Revisiting Octavia Butler

If you love science fiction, I strongly recommend you spend an hour listening to excerpts from Octavia Butler’s fiction and interviews with authors she inspired in this Throughline episode of Winter Book Club.

I was thrilled to learn that Nnedi Okorafor--an excellent science fiction author in her own right—was as blown away by Wild Seed as I was when I first found it at the library as a teenager many years ago.  As we enter year two of the second Trump administration, Parable of the Sower reads like prophecy.  So it was important to be reminded that Butler looked at and listened to Ronald Reagan during his days as governor of California and extrapolated forward from there.

My list of “must-read” books didn’t need to grow any longer, but this podcast definitely added some titles to the list.  In addition to revisting Butler’s Patternist series, Babel-17 (by Samuel R. Delany) is now on loan in my Libby app.  I read Noor last year, and had planned to read more of her but the mutual Butler fandom has accelerated those plans for sure.  I’m long overdue to read book 2 of N.K. Jemisin’s Great Cities duology.  It’s been too long since I’ve read any P. Djeli Clark (The Black God’s Drums was my introduction to him).  I’ve heard Ring Shout is excellent, so that goes in the list for sure.

Rest In Peace David Prouse

I’ve loved science fiction and fantasy for as long as I can remember. But I hadn’t thought much lately about exactly where that love began until a phone call from my mom today. She called to let me know that David Prouse had died. While James Earl Jones was the unforgettable voice of Darth Vader, David Prouse was who we all saw.

Before tonight’s conversation, where she reminisced about taking my sister and I to see it in the theater, I distinctly remember her taking me to see Return of the Jedi in the theater when I was 9.  I remember the anticipation of seeing and just how much I enjoyed it.  But when she mentioned my sister being in a stroller, I paused.  Because my sister and I are 4 1/2 years apart, she wasn’t talking about when we saw Return of the Jedi.  My mom was talking about the preceding movie—The Empire Strikes Back.  While I’ve seen it many times since then in almost every conceivable format save LaserDisc, I didn’t remember the very first time.  She thought I would be scared of Darth Vader, but as she told me I mostly stared in awe.

So Rest In Peace to David Prouse.  Thanks to you—and my mom—for starting my journey into science fiction.