She didn't even mean to tell the future ... she was just calculating the most plausible outcomes of racism in America
Replies
Just a bit of a shame she had anarchy all wrong
aug 27, 2025, 4:13 pm • 0 0 • view
Some pattern recognizers can ingest, understand & retain so much history & connect so many dots in so many layers and at such a high level of resonance, with such crystalline clarity is seems like prescience. until the machine starts claiming her vision as its own, twisting it into doom, like a god
aug 31, 2025, 5:49 am • 0 0 • view
Right. That why I cringe a little whenever people talk about how Butler prophesized all this. She said none of what she wrote required psychic powers. This is who were are.
aug 27, 2025, 2:38 pm • 61 6 • view
Yep. And in a way, overly mythologizing her obscures the fact that *she also lived through racism* on top of knowing its history expertly and wasn’t just an outside oracle looking in.
aug 27, 2025, 2:59 pm • 43 5 • view
Also, not for nothing, Butler's work is incredibly, deceptively complicated. I read the Xenogenesis trilogy fairly frequently, and each reading turns my thoughts from the previous reading inside out. I feel like mythologizing the Parable books in a way...flattens the narrative.
aug 27, 2025, 3:03 pm • 24 1 • view
I miss her terribly. I read her work often. It makes sense to me.
aug 27, 2025, 2:53 pm • 1 0 • view
Parable of the Sower is one of those few books I wish I could read again for the first time.
aug 28, 2025, 2:07 am • 1 0 • view
I read the first Parable maybe two years ago and it was almost too overwhelming because of how obviously right she was.
aug 27, 2025, 3:21 pm • 6 1 • view
Reading this book now and wow…
aug 27, 2025, 3:16 pm • 5 0 • view
california being constantly on fire while black workers bike miles to work and disappear randomly because the state has withdrawn all support to the area kinda was obviously on the horizon in the 90s.
aug 27, 2025, 3:21 pm • 19 0 • view
And paying the cops if you want even perfunctory investigation of your disappeared relative.
aug 28, 2025, 2:04 am • 4 0 • view
Right! I don’t know why everyone is acting like she she was some psychic and that this was not a possible outcome of white violence, racism, greed and tyranny.
aug 27, 2025, 7:28 pm • 4 0 • view
"She was like Nostradamus! She SAW THE FUTURE!" No, she just had pattern recognition. If you aren't a moron and can recognize patterns, it's easy to extrapolate what will happen by following the patterns to their obvious conclusions.
aug 27, 2025, 10:35 pm • 4 0 • view
that part
aug 27, 2025, 2:46 pm • 0 0 • view
I love Octavia Butler’s writing!
aug 28, 2025, 3:09 am • 1 0 • view
Fledgling
aug 28, 2025, 2:47 pm • 0 0 • view
That’s what my piece is about!
aug 27, 2025, 2:40 pm • 40 0 • view
Read the parables. Really enjoyed her work. She just had such a sense of humanity and that includes the best and worst of it. Read the article I am so glad it focused on her hope for us all. She was so accurate of how we would fall but she always believed there were those who would lift us higher.
aug 27, 2025, 2:47 pm • 27 1 • view
Jack London predicted American Fascism, as capitalist oligarchy, in 1908, called it “The Iron Heel” and this was decades before Mussolini and Hitler, before the first Red Scare. His book is completely ignored and erased from history, despite being one of the “Great American Classic Authors.”
aug 27, 2025, 3:24 pm • 14 0 • view
I hadn't heard of that book...I just downloaded the audible. Thank you!
aug 27, 2025, 8:14 pm • 2 0 • view
U.S. culture will always ignore authors like Jack London and Octavia Butler for having incites into the pathologies of US culture.
aug 27, 2025, 3:24 pm • 10 0 • view
📌
aug 27, 2025, 8:08 pm • 0 0 • view
She had system-level pattern reading neurodivergence and her primary lifelong special interest was the intersection of race and society over the passage of time. Which... In prehistoric times they called a prophet. Or a witch. 🤷♀️
aug 27, 2025, 4:26 pm • 16 1 • view
Precisely this.
aug 27, 2025, 4:30 pm • 5 0 • view
Once you start to see the neurodivergence, you can pick it up in people's work and lives. Tesla? Darwin? Marie Curie? ALL my people. We are wonderfully and powerfully made and perhaps society needs a modern word for oracles. 🤩
aug 27, 2025, 4:35 pm • 7 0 • view
Men are different though. Neurodivergent women have been accused of being witches for millennia, when we’re just exceptionally good at pattern recognition and aggressively curious.
aug 27, 2025, 4:38 pm • 10 0 • view
OMG Yes!!! I genuinely wonder if a certain % of women being ND is a survival mechanism somehow. Like the tea app, but the universe is gonna make one out of every 50 or so women able to tell exactly where all this is headed. And the fate of societies depends on how well they listen to women. 😒😭
aug 27, 2025, 4:44 pm • 4 1 • view