Author Interview: A Conversation with Octavia E....

A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler

What were your motivations for taking your title from the biblical parable of the talents?
The parable of the talents is one of the harsher parables of the Bible, but then, life can be harsh. We human beings will use our talents—our intelligence, our creativity, our ability to plan, to delay gratification, to work for the benefit of the community and of humanity, rather than only for ourselves. We will use our talents or we will lose them. We will use our talents to save ourselves or we'll do what other animal species do sooner or later. We will continue turning as much of the world to our use as we can. Technology helps us to do this faster, more thoroughly, and more disastrously than any animal species could. At some point, this must end. Earth is finite. Consciously or unconsciously, we must decide whether, in all our intelligence and industry, we choose to be no more than, as Olamina says in Parable of the Sower, smooth dinosaurs.

Was the idea for Parable of the Talents already planned when you wrote Parable of the Sower?
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents were originally intended to be only one book. I intended to write the fictional autobiography of Lauren Olamina—her story of her struggle to spread her beliefs in the hope that those beliefs would redirect people away from the chaos and destructiveness into which they have fallen and toward a consuming, creative long-term goal. I knew what I wanted to do, as Olamina knew what she wanted to do. But like Olamina, I didn't know how to do it. I had written the events of Parable of the Sower and perhaps seventy-five pages more when I realized that I had a much longer book than

I had planned. I looked back and found a way to end Sower. Then I began trying to write Talents. Problem was, I had come to like Lauren Olamina and Acorn. Olamina's God was Change, but I didn't want either her or Acorn to change—at least not drastically. And yet both had to. Conflict is the essence of story. And anyway, Olamina wanted to change the world. She couldn't do that by living a quiet, comfortable life in Acorn. Knowing this didn't help me. I kept rewriting the first 150 or so pages of Talents and heading up one blind alley or another. I couldn't seem to tell Olamina's story no matter how hard I tried. It was incredibly frustrating. I hadn't liked Olamina when I began Parable of the Sower because in order for her to do what she was bound to do, she had to be a power-seeker and it took me a long time to get over the idea that anyone seeking power probably shouldn't have it. I had to remind myself again and again as I strove to write Sower that power is only a tool like any other tool—like money, like knowledge, like a hammer, even. It's the way tools are used that's important. It's the way they're used that's good or bad. I knew this of course, knew it intellectually. I had to come to know it emotionally before I could write the novel. This I did at last. And by the time I had finished Sower, I had come to like Olamina far too much.

As I tried to write Talents, as I wrote those 150 pages over and over again, I was trying to write only Olamina's story. Then, in late 1996, my mother had a stroke. After three weeks, she died.

This was a difficult time. My mother was widowed shortly after I was born, and I was an only child. We had always been close. Not surprisingly, I did no novel writing at all while she was dying and for some time afterward. I didn't get back to the novel until around January 1997. By then, somehow, the novel had changed.

Olamina's story had become also her daughter's story, and it wasn't a happy mother-daughter story. My mother and I had had quite a good relationship. I don't know why her passing somehow inspired the situation between Olamina and her daughter. Whatever was going on with me, the story began to live and move. In a sense, it was my mother's last gift to me.

Why have you described Parable of the Talents as a novel of solutions?
Talents is intended to be not only a continuation of Sower and of Olamina's life, but of people trying either individually or in groups to find some way out of their trouble. Olamina herself is doing this through Earthseed. She's blundering. She doesn't know how to "spread the word" effectively. She isn't sure she can do it. She only knows that it must be done. Other people know different things. Some know they must endure. They must settle for what they can get, expect less, adapt to an existence closer in some ways to the nineteenth century than to the twenty-first.

Some know that they have to get away from the chaotic "old country" that the U.S.A. has become. These people emigrate to Canada, to Alaska, even to Siberia—places made more hospitable by global warming.

Some people know that if they can only find the people responsible for all the chaos and punish them, stop them, kill them, then all will be well again. Hunting for scapegoats is always popular in times of serious trouble. So is hunting for the great leader who will restore prosperity and stability. Some people know that that's the answer. If they could just find the strong, powerful leader that they need, all would be well. And, unhappily for them, they do find such a leader. That leader has his own answers. He turns his true believers—his thugs—loose on those he chooses as scapegoats and he looks around for an external enemy to use as an even bigger scapegoat and a diversion from the reality that he doesn't really know what to do. Because of him, innocent people lose their freedom, lose custody of their children, lose their lives. Because of him, the U.S. starts a war with Canada and Alaska over the Alaskan secession. Alaska has seceded from the union to become an independent country as its own answer to the chaos.

Sometimes the only thing more dangerous than frightened, confused, desperate people looking for solutions is frightened, confused, desperate people finding and settling for truly bad solutions.

What do you think the experience of humans reaching worlds in other solar systems will be like?
First, I'm not sure it will ever happen. It will be a complex, expensive, long, long, long-term multitude of projects. Will we remain a wealthy, educated, industrially competent society long enough to send a few people out of our solar system? Will we want to spend the time, money, and effort to do that? Will we be content sending robots in our places? Will we be physically able to go?

If we go in sleeper ships, perhaps, or multigenerational ships, or in some other arrangement, we'll need to do it after we've discovered living worlds other than Earth. This happens in Parable of the Sower, but has not happened yet in fact. A human settlement on an extrasolar world would not be able to depend on resupply from Earth. The more our new world can do for us the more likely we are to be able to survive on it. For instance, a world that offers breathable air, potable water—or water that can easily be made potable—and arable land is much more desirable than a dead world like the moon or Mars. Where water must be mined like gold; where air must be caged in vast community-wide bubbles and carefully maintained; where normal temperature extremes range, literally, between freezing and boiling; where even small mistakes may be fatal; chances of survival are less.

On the other hand, the more our new world can do for us, the more it might be able to do to us. I intend to write about communities of Earthseed who, in fulfillment of the Destiny, go out to extrasolar worlds. I'm not planning to write about encounters with intelligent natives. My characters will have all they can do to survive the challenges that their new worlds throw at them.

In Parable of the Talents, Olamina refuses to leave Acorn, the community she has created. She sees Acorn as the beginning of Earthseed, the first of many Earthseed communities. But ultimately, her refusal to leave costs her her family. Her husband is killed, her child is taken away, she is imprisoned and brutalized until she can get free. Where do you think the line should be drawn between commitment to self versus commitment to community?
Was Olamina committed to herself? She would not think so. She sees herself as committed to something much larger than herself, something she believes will make life better for the species, for humankind. Surely, she could have lived a safer, more comfortable life in Halstead, the larger, long-established town that her husband wanted to move to.

But was it her duty to leave Acorn for the good of her child? Her child certainly thought so. Her husband thought so. If her dedication was only to her family, and not to the people she had brought together, or to her beliefs, then she should have gone to live in Halstead. There's no guarantee that she and her family would have survived in Halstead, but all of their chances would have been better there.

Should her dedication have been only to her family?

When I was a girl and the civil rights movement was in full stride, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, a homemaker, a white woman of Detroit, Michigan, went to Alabama to help in the peaceful struggle for human rights for African Americans. For her trouble, she was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Memory of this incident has stayed with me because later in a women's magazine, I read a number of letters to the editor in which letter writers insisted that it was Mrs. Liuzzo's duty to stay at home and look after her family.

She had no right, the letter writers said, to involve herself in a struggle not her own. She had no right to deprive her husband of a wife, her children of a mother. And, of course, she had no intention of doing any of that. She was murdered, after all. Interesting that not one of those letter writers condemned her murderers. They only condemned her.

Duty can be cast as a selfish and shortsighted monster.

When I was researching religions in preparation for writing Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, I ran across the story of the temptation of Buddha. Buddha was tempted not only by the promise of wealth, greatness, and beautiful women, but by responsibility, by duty, by the fact that his father was a king. It was his responsibility to inherit the throne and look after the welfare of his people. He had no business going out to seek enlightenment, no business traveling and teaching and seeking to ease suffering.

He resisted the temptation. It was, I thought, the most interesting temptation I'd ever run across. Clearly, I kept it in mind.

Education for everyone played a major part in Earthseed, but not such an important part in the surrounding society. What problems do you see in education today that foreshadow the problems of Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents?
I wrote the way I did about education in the two novels because I kept hearing or reading such contempt for public education, and at the same time such enthusiasm for the building and filling of more and more prisons.

Shortly after I finished Parable of the Sower, I read an L.A. Times story about convicts being forbidden to take college classes. Why? So they would not benefit from their crimes, so they would not learn in prison what others must pay to learn outside of prison.

But, in fact, people will learn, no matter where they are. We are learning animals, we humans. College classes or no college classes, people will learn. The only question is what they will learn, and what choices they will see before them once they leave prison.

I read about schools that didn't have enough books for their students.

I read about schools that were physically dangerous because they were war zones and schools physically dangerous because they were falling apart—chunks of plaster falling from the ceiling.

I read about some public colleges and universities required to discontinue remedial classes so that people with a little catching up to do after surviving their high schools would be required to go elsewhere—or nowhere.

I read about court cases wherein localities had to be legally prevented from dumping large numbers of minority children into "special education" classes.

I heard a member of Congress explain on television that there was no scientific proof that small classes (instead of big, overcrowded ones) helped kids learn. I had difficulty imagining his kids in overcrowded

inner-city classrooms. "You can't," he said, "solve these problems by throwing money at them."

I heard congresspeople insist that the answer to poor public schools was to undermine those schools even more by issuing vouchers to send the kids whose parents could afford the fees not covered by the vouchers to private school. And as for those kids left in the even less well-funded public schools . . . ? Well, tough!

The problem, of course, with throwing people away is that they don't go away. They stay in the society that turned its back on them. And whether that society likes it or not, they find all sorts of things to do.

Here in California, a few years ago voters passed an initiative intended to prevent illegal aliens from using our schools and hospitals. The courts have so far prevented this fantastically stupid law from being enforced, but what bothers me is, a majority of voting Californians thought it would be a really good idea to share our state with large numbers of sick, uneducated people. Of course, the true goal was to force the illegals out, but as long as there are jobs here—even dirty, ill-paid, dangerous jobs—needy people from other countries will come here. Best they maintain their health, and in doing so, maintain the public health. And best their children go to school and become the educated Americans that the country will need for a positive future. Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower, after all, are about the kind of society we might wind up with otherwise.

What do you see as the future of science fiction (SF)?
Science fiction will go wherever its readers and its writers take it, wherever society takes it. As far as subject matter is concerned, it's always been a more open genre than any other, and yet, ironically, it's always been perceived as narrow, simplistic, and juvenile. People who don't read SF are all too likely to imagine that there's nothing more to the genre than what they see presented on-screen—a special-effects-fest ranging from Buck Rogers to Star Trek to Star Wars—with maybe X-Files on the side.

There's so much published SF that people who try to read a little are sadly likely to wind up reading something they don't like or worse, something that confirms their worst suspicions. So, SF is likely to be judged by its worst elements. After all, there's plenty of bad stuff out there.

Inevitably, in any writing, fiction or nonfiction, there's more bad stuff than good. The best method, by the way, for finding SF that you'll like is to take a look at the end-of-the-year anthologies. The ones that come to mind right now are The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, and the Nebula Awards series (several editors). And there is The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, a big multi-volume, multi-editor anthology that covers much of the history of science fiction.

Books like these will at least give the new reader a chance to see what's good out there. And most of the writers who have short stories in these anthologies have also written novels. There is, in spite of everything, a lot of good reading out there.

Good stories are good stories, no matter how they're categorized.

Octavia E. Butler; Pasadena, California; May 1999