Kindle Notes & Highlights
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August 24 - August 31, 2025
Octavia was intimately familiar with the Bible, and so it’s no surprise that biblical allusions and religious imagery abound in her work, particularly in the Parable series. And she was often working out in her own work the human stories featured in religious texts.
I used to despise religion. I have not become religious, but I think I’ve become more understanding of religion. And I’m glad I was raised a Baptist, because I got my conscience installed early. I’ve been around people who don’t have one, and they’re damn scary. And I think a lot of them are out there running major corporations! How can you do some of the things these people do if you have a conscience? So I think it might be better if there were a little more religion, in that sense.
Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toshi Reagon reimagined Parable of the Sower as an opera.
Trickster, teacher, chaos, and clay would also become the inspiration for at least four sequels she planned to write—Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay.
Octavia would remark that Rice was one of the few speculative authors who could expect long lines of devoted fans at conventions, while there had been times Octavia had to personally run down readers to pay attention to her books.
Black vampires were also the stars in films like Vamp (1986), Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), and Blade (1998).
The year that Stephenie Meyer’s glittery Twilight vampires were unleashed onto the world, 2005, was the same year Octavia published her final novel, Fledgling.
In 1999, she and her three hundred boxes of books made their way to Seattle for a new adventure. Octavia described this move as her “midlife crisis.”
More and more it seemed that her hypertension symptoms were getting worse and her medications had alarming side effects. She noted in her journal that the medicines made her cough until she was nauseous. At other times, she was so drowsy that she fell asleep at her desk.
She published a dozen novels, a collection of short stories, and several essays over the course of her career, but as science fiction authors of her generation went, this was a relatively small number of works. For example, Samuel R. Delany has published more than thirty-five books. Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-three novels, thirteen children’s books, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, and five essay collections.
such as a manuscript she was calling Paraclete, another she was calling Spiritus, and a nonfiction guide about names she was calling Fire, Laughter, Emeralds, Rain: A Thesaurus of First Names.
She wondered whether her diminished libido was connected to this lack of creative energy.
Octavia’s observations on her fellow science fiction writers were similarly incisive. Also in the “People” notebook she described Isaac Asimov as a “successful, self-limited perfectionist,” who “tended to dislike and avoid those things he couldn’t do well.”
My books are most likely to last. They’re like messages in bottles that I cast into a sea of humanity. There’s no guarantee that they will ever be found and read by people able to make use of them. They are, if anything, beginning places. They might foster study in areas new to the finders. They might give the finders directions for behavior modification. They might give the finders something to react against, and thus find new paths for thought and/or action.
Octavia patterned the protagonist of Wild Seed after her grandmothers.
Although dyslexia has no bearing on one’s ability to drive, Octavia frequently cited it as the reason she did not learn to drive. Today, we would use the language of neurodivergence to describe Octavia’s understanding of how her mind worked and how she processed information.
The term “maroons” describes enslaved people who successfully escaped bondage and established autonomous communities beyond the boundaries of slave-holding societies. Marronage itself represents the complex process of liberation from slavery, a profound act of resistance and self-determination. Petit marronage characterizes short-term escapes, where individuals or small groups temporarily fled their plantations—sometimes for days or weeks—driven by a range of motivations, from seeking respite to staging localized acts of resistance. In contrast, grand marronage represents a more radical form
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Octavia was curious about queer sexuality and so she attended a meeting at the Gay and Lesbian Service Center to get more information. After listening to participants share their experiences of being part of the LBGTQIA+ community, she decided in that moment that identifying as queer was not for her: “I realized, Nope, this ain’t it. I also realized, once I thought it over, that I’m a hermit. I enjoy my own company more than I enjoy most other people’s—and going to parties or trying to meet Mr. or Ms. Right or whatever simply doesn’t appeal to me”
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholar Monica A. Coleman and writer Tananarive Due hosted two dozen webinar discussions titled “Octavia Tried to Tell Us: Parable for Today’s Pandemic.”
