Octavia E. Butler Quotes

“Change biology, and you could change society--but could you change society on its own? Were we as a species simply condemned to permanent misery, all because of how we have evolved?

This was the conundrum that the Oankali books had posed to her, and the Parables had been intended (but failed) to solve: How do you create a more sustainable, more benign, more livable society when you're stuck working with human beings?”
― Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler

“The Paraclete and "Book of Martha" narratives were ultimately versions of the dream of "fixing" of the human species that had driven (and stymied) the Parables books: "On the one hand," she writes in her journal, "I want to write fix-the-world scenario. I seem to need to write them. The fact that I don't believe in them--don't believe humanity is fixable--does create a problem”
― Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler

“Mary, living in the economically depressed slum of Forsyth, gathers the first Patternists from the ranks of Doro’s unstable telepaths , the rejected and failed “experiments” he would have simply exterminated before Anyanwu’s intervention forced him to relax his brutality. Mary is able to unite these misfits into a collectivity that allows their powers to flourish in a way atomism could never allow. In the end it is this new collectivity that, after millennia, is finally able to match Doro’s power;”
― Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler

“Butler’s Patternist superhero novels anticipated by decades the inability to reliably tell the difference between heroes and villains that would come to dominate the post-Watchmen superhero genre.”
― Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler

“the power fantasy escapes the ideological bounds that are usually intended to rein it in. The Patternists are superheroes in a world where human beings are primarily driven by Darwinist urges rather than ethical considerations—which is to say, our world, as Butler understood it to actually exist.”
― Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler