Kindle Notes & Highlights
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August 24 - August 31, 2025
“SF looks ahead. But since some of the most forward looking writers do not value characterization—or simply cannot create strong, believable characters, much highly imaginative sf is still run by puppets and stereotypes.”
Essence magazine even published the first chapter of Wild Seed.
Being a progressive pioneer is hard. Octavia holds the distinction of being the first well-known Black woman to write speculative fiction almost exclusively.
In May 1977, Star Wars was released and soon became a global fan phenomenon. Octavia was bemused by the movie’s popularity; she enjoyed the theater-going experience but found Star Wars fun if not a bit trite.
Although speculative fiction might imagine possible futures or invite us to reimagine the past, it is fundamentally about the present. As Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us, “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”
Before, during, and after working on Wild Seed, Octavia was embroiled in another major creative project called Blindsight—a supernatural thriller about the rise of a cult with a charismatic leader.
I first read Wild Seed in college for an upper-level course called Slavery and the Literary Imagination. I had to get permission to enroll because I was only a sophomore.
In Octavia’s works community is often an antidote to the alienation mischaracterized as rugged individualism in the West. Octavia noted: “My character Anyanwu at one point actually says that she makes communities around herself. All of my characters are in a community like Lauren in Parable of the Sower, or they create one; she does that, too. My own feeling is that human beings need to live that way and we too often don’t.”
He symbolizes the logics of chattel slavery and imperialism, constantly consuming and extracting bodies, people, land, and resources. It is this logic that undergirds the behavior that precipitated Western imperialism, a centuries-long extractive project that has led to our current climate chaos.
“What I hope to wind up with in my work are series of shadings that correspond to the way concepts like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ enter into the real world—never absolute, always by degrees. In my novels, generally everybody wins and loses something—Wild Seed is probably the best illustration of that—because as I see it, that’s pretty much the way the world is.”
“I am not ordinary! I am not some damn nothing writer, some shlep who spends her whole life writing and being ignored and shat on and used and made to feel she ought to be grateful for the fucking privilege. I am so incredibly tired of being passed over while writers of less ability telling stories that don’t entertain as well or read as smoothly rake in the gravy.”
The story, with its mysterious illness and the resulting breakdown in society, is a cautionary tale about contemporary miscommunication, how easy it can be for human beings to go from being sophisticated communicators to brute animals ready to tear one another apart.
The novel asks: Are we still human if a disease or pandemic fundamentally alters us? Are we still human if our bodies are changed such that we are quadrupeds rather than bipeds? Are we still human if we are mostly guided by biology rather than culture? Are we still human if we transgress human taboos like incest and cannibalism? What does this all mean for humanity?
even for a writer who never shied away from violence. Much of this had to do with Octavia’s state of mind when she was writing the novel. A series of losses filled her with impotent rage, which spills onto its pages. “When a friend and a relative were both dying of cancer,” she wrote, “when another, anorexic and bulimic, was killing herself slowly, when people I loved in general seemed to be doing very badly, I wrote some of the most violent prose I’ve ever written.”89 Her home was also burglarized twice in the space of a few months, leaving her feeling exposed and scared.
When interviewers or fans would ask Octavia what inspired the Xenogenesis novels, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, she would point them to a specific moment in Ronald Reagan’s presidency. His description of a potential “winnable” and “limited” nuclear war got Octavia thinking: “I thought there must be something basic, something really genetically wrong with us if we’re falling for this stuff. And I came up with these characteristics.”
She would later call these characteristics the “Human Contradiction”: “That’s when I began to think about human beings having the two conflicting characteristics of intelligence and a tendency toward hierarchal behavior—and that hierarchal behavior is too much in charge, too self-sustaining.”
Octavia was born in 1947, just two years after the end of World War II. She came of age during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Her whole adult life had been in the shadow of the Cold War. The idea of a “winnable” nuclear war was simply unfathomable and to suggest otherwise was ludicrous.
For Octavia, Reagan was a vacuous blowhard, the “ultimate triumph of form over function” who negatively influenced an already susceptible public with impunity.
She mused that people, not nuclear war, were the problem, because of our “hierarchical thinking (greed, xenophobia), anger, short-sightedness, and tendency to romanticize and glamorize war, to perceive war as manly and thus desirable while portraying peace as coward[ly], effeminate, unrealistic[ly] foolish and impossible.”
Writing was the center of her life. In a 1985 journal entry she declares, “work is love made visible. Work is worship.”
“the return to school was such a blow to my ego—and my self-righteousness. There I could see my own intellectual inadequacies magnified and spotlighted . . . I had forgotten what a disastrously bad student I was—even when I did well. I had forgotten all the futility and depression and effort—working so hard to do what others did quickly and easily, inventing tricks to help. Tricks that couldn’t help in math and science classes.”
Outside of the science fiction peers she saw at conventions, corresponded with, and occasionally hung out with, no one in her day-to-day life truly understood how monumental it was, for instance, to win a Hugo Award.
like she was failing at being properly social. In a September 1984 journal entry, she chided herself against awkwardly oversharing and reminded herself, “don’t tell people more than they want to know before they’ve decided whether they want to know you at all.”
Sometimes the loneliness was unbearable and Octavia believed that death would be a “sweet relief” from the pain of an alienated existence.
She told herself, “the Most Important Thing I Do Every Day is to WRITE, To Work On My NOVELS and stories. They are my love and my work, my fortune, my life, and if I can be said to have one, my soul. Nothing is more important.”
So in the summer of 1985, she joined a UCLA research group and made her way to the Amazon in Peru.
Once Octavia returned from Peru, she continued working on her new project and settled back into the rhythms of her life. She set up lofty writing goals, telling herself “a five-page-per day minimum isn’t bad but it isn’t really enough either” and reminded herself to be disciplined and to practice controlled obsession “because out of control obsession is tedious, limiting, even dangerous.”
How could Lilith, and by extension humanity, survive in the midst of such utter control? Like Kindred, the series asks, How far would one go to survive? What compromises are justified or too much?
The Oankali are the opposite: their genetic nature actively repels poisons and predators alike, so they can explore the worlds they colonize without fear of danger. As a result, they are what Octavia called “xenophilic.” They are intensely interested in the foreign and the strange.
As we have seen, the trilogy grapples with the Human Contradiction, the Oankali phrase for what they see as humanity’s greatest flaw: “Intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior.”
The Human Contradiction was one way to grapple with an axiom of human behavior that seemed to cut across race, religion, creed—even space and time. She believed that “sadly (or not) we are a hierarchal species. We will seek and find or make differences between ourselves and grade those differences worst, worse, bad, fair, good, better, best. Others are less to the degree that they differ and/or are weaker.”
Enslaved Africans were essential in building much of the modern West through the violent and extractive actions of colonial powers, and their descendants continue to overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the generational damage of slavery. The example of Martinique, still a French colony, shows that economic exploitation is not something of the past. Imperialism needs to be constantly fed to be kept alive, and it feasts on its colonies and within its spheres of influence.
“It seems that unless there’s a serious turnaround (political, social, economic),” Octavia worried, “we could pass into the new century with a permanent landed elite . . . AND a permanent poorly educated underclass.”
When President Jarret repurposes Reagan’s slogan in Parable of the Talents, it is not so much a dog whistle as a bullhorn, loudly proclaiming his intent not simply to return the fractured country to its former glory but to lead it as a fascist.
Perhaps it isn’t so much that every time I teach the Parable series the world is on fire; it’s that the world is always on fire, and Octavia’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents give us language to understand what’s happening.
“I have no children. I shall never have any. American Black children will be mine. My fortune will be spent motivating and educating them while I live and after my death.”
She was not simply the first Black science fiction writer, or woman science fiction writer, or Black woman science fiction writer to the win the award; she was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur, period.
People continued to speculate on her sexuality. For example, Samuel R. Delany recalls asking Octavia outright if she was gay. According to Delany, in 1997 they were at a gay club in Atlanta because someone had dropped the two speakers off there. Delany assumed they had chosen that venue because he was openly gay. And then he wondered whether it was because Octavia was queer as well. She replied to his query by shrugging and saying, “Probably.”
Octavia viewed Reagan as a sociopath and a pathological liar who could not distinguish between fact and fiction, while she believed Bush was “more likely to know what’s true, but no more likely to care.”
She was rather disillusioned with politics more generally, believing that “whether calling themselves communists, capitalists, socialists, monarchists, or whatever, all rulers are oligarchs. If they aren’t rich when they come into power . . . they quickly become rich, and they seek to protect their wealth.”
She defined writer’s block in a few ways: when you know what you want to say but don’t know how to say it, when you say nothing because you don’t know what to say, or when you don’t know what to say so you produce a type of word vomit.
She wrote about interstellar space travelers who arrive on a hostile planet. They have taken a one-way trip away from Earth. So what do they do next? Rather than answering that question, Octavia decided to imagine the origin story of these far-flung earthlings.35 While test-driving methods for improving her writing process, Octavia also began writing snatches of poetry to incite her creative flow. These small poems, affirmations and admonishments, would eventually become the Earthseed scriptures.
The Parable novels’ personal-style prose brings the apocalyptic fervor of the plots down to earth, inviting readers to remember how commonplace apocalypses have been throughout history.
The increasing threat of global warming was also a major concern when the Parable series debuted. Octavia, who was keenly interested in climate change and belonged to several environmental groups, admitted that “global warming is practically one of the characters” in Parable of the Sower.
“Parable of the Sower contains nothing that couldn’t actually happen, but I hope we’re smart enough—foresighted enough not to let most of it happen.”
With Lauren, Octavia is able to work out some of the issues that fascinated her in the failed Blindsight novel, namely, what it means to be a charismatic leader (of what some would call a cult) and what it means to grow up in the shadow of such a leader.
Octavia wrote Parable of the Talents in the wake of her own mother’s death after a massive stroke in 1996.
“my pen and my paper, they comfort me—at least a little. They allow me to scream into utter silence. They focus my thoughts, they permit me to act when no other action is possible.”
“Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability, and persistent, positive obsession . . . Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.”
But Lauren is a spokesperson for many of Octavia’s fears about what could happen if human beings do not stop being so self-destructive. As the prologue to Sower suggests, Lauren is an archetype of what positive obsession can become. But she’s also a warning about unmitigated obsession.
