Octavia Butler's Grim Vision of a Post Climate Change World, Apocalypse Cliches, and Black Quarterbacks

Hello!

In today’s episode, we talk about Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower,” a science fiction novel from 1992 that unexpectedly found itself on the best seller’s list in 2020. The novel imagines a violent and grim future in which the world has warmed beyond safe inhabitation, the lucky get to live in walled off communities while the poor all kill one another in the streets. We talk about visions of climate apocalypse and how Butler, through no fault of her own, might have created a hegemonic vision of a warmed earth, one that has become almost cliche in the thirty years since Sower’s publication. Why don’t we have other, new visions for climate death? What would those even look like?

We also get a bit into a recent article in The Atlantic about Butler and her use of “historofuturism” in her work.

And we talk a bit about the state of the Black quarterback and muse on why Lamar Jackson might get a more traditional, sports-talk-racist treatment than other Black quarterbacks in the league.

We will be continuing our look into extinction literature next week with a look at Becky Chambers’s “A Psalm for the Wild-Built.” If you’d like to read it before the show, please do so!

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— TTSG