Octavia Butler: ‘Positive Obsession’ and ‘Wild Seed’

Alternate Mondays, Next on December 8, 5-6:30 pm ET

Watch for new selections coming soon, featuring Frankenstein and the Chicano Frankenstein.

Join us for a new appreciation of Octavia Butler, beginning with Susana M. Morris’s pathbreaking new biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler followed by Butler’s prophetic Wild Seed and other short selections. Offered by the Speculative and Visionary Fiction reading group.

Morris’s just published biography blends commentary on Butler’s work and life against the social and political conditions she lived and wrote in. Butler developed her literary powers during the Reagan years while living a far from easy life.  As Dana A. Williams notes in her New York Times review, “One of the biography’s most compelling themes is Butler’s sustained critique of American imperialism. From the scorched landscapes in Parable of the Sower to the uneasy alliances between humans and the Oankali (an “alien” race in the Xenogenesis series) to the entanglement of history and power in Kindred, Butler’s fiction exposes the toll of empire (and its illusion of progress) on the body, on the planet and on humanity.”

Whether you have read a lot or a little of Butler’s fiction, we encourage you to join with the MEP’s long-running reading group for a new introduction to Butler’s pivotal role in reshaping science, visionary and speculative fiction, helping inspire the emergence of Afro-Futurism, and influencing a new generation of younger writers. We will accompany our reading of the biography with short selections from Butler’s fiction and other related materials.

Convened by Steve Backman