Octavia's Brood Quotes

“Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us.”
― Walidah Imarisha, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“And for those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us.”
― Walidah Imarisha, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Because many of the people who were taken by the wasting disease happened to be white, God was not a viable culprit.”
― Walidah Imarisha, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Visionary fiction” is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“and she noticed who stayed, and it was the same people who had always been there.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“God is one answer to our need to explain ourselves, to make sense of ourselves. But the moment you just accept yourself, then no explanation is needed, and god is everything together and nothing in particular.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“She felt the night air on her, pretending she was somewhere else, in some other time. She often did this before she did something reckless. Her hope was that, if she died, her soul would travel to the last beautiful place she imagined.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“hipsters and entrepreneurs were complicated locusts. they ate up everything in sight, but they meant well.”
― Walidah Imarisha, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Together they unlocked potential in one another. They worked hard and played harder, until the work felt like play. Everything”
― Walidah Imarisha, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Yasmin loved the little woman with her seamed glowing face, tiny mahogany hands ghosted with flour, white hair like a veil, tied up; loved her in that way women never get to love their own mothers because there is not enough unsaid, and too much said, between them.”
― Terry Bisson, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“He turned and looked her solemnly in the eyes. “Is it too much to ask for a happy ending?” She smiled sadly. “I don’t think there are any happy endings left.”
― Walidah Imarisha, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Telegram@velocemarco Buy Cocaine online in York”
― Tunde Olaniran, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“We believe it is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.” —Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“One of the ways we perpetuate indivdualism is by ideating alone, literally coming up with ideas in solitude and then competing to bring them to life.”
― adrienne maree brown, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“The elements of visionary fiction are that it: explores current social issues through the lens of sci-fis; is conscious of identity and intersecting identities; centers those who have been marginalized; is aware of power inequalities; is realistic and hard but hopeful; shows change from the bottom up rather than the top down; highlights that change is collective; and is not neutral—its purpose is social change and societal transformation.”
― adrienne maree brown, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“My mother spent forty-nine days in jail for sitting in at a Tallahassee, Florida, Woolworth lunch counter in 1960—so I have grown up with a sense that, like the activists told Octavia in the 1970s, I am somehow shirking my social duties by holding myself up in a. room to make up stuff.
Yet we hope that the work we create is the planting of a seed. And most of the seeds we plant will have no impact beyond entertainment—if that. But one, perhaps one, might actually help change the world. The Quran, after all, is a poem. And the miracles of Jesus were merely an oral history—hardly the underpinnings of a powerful world religion—before the authors of the Gospels wrote the story.”
― Tananarive Due, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“In traditional science fiction, according to Robert Heinlein, there are three lines of thought that drive writers:
"What if—" [What if we built a colony on Mars?]
"If only—" [If only we could fix past mistakes by travelling through time.]
And "If this goes on—”
― Tananarive Due, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“This is the meaning of Star Wars: we were rebels; we are Empire.
And like all rebellious children, we were but going through a phase.
We are getting ready for adulthood, after we sowed a few wild oats.
Once grown, we put on our imperial uniform, and bowed to the Empire.
"It is your destiny."
Right? Unless—”
― Mumia Abu-Jamal, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“But America, like every nation, has its ages of psychosis. It has fits of indecision and periods of self-delusion.
Consider how presidents spoke movingly of "freedom from tyranny" while personally holding hundreds of men, women, and children in slavery.”
― Mumia Abu-Jamal, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“But geography was not destiny. Nowhere was safe and nothing was infinite, and to impose a law predicated on an outdated belief in stability was immoral.”
― Dani McClain, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“I already knew everything that would go into a column making a case for saying in Oakland. The list would confirm my fears that I was an individualist to the bone, that I had turned into someone who placed personal comfort and loose camaraderie above the bonds of blood and going—instinctively, without the need to think it through—where family needs you and you know you need them.
If I couldn't be safe—and I couldn't, no one could—I should face the chaos shoulder to shoulder with the people whose love and care I'd been able to count on for decades, right?
And I should pick the place where those people were concentrated, yes? The answers should have been obvious, and I'd always thought that when push came to shove, I'd know what to do.
But they weren't and I didn't.”
― Dani McClain, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Then the most dangerous thought rushed out of the depths of her subconscious: as long as you could find a way to laugh at the madness, they couldn't reach you. And if they couldn't reach you, then they couldn't beat you. This laughter at the absurdity of it all brought the mad reckless optimism every revolution needs. This wasn't just a threat to the prison. It was a threat to everything. Laughter was the means by which everything could change.”
― Vagabond, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Laughter liberated them from the search for logic within the illogical. It validated for them what they had known all along—that the system was a joke.”
― Vagabond, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“He wandered the noisy streets and felt desperation in his bones. A need to touch earth and feel water, but deeper still was a need to tell people what he knew.”
― Gabriel Teodros, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“While Crusaders were violently expanding from Europe and Saladin was defending Egypt and pushing back, Ethiopia turned inward and grew in a way that took them all the way to the stars.”
― Gabriel Teodros, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“It was the exploration of the past, not merely the facts of history but the stories of the past, that made the Memorials so important. A Memorial did not simply know that this fortress had been used to cage refugees, a Memorial smelled the death in the air, heard the sound of screams, sensed hope draining from bodies like spilled blood. With Memorials remembering the pain and devastation, their role was to ensure that things like these prison forts would never be used again. But here was Cy sitting in this cell, drowning in the pain of the past mixed with her own.”
― Morrigan Phillips, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Genocide." The word sounded wrong in the mouth of one so young. "What's that?"
"It's when you hate not just one person but their mother and their grandmothers and their children and everyone like them. You hate them so much, you try to destroy all of them.”
― Walidah Imarisha, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“She had lived in Harlem long enough to know that sending people into the criminal justice system did nothing but make them more damaged and desperate.”
― Walidah Imarisha, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Breathe deep, baby girl, we won. Now life, though not exactly easier, is life all the time. Not chopped down into billable minutes, not narrowed into excuses to hurt and forget each other. I am writing you from the future to remind you to act on your behalf, to live your life as a tribute to our victory and not as a stifling reaction to the past. I am here with so many people that you love and their children and we are eating together and we are tired from full days of working and loving but never too tired to remember where we come from. never exhausted past passion and writing. So I am writing you now.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“When the epidemic hit America, everyone had a theory about who started it. Seventy percent of the American population eventually turned zombie, and those that didn't had to blame someone. Because many of the people who were taken by the wasting disease happened to be white, God was not a viable culprit. The field was wide open for the survivors in America to pick a suspect, a villain, an origin for this nameless evil. And so the government classified it as a terrorist act, without evidence, without even an idea of what caused it. And the American people duly picked the enemy to be vilified—China, North Korea, and the nebulous ever-shifting region known as the Middle East.”
― Bao Phi, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements