“Speech Sounds”, by Octavia Butler

Story Overview

• Octavia Butler is a big deal in the history of science fiction
  • One of the first African American women SF authors
  • Additionally, like the Cyberpunk movement, she arrived at a time when SF was looking for something new and emerged with a radically different voice
  • Equally as bleak as Cyberpunk, Butler also distrusts technology and has little belief in human progress
• “Speech Sounds” won the Hugo in 1984
  • Her first of many Hugo and Nebula award wins
  • This was the story that first got her noticed, after a few years of less attention
• In addition to numerous SF award wins, she is the only SF writer to wina MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grants” given to individuals of exceptional talent
  • These awards usually go to literary writers
  • Butler’s was for $$$295,000
• Early on, was championed by Harlan Ellison
  • Butler attended the third Clarion Workshop in 1971
    • This workshop has become the SF writer bootcamp of note.
    • Most major contemporary SF authors have attended or taught at Clarion
  • Supposedly, on the second day of class, Ellison, having read the students’ work, walked in and said “none of you have any talent, except this Butler woman; she has promise.”
• Initially published Patternist series of novels (since republished as Seeds to Harvest):
  • Patternmaster (1976)
  • Mind of My Mind (1977)
  • Survivor (1978)
  • Wild Seed (1980)
  • Clay’s Ark (1984)
• In 1979, Kindred appeared, which is important outside SF as well as in
  • The novel tells the story of a contemporary African American woman who has to travel back in time to make sure her slave ancestor is impregnated against her will by her owner.
  • Fits into the postmodern slave narrative alongside Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• She is also famous for the Xenogenesis series (which are awesome, if I can insert my editorial opinion) and the pair of Parable novels
  • “Blood Child” (1984) is also widely anthologized
• She suffered from serious writer’s block that prevented her from finishing Parable of the Trickster, which was to be the third Parable novel
• Did publish Fledgling (2005), about vampires, shortly before her death

Themes in Butler

• Mutualism and/as violence
• Racial and sexual violence as a condition of human existence
• Disease and the limits of the body
• Collapse of society caused by existing hierarchies rather than in spite of them

Afrofuturism

• Octavia Butler is an early practitioner of afrofuturism, which is the other major SF trend in the 1980s
• A multimedia aesthetic, it first emerged in music:
  • The Sun Ra Arkestra
  • Parliament-Funkadelic
    • Listen to “Mothership Connection” as an example
  • Detroit Techno
  • Lee “Scratch” Perry
  • Afrika Bambaataa
• Definition:
  • A multimodal movement to reclaim the future for black people, building SF out of the elements of African diasporic culture.
• Black Panther is to afrofuturism what The Matrix was to cyberpunk: a mainstream acknowledgement of a counterculture aesthetic.
• Early literary examples include W.E.B. Du Bois’s SF and George Schulyer’s Black No More
• Contemporary practitioners include:
  • N.K. Jemisin
  • Nnedi Orkafur

Themes

• Decay:
  • “Two young men were … replace lost curses”
  • “The instant the bus … who might rob or murder them”
    • How does this depiction of decay mirror usual depictions of post-apocalyptic life?
  • “The man took … that was all”
    • What do we know about the history of the Los Angeles Police Department that might make this scene particularly ironic?
  • “She dressed in … keeping him.”
  • “Obsidian took … to kill him.”
    • How does hope function in this story? How does this inform our understanding of the ending?
  • “Fluent speech! … teachers and protectors”
    • Same as the previous question. Should we trust this hope?
• Communication:
  • “Rye sat a few feet … could happen anytime.”
  • “The beareded man … even display it.”
  • ” It was the driver’s property … man and shouted.”
  • “Loss of verbal language … beginning with him.”
• Animals:
  • “People screamed … hit the other.”
  • “She nodded … they would ever be.”
    • How do we communicate a sense of time as past, present, and future without language?
  • “She had been about … done nothing.”
• Disease:
  • “The illness … highly specific.”
• The Ending:
  • “The boy covered her mouth … for you to talk to me.”
  • Again, given the way hope and time function in this story, how do we take the ending?

Conclusions

One common and important theme in Octavia Butler’s work, especially the Parable novels, is the use of language used to describe the urban poor to imagine a dystopian future. Set in a violent, decaying future Los Angeles, where the lack of communication skills has made people resort to sudden, animalistic violence, Butler imagines a future that mimics the way in which inner cities were (and still often are) described during the 1980s: marked by sudden violence and populated by people who are little better than animals. Of course, by making this into a condition of the world itself, rather than just a rhetorical lens placed over a particular community, Butler highlights the artificiality of these conditions.

Additionally, the story connects to Butler’s larger interests in violence as a basic condition of human being, where even seemingly loving relationships are marked by the possibility of explosive and sudden violence.