Octavia Butler - The Last Interview
Butler, Octavia (2023). Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Melville House Publishing.
Excerpts from "Possible Futures", an interview by Celia Tan, originally published in Sojourner. 1999.
pages 96 - 97:
Cella Tan (T): ... would you say to spend a lot of time thinking about possible futures?
Butler (B): I just did a piece for Essence magazine for their thirtieth anniversary. I wound up writing how to foretell the future rather than about what the future will be like. "Read history", [I said]. How can you foretell the future if you don't read history?
T: What do you think is going to happen to the human race in the next millennium?
B: Pretty much what is happening now. Why should anything different happen? There will be technological innovations and biological innovations, but things will be essentially how they are. The future is not some mystical magical place. The future is moment to moment. Thirty years ago we didn't have the computers we do now, but we're still dong the same things.
T: Meaning, even if the power grid collapses on January first, human beings are still going to be pretty much the same.
B: The human being is essentially lazy.
T: In your books, you often deal with issues of race and more general issues of stereotyping and the way pigeonholing people impedes social change.
B: It's all part of the same human laziness. We are prone to think in shorthand. It's like you're having argument with someone and they suddenly decide, "Oh, you're a Malthusian," and dismiss your whole argument. Of course, the problem is that it works a lot of the time, and pigeonhoiing things helps us to deal more with the things we care about and less with the other. But it also prevents us from discovering things we could want to know. It's the we are as human beings, and it has to be overcome again, and again and again.
pages 98 - 100:
T: You write a lot about the future of society, but would you call your work utopian of dystopian? Pessimistic and cautionary, or meant to inspire?
B: ... I have warned -- the Parable novels are obviously novels of warning, cautionary tales. I have never written about a world I want to see develop -- [although] maybe the Parable stories did that. I despair about the way we human beings injure ourselves and lay waste to the environment. The stupid things we do -- we've always done them and chances are we always will, that's the kind of animals we are. This leaves me with the feeling that the kind of world I would like and that makes sense to me is not possible with the materials we've got to work with.
In the Parable books, what I did was have my character offer a long-term goal backed by religion. Give people a goal that is backed by religion, and a plan that would last more than a generation, and it's not so much a way of making people better as a way of diverting their energies in a direction that would not be quite so negative (i.e., to go to the stars, to get to Heaven while you're still living) -- this is the kind of project that will give people an outlet for their competitiveness and their desire to be important and things we don't always use to good effect. I can see it going wildly wrong, I can see us devastating this world in the effort to reach others, but that's the way my imagination works. Unhappily, that's one of the places things might lead, but my character has people practicing living in self-sufficient communitiies in the hope that it won't happen. I've been trying to fix humanity all along, but [the Parable books] are the first time I've tried to do it with the material at hand. Rather than with special powers, as in the Patternist books, it's just people using their own hands, their own brains.