Fund us and vote for #octaviabutler (or something else of course!)

6octavia butler, vr,

dwdjohnson:

Insomnia III:

The great Dame of science fiction gives 13 wonderful tips on writing. High School kids should check out #3 and 5 in particular.

(via oeblegacy)

Source: dwdjohnson

6octavia butler, octavia e. butler,

inkandgrease:

“I recently met a Black teenager who told me she didn’t like to read. And I said, “But there are so many great books out there and many of them are being made into movies. Did you see The Hunger Games?” And she had. After we parted ways I thought to myself, “What do Black girls do when they’re watching The Hunger Games? Do they identify with Katniss more than Rue?” I thought of Jacqueline Bobo and her work on Black women as cultural readers. So many of us walk into the theater knowing that Hollywood is going to screw us over. And so we’re already prepared to navigate around stereotypes and extract meaning from the film.“

(via afrofuturistaffair)

Source: inkandgrease

ladymargo:

afrofuturistaffair:

“It is quite baffling that one of the most celebrated sci-fi authors of our time (and not just black authors - of all sci-fi authors), has yet to see a single one of her novels adapted to film, given how adaptation-happy Hollywood is, especially in recent years.”

I’m going to expand a little bit on why I’m rooting for this movie to get made. bulleted for your viewing pleasure:

• The author of this book is Octavia Butler.  If you don’t know who Octavia Butler is, well, she was a black, queer, writer of sci-fi/speculative fiction, whose work is absolutely singular for the award-winning womanist and afrofuturist renderings. Even after her untimely death, she still remains a titan of the genre. She is my favorite writer.
• The director who is desperately trying to raise money to make this happen is Ernest Dickerson, the cinematographer behind those gorgeously filmed Spike Lee movies (Do The Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, and Malcolm X) and a director of some of your favorite TV shows  including Dexter, The Wire, The Vampire Diaries, Sleepy Hollow, and The Walking Dead.
• The protagonists are subjects you never see in mainstream movies, an interracial family.
• The challenges presented are morally oblique, which always makes the best sci-fi. There is no one right or wrong answer here; just examination and choices.
• This for me is sci-fi for the future.  It’s not about a white guy saving the world or being persecuted by the world. Nor is it about a white girl in a tight space suit firing a laser-gun. It’s about people dealing with some imaginative futuristic challenges. It’s brutal, and hopeful, and frightening.

I hope with every fiber of my being that this gets made.   

(via oeblegacy)

Source: afrofuturistaffair

nerveendingslongerthanourbodies:

A group of progressive organizers want to take Octavia Butler’s lessons from the page and into the streets.

“A lot of our movements are shaped defensively, necessarily,” Brown says. “It can be easy to set our dreams only on the horizon of what seems possible in circumstances largely controlled by oppressive systems. It feels like radical work to actually stretch our imaginations and recenter ourselves in the long arc of what we need to survive.”

Now, the focus is on the thousands of dollars raised for the anthology and writing workshops. “Octavia did this, gave us a blueprint of a right-wing America, an alien colonization, and more,” says Brown. “What are the scenarios we need to familiarize our minds with before they happen? It feels like a way we take explicit responsibility for the future.”

**********

Have been thinking a great deal about the politics of the imagination and how people begin to envision a better world; really fascinated to see activists so openly embrace creative work as a critical part of their organizing not divoriced from a broader political praxis

(via mp285)

Source: nerveendingslongerthanourbodies

6octavia butler, octavia e. butler, grassroots organizing, octavia's brood, colorlines, earthseed,