a society waiting to ignore her, Butler
created herself and her wide legacy in
a true-life act of science fiction. She
was oppressively shy, but her voice as
a writer rang loud.
Her fans include everyone from
singer and actress Janelle Monaé to
African futurists Nnedi Okorafor and
Wanuri Kahiu, who are cowriting
Amazon Prime Video’s Wild Seed
series with Viola Davis coproducing.
Singers Toshi Reagon and BerniceJohnson Reagon of Sweet Honey
in the Rock composed an entire
opera based on Butler's Parable of
the Sower. A graphic novel adapta-
tion of Butler’s time-travel tale Kindred,
created by Damian Duffy and illus-
trated by John Jennings, won a Bram
Stoker Award last year. And activ-
ist Adrienne Maree Brown’s book
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change,
Changing Worlds draws directly from
Butler’s philosophies.
“Whenever we try to envision a
world without war, without violence,
without prisons, without capitalism,
we are engaging in speculative fic-
tion,” activist and author Walidah
Imarisha wrote in her introduction
to the book Octavia’s Brood: Science
Fiction From Social Justice Move-
ments, which she coedited with
Adrienne Maree Brown. “All organiz-
ing is science fiction.”
But Butler is no longer here to
see her legacy grow. Six years after
our visit, in 2006, she passed away.
None of us had any idea during that
long, pleasant afternoon that her re-maining time would be so short—but
even then, we saw glimpses of the
rising wave of Black speculative art
today’s readers and moviegoers are
enjoying like never before. That day,
we talked about the great response
to the groundbreaking anthology her
former writing student Sheree Renée
Thomas had just edited, Dark Matter:
A Century of Speculative Fiction From
the African Diaspora, which included
work from all of us.
Black speculative fiction was
coalescing into a movement, and But-
ler’s vision made her the movement
leader. Her unwavering, unflinching
study of our uglier tendencies made
her a social prognosticator—if only
we would listen.
In Dawn (1997), she saw human-
kind’s trajectory toward self-destruc-
tion and created an alien species that
tries to save us. In her novels Parable
of the Sower (1993) and Parable of
the Talents (1998), she predicted
our national decline down to a presi-
dential slogan: “Make America Great
Again.” And in her final novel, Fledg-
ling (2005), she reimagined horror by
creating a mutated vampire whose
melanin allows her to walk in the
light—and makes her a target to older
pale-skinned vampires who want to
destroy her.
During our visit, we asked her how
she felt about being described as a pes-
simist. First she joked in faux surprise,
as if she were taken aback—“Moi?” But
then she circled back to the truth with
a sigh. “Look at us. Look at us,” she
said emphatically. “We’re not really
that long-term.”
Nearly 20 years ago, Butler told
us how she believed as a species we
were destroying ourselves, pointing
to our lack of action against climate
change. She said climate change
was already claiming lives in Africa
and would claim more in the years
to come.
“What I’ve been harping on in the
past five novels is, ‘How can we make
ourselves a more survivable spe-
cies?’” she said to us that day.
How, indeed?
On Inauguration Day in Janu-
ary 2017, I published a blog post »Due’s mother’s book was
signed by Octavia Butler. Afrofuturism is the
audacity to imagine
a thriving future
for Black people, or
any future.”
—TANANARIVE DUEButler, who would have turned 72
on June 22, is often called the Mother
of Afrofuturism—or Black speculative
fiction (science fiction, fantasy and
horror). Long before my novels about
African immortals that began with My
Soul to Keep, Ryan Coogler’s Black
Panther or the sci-fi horror of Jordan
Peele’s Get Out, Butler was writing
Black women into imaginary worlds
with aliens, giving us powers of telepa-
thy and sending us back to the slavery
era to try to fix a horribly broken past.
Afrofuturism—which spans litera-
ture, music, art and film—is Black art-
ists’ proclamation of “I am, I was and
I WILL BE,” straddling genres and
st yles to create B lack ar t that imagines
a world not quite our own. Afrofuturism
is space travel, superheroes, sorcer-
ers and seers. Afrofuturism is the
audacity to imagine a thriving future
for Black people, or any future.
Often, Afrofuturism travels across
time to evoke the past, present and
future in one snapshot, like Julie Dash’s
brilliant film Daughters of the Dust.
Butler, who became the first sci-
ence fiction writer of any race or gen-
der to win a MacArthur Foundation
Fellowship “genius” Award in 1995,
had a mighty high mountain to scale.CO Raised in poverty by a single mother in
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