience.

On many, many evenings I sat in her living room with its crowded bookshelves and talked writing, research, life, politics, publishing, race, gender … every conceivable subject. I noticed that she tended to ground her opinions of humanity in her biological research. Did that make her a strict sociobiologist or biological determinist? Not at all. But she did see our behavior on a continuum with animal and particularly Primate behavior. And because of that, there were two things about human beings that disturbed her:

1. That human beings tended to be hierarchical

2. That they tended to place themselves and their tribes higher on that hierarchy than others.

What does this mean? Well … there are two different basic ways human beings look at the world to understand it. They look at what is similar (water and oil are both wet) and what is different (water evaporates, oil does not). We take this and create hierarchies of pain and pleasure. This is necessary to survive in the natural world: a rattlesnake is dangerous, a coral snake more so. A mushroom is edible, an avocado is more nourishing. And so forth. Combine this with the natural tendency for children to think their mommy is the prettiest, their dog the smartest, their daddy the strongest … and you have the beginnings of tribalism.

We are different from you.

We are also better than you.

Therefore, we have the right to take what is yours, and/or control or exterminate you.

She talked about something called an “emergent” property, a small thing which, repeated over many actions, has large consequences. For instance, an ant might have a genetically encoded instruction to “remove a grain of sand from here and place it there.” Any individual ant doing this is meaningless. But a colony of ants doing this creates a complex and beautiful network of tunnels. Tiny individual tendencies multiplied across thousands or millions of interactions over lifetimes create the kind of dangerous, intractable sexism and racism that Octavia saw as the building blocks of Armageddon. Once you believe others are less than you, you can push them toward the Uncanny Valley, where they no longer seem wholly human:

“They don’t feel pain the way we do.”

“They don’t love their children as we do.”

“They don’t value human life the way we do.”

Excuses for murder. And what is even worse, justifications not merely to perform an action but to celebrate yourself for damaging others. “Manifest Destiny.” “White Man’s Burden” and so forth. Why, God wants us to kill/rape/torture/steal … for the good of those poor sons of bitches we are actually screwing over. Conscience clear, you can do anything you want. Allelujah, allelujah.

She would watch the current rise of “Incels” and think that they were hierarchical males who are failing at climbing the hierarchy and blaming women who are beating them at their own game. They cannot adjust and are blaming the world for their own failings. Their anger diminishes their sense of a woman’s humanity, until she is an object to be used, not a “person” to be respected. I suspect she would watch the rise of Trump as a symptom of an entire culture tainted with the same moral bacterium one finds infecting Incels: a sense of entitlement, an inability to cope with a shifting cultural landscape, a fear of loss of control leading to a sense that “they” are destroying “the natural order” whether “they” are a different color, sexual orientation, or of another nationality.

Emergent social qualities, compounded over years and generations, fear mutating into anger, anger shutting down rational consideration of things like experience, courtesy, ethics, and social ties. I suspect she would have considered the election of Trump as the greatest political Hail Mary pass in American political history, a desperate move by people who see power slipping away from them, who set up a game to benefit their own children and are seething that it is benefitting others. I am sure that she would have a lot to say, and think about him, and where we are in America right now.

I wish I could have had that conversation with her. But … she left us her thoughts. And she taught us to see beyond surfaces, to embrace the humanity in the inhuman, to stand together against injustice, to create family and hold against the night. To surf on the chaos.

“All that you touch, you change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”

The forces of evil, and weakness and fear, will lose. You cannot rail against the tide: it continues to come in. But … you can learn to surf on it. And in embracing that change, we are worshipping the divine. Octavia is with that divine now … and all we need to do is put our fears aside and embrace the chaos of existence, and we can hear her voice anew.

CHAPTER TWO

“I want to live forever and breed people!”: The Legacy of a Fantasy

HEATHER THAXTER

“I want to live forever and breed people!” (Kenan 499). This childhood fantasy expressed by Octavia Estelle Butler in the mid-twentieth century has a distinct currency in our contemporary technological environment. As is the case with many authors of science fiction, Butler’s narratives are portents of future realities, and her formative writing could serve as a blueprint for the work of artificial intelligence researcher and mathematician Ben Goertzel. His formulation of a Patternist treatise: the convergence of science, technology, mystic religion, and philosophy includes the somewhat controversial hypotheses of cybernetic telepathic communication and physiological immortality. However, it is the premise of Patternist philosophy that “a mind is thus a collection of patterns that is associated with a persistent dynamical process that achieves highly-patterned goals in highly-patterned environments” (Goertzel “Patternism”) that is particularly germane to offering an original interpretation of Butler’s work. The palimpsestic nature of Butler’s oeuvre reveals emergent patterns resulting from a core premise that intelligence and hierarchal behavior are the defining characteristics of humanity. Intuitively, we recognize these characteristics as part of the pattern of our daily lives, but Butler views this combination as contradictory and problematic. Butler’s consistent reworking of this theme demonstrates a highly choreographed attempt to change readers’ mind-sets, thereby initiating her childhood fantasy of living forever and breeding people, albeit in a literary sense. The application of Patternist philosophy to Butler’s work of the same name, the Patternist series (1976–1984), reveals other commonalities which emerge from the endeavor to attain highly patterned goals in the highly patterned environment of the mind.

The highly patterned environments that Butler created were inspired by her passionate interest in social power (patterns of behavior) and biogenetics (patterns of genomes) and suggest a desire to repattern nonfictional environments. Butler recognizes that as patterns form the basis of what she refers to as “body knowledge” (genetics and biology), they also form the basis of sociological inference which engenders hierarchies (Francis 108). By deconstructing the agency of the body within cultural perceptions of hierarchy, Butler highlights such flawed deterministic reasoning thus provoking debate about the very nature of humanity. Considering the human inclination toward patternistic behavior, she presents what would seem to be the solution: hierarchies of cognitive superiority connected by a telepathic network. Advances in understanding the brain’s plasticity, as well as Carol Dweck’s psychological studies in growth mind-set, support the potentiality for reprogramming arbitrary hierarchies based on embodiment. The architecture of the mind employs different cognitive models that conceptually manipulate its external environment to produce any given reality (Gardner et al. 11). Therefore, if the external environment were to include literal access to other minds, the prospect of attaining an egalitarian society could be facilitated. In her first published series of novels, Butler uses the motif of telepathic ability as the determinant of hierarchal status to explore whether that would be the case.

The dystopic plot of the Patternist series (1976–1984) is driven by the evolution of humans with telepathic abilities who are eventually bound in a psychic network known as the “pattern” and controlled by a succession of Patternmasters. The ensuing power struggles extend to the telepaths’ interaction with and dominance over non-telepathic humans ultimately pushing humanity’s chances of survival to the brink. The series consists of five novels: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984). Significantly, the Patternist narratives were neither written nor published in the chronological order of the evolution of the Patternist race and also function as stand-alone novels. Butler progressively built back stories as she got to know each character more intimately in her mind. Rather than hinder the reader’s understanding of the Patternist universe, it reflects the structure of each individual narrative, whereby Butler employs analepsis as an effective form of pattern building. After being provided with digestible segments of the characters’ contexts, the reader is then taken backwards into their biographies with incremental explanations as to how they arrived at their present situation. Particularly evident in Survivor and Clay’s Ark, this narrative strategy compels the reader to question their own perspectives and assumptions about the hierarchal power structures that influence decisions which can ultimately determine survival. Both protagonists, Alanna (Survivor) and Eli (Clay’s Ark), are faced with the unpalatable knowledge that their individual strategies for survival call into question their self-perception of their own humanity. In both novels, the protagonists reside as outsiders within communities that are separated from the general population further highlighting the complexities of hierarchies. By moving the focus away from the invisible cognitive changes which facilitate telepathy, the narratives of Survivor and Clay’s Ark present a subtext of the primarily religious indictment against outwardly observable physical alterations to the human body which, in these particular cases, result from encounters with extraterrestrials. Although these subplots of the Patternists’ history problematize the agency of physical embodiment as an indicator of humanity, a clear message emerges that when the unseen aspects of embodiment such as cognitive and sensory functions are altered they undermine the concept of humanity in a more sinister way. The attainment of superhuman abilities does little to eradicate the desire for power; those in a position of strength are powerful by default and power that is occultist in nature is decidedly more threatening.

Wild Seed provides an exposition of the emergence of Doro, a shape-shifting immortal ancient whose lifework is to perfect a race of selectively bred telepaths. His journey through the ages in different bodies draws attention to the power struggles that are evident across cultures. Doro and the female immortal Anyanwu, also called Emma, often use bodies from the hegemonic classes to serve their own agendas as they travel from country to country, thus identifying the role that physical embodiment plays even within a telepathic community. However, the real power struggles are played out within the internal network of the Pattern (for the sake of clarity, from here on in I will distinguish this pattern by capitalizing it). As this hierarchy is dependent upon mental ability (including the power of healing), non-telepaths, or “mutes,” are effectively enslaved without their knowledge and serve as the labor force. The idea of psychological mind control and voicelessness has obvious allusions to the African American experience historically and contemporaneously: Butler famously said, “I write about power because I have so little” (qtd. in Canavan 3). However, rather than removing the arbitrary power relations evident in all of human society in the narrative of a telepathic network, Butler seeks to dissect the underlying patterns of programming which produce the status quo. As such programming is formulated in the mind, her exploration focuses on gaining insight into the mechanics of this largely mysterious human control center, especially through the hypothetical context of mind-to-mind communication.

It is noteworthy not only that Butler began writing the Patternist narrative during adolescence, but that this period of transition plays a pivotal role throughout the series’ narrative. During adolescence, ontological changes in neurobiological sensitivity as well as social context greatly influence decision-making and behavioral patterns, often with adverse outcomes (Schriber and Guyer). Butler’s prescient focus on neural plasticity, articulated through the context of transitioning adolescent telepaths in socially dysfunctional environments, does more than highlight the heightened physiological and emotional susceptibility of premature adults. The account of the onset of Mary’s transition in Mind of My Mind provides an insight into how such sensitivity is triggered by ontological changes:

Something in the girl’s expanding ability had changed. Suddenly she was no longer passively absorbing the usual ambient mental noise. She was unwittingly reaching out for it, drawing it to her. The last fragments of what Doro called her childhood shield—the mental protection that served young actives until they were old enough to stand transition—was crumbling away. She was in transition. (45)

This description of Mary’s adolescent transition into an active telepath resonates with the concept of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), whereby electromagnetic currents affect electrical signals in the brain for the purpose of manipulating physiological responses (OHBA “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation”). Similarly, the “childhood shield” works in the same way a conductor reroutes lines of magnetic flux around a magnetic-sensitive object, and once it is removed the magnetic fields terminate on the opposing poles; the mental noise (thought patterns) of others is attracted by Mary’s mental noise in the same way. This receptivity facilitates emotional changes in Mary’s neural pathways as her husband Karl realizes during his mental contact with her. She is exposed to “other people’s raw emotions. And now he realized that when he let himself get caught up in those emotions, he was standing in the middle of an open pathway” (Survivor 51). Interestingly, Peter Enticott’s recent experimental research involving adolescents suffering from brain disorders shows how emotional receptivity is enhanced when TMS is employed which is essentially what is happening to Mary but without the technology.

The parallels between Butler’s twentieth-century fiction and nascent neuroscience are astonishing and can be read as analogous to the unique anatomical structure of the adolescent brain. Galvan suggests this period of hyperactivation of the brain’s neural networks and associated hyperresponsivity to the environment be viewed as a window of opportunity to positively influence individual behavior (263). If there was an optimal time to reprogram hierarchal behavior then this would be it, when the brain acts like a cognitive magnet. Doro’s reference to the formation of a new shield during transition (Mind of My Mind 143) indicates a time of vulnerability wherein the protective childhood shield fragments, thereby temporarily opening a channel that exposes the individual ...