Octavia Butler – Treehouse Writers

Last weekend I saw a movie that combined science fiction with political activism and food: Earth Seed: A People’s Journey of Radical Hospitality. It was the start of the documentary’s national tour; you can see the schedule here.

The name Earth Seed, of course, comes from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. These books have not only resonated with science fiction readers over the years, but also have become focuses for activist groups. They seem all too relevant, in part because they were written in the 1990s about a future starting in 2024 that isn’t as far removed from our own as we would like it to be.

The People’s Kitchen Collective – an Oakland group that has been providing meals for events and gatherings for many years – decided in 2023 to do and film a pilgrimage up California from Los Angeles to Mendocino that echoes the path taken by Lauren in Parable of the Sower.

Along the way, they meet with various community groups and prepare amazing meals while having deep discussions with the people.

It is a movie that inspires activism and community building and, to use their phrase, radical hospitality. In fact, a great deal of the movie as well as the discussion after the screening focused on what those words truly mean.

The film begins in Los Angeles, particularly in Altadena, where it includes a visit to Octavia Butler’s grave. Many of the places where they filmed were destroyed in the fires earlier this year, which made the screening especially poignant. Continue reading “Radical Hospitality”…

Cover of the first edition of The Handmaid's Tale Historian Timothy Snyder keeps telling us “Do not obey in advance” even as more and more people appear to be leaping up to kiss the ring (or perhaps a part of the anatomy) of the grifter now apparently headed back to the White House in the ultimate triumph of the January 6 insurrection.

This week in his newsletter he is looking at Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in a three-part series. The third should be available the same day this post appears; the first is here and the second here.

In the first part, he critiques The New York Times’s summary of the book on its current trade paper bestseller list (where, I am glad to note, the book, which first came out forty years ago, has appeared for 139 weeks). The Times’s 16-word summary reads: “In the Republic of Gilead’s dystopian future, men and women perform the services assigned to them.”

His whole piece is worth reading, but he sums it up here:

Christian Reconstructionism is now at the edge of power in the United States, and the attitude of the relevant people towards the female body and indeed towards rape is an essential element of what is happening and what is likely to happen. Both-sidesism, prudery, and euphemisms are keeping much of the media from bringing this story together in time. We will need clear language in general, and this novel in particular, to see the whole picture. I will develop this in two posts to come.

In the second essay, he makes this point:

The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale is not a purely invented world based on the law and culture of one religion or another. It is a well-drawn post-America.

Prof. Snyder thinks this book is important to understanding where we are today and I certainly don’t disagree, though perhaps the most disturbing thing about what an accurate picture it paints of where we are is that the country did not take appropriate steps to head it off.

We can all argue about what those steps should have been, but I’ll leave that to others. I’m tired of dishing out blame. I’m more interested in fixes.

Alas, The Handmaid’s Tale, while an excellent description of one of the places we could be headed (the others being a utopia for certain tech bros and no one else or just the grifter’s unparalleled corruption accompanied by significant foreign influence) is not the best book for fixes. Continue reading “Living in Margaret Atwood’s Future”…