The Conversation contributed the article to Space.com's expert voices.
The assistant professor of English language and literature is from the University of South Carolina.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California awarded a yearlong Octavia E. butler fellowship to Alyssa Collins.
The first science fiction writer to be awarded a genius grant was the author of the book. A pioneer in a genre long dominated by white men, she explored power structures, changing definitions of humanity and alternative societies.
In an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Collins explains how Butler's curiosity inspired the author's work, and how she drew her to "humans who must deal with the edges or ends of humanity."
The man who died in 2006 would have been 75 years old on June 22nd.
The best space books in the future.
How did you come to be interested in this woman?
I first read his work in a graduate class. "Parable of the Sower" is a novel that was published in 1993 but is set in 21st-century America. The prescient nature of the novel caught my attention. I wanted to know if she had weird things on her backlist.
In 1984 there was an award-winning short story called " Bloodchild" about aliens and male pregnancies. I was hooked after I read that story.
Can you give us an idea of the scope of the collection and how much you were able to read?
There are manuscripts, correspondence, photos, research materials and other items in the collection. There are 386 boxes, one volume, two binders and 18 broadside folders inside.
When I started my fellowship, I was told that I wouldn't be able to see everything in the collection.
I've spent most of my time working through her research materials, including her note cards and notebooks. The content in these notebooks has allowed me to get a better idea of the thinking of the man.
One of the most surprising things you learned about butler was.
Every day I spent in her archive increased my esteem for her, even though I knew nothing about her prior to that. I was surprised by the breadth of her interests and knowledge, as well as the way she was able to bring disparate topics together.
Readers might not expect her interest in certain subjects to come through in her stories. symbiogenesis is an evolutionary theory based on cooperation instead of competition. In the movie "Bloodchild," readers can see that the author is thinking about how humans can interact with other species.
Your project is calledCellular Blackness. What is posthumanism and how does it relate to other works?
In graduate school, I was interested in how Black speculative writers in the 20th century imagined and interacted with a field of thought called posthumanism. Some scholars of posthumanism think about the limits of what makes us human, and if there are things we can do with technology that could make us posthuman.
I wanted to know how Black writers were engaging with the idea of posthumanism when Blackness had historically been thought of as inhuman, for example, justifications for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow segregation and ongoing state violence against Black.
Humans who must deal with the edges or ends of humanity are represented in her writing. Important decisions about humanity are made by Black women characters who have been erased. In my book project, I look at howButler sees humanity in her novels.
What aboutcellular blackness?
It appears that the speculative investigation of humanity takes place on the scale of cells.
Lilith, a black woman, considers helping a group of aliens who are interested in interbreeding with humans in a way that would end the human race. Lilith has a history of cancer in her family and the aliens call her a "talent for cancer." They are interested in the possibilities of regulating cell growth.
The story of Lacks, a black cancer patient who had her tumor cells collected without her knowledge at the age of 31, was an interest of the man. Lacks' rapidly reproduced and stayed alive even after his death, unlike the other samples that had been collected over the years. Her prolific cell line, called HeLa cells, are used around the world to study cancer cells and the effects of different treatments.
She imagined what HeLa cells could offer outside of a person's death. In works like "Dawn," you can see the idea of cellular replication as a concept that extends humanity.
The " Parable" books, which were written in the 1990s and set in the 2020s, have seen a resurgence in popularity recently. With society on the verge due to looming environmental catastrophe, rampant corporate greed and worsening economic inequality, the near future in these works seems prescient. Did you get any new insights from your time in the collection?
The problems of extreme climate change, income inequality, capitalistic exploitation, housing shortages, racial prejudice and the defunding of education aren't new problems, according to a report byButler.
She read a lot and thought a lot about what she read. If nothing were fixed, what a not-so-distant future would look like if she had taken what she learned from these sources.
In the 30 years since she wrote the books, the problems have only gotten worse.
Lauren is the main character in the first "Parable" novel. "All that you Change, Changes you" and "God is Change" are some of the mottos of change contained in Earthseed. There are a lot of people who are interested in pushing for change.
A writer at the University of South Carolina contributed to the article.
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