The Worlds of the ‘Remarkably Prescient’ Octavia Butler

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Veronica Chambers, the editor of Narrative Projects at The New York Times, was shocked when she saw the work of the pioneer science fiction writer.

While other authors in the genre were writing about aliens, Ms. Chambers marveled at how Ms. When Ms. Chambers was planning story ideas for the coming year, she wanted to do a project for the 75th anniversary of Ms.Butler's birth.

Ms. Chambers said that Ms.Butler was prescient. The issues she was writing about 30 years ago are still relevant today.

An interactive piece that was published online last week appeared in the arts and leisure section this weekend. It looks at key locations and moments from Ms.Butler's life and how they shaped her writing.

A team of artists, designers, editors and writers built the project over the course of nine months. It gives a 3-D view of the Los Angeles Central Library, where Ms.Butler spent most of her early years as an aspiring writer.

Ms. Chambers said that they wanted to straddle the line between people who love her and know her work well, and the vast number of readers who will be introduced to her.

In February, Ms. Chambers traveled from London to California to visit the Huntington, a library and research institution that has a collection of Ms.Butler's papers. She was accompanied by a journalist and historian, who published a book in 2020 called "A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E.Butler." The Times article was written by Ms.George.

Ms. George had a lot of notes and research to do.

She wanted to show how certain moments in her life influenced her writing.

Ms. Chambers and Ms. George were involved in selecting the sites and moments that would highlight major themes of Ms.

A media artist by the name of Ainslee Alem Robson captured thousands of photos at multiple angles and then used reconstruction software to create 3-D models from them.

The team had to come up with inventive ways to capture many of the environments. There is a scene in the article depicting the dust on Mars. There are 3-D models and images from the Mars rover at the landing site named after Ms.

Image

This is the real library, the real bus, and the actual landscape of Mars. The photos of the real material were used to create them.

Danny DeBelius, a graphics and multimedia editor, created a flipbook-style tool that allows readers to scroll through each location on a virtual path, stopping to explore as they please.

The visual representation of the book was the most difficult. She wanted to show the interracial relationship at the center of the novel, so she decided to take a picture of her parents, her mother and her father in a cotton field. The left arm of the female main character, Dana, is severed.

It felt likeracism would be winning if I cut my mom's arm off.

She used a center camera path to allow readers to pass through her parents' arms. The cotton plants are tracked through the visual.

Ms. Chambers hopes that the project will allow people to connect with Ms.Butler as a person.

She said that people don't need to like sci-fi to identify with a woman working side jobs.