Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements Read online

  Advance praise for Octavia’s Brood

  “Never has one book so thoroughly realized the dream of its namesake. Octavia’s Brood is the progeny of two lovers of Octavia Butler and their belief in her dream that science fiction is for everybody. In these pages, we witness the power of sci-fi to map our visions of worlds we want, or don’t, through the imaginations of some of our favorite activists and artists. We hope this is the first of many generations of Octavia’s Brood, midwifed to life by such attentive editors. Butler could not wish for better evidence of her touch changing our literary and living landscapes. Play with these children, read these works, and find the children in you waiting to take root under the stars!” —Moya Bailey and Ayana Jamieson, Octavia E. Butler Legacy

  “‘All social justice work is science fiction. We are imagining a world free of injustice, a world that doesn’t yet exist.’ The first time I heard adrienne maree brown provide that frame, I was changed. A longtime devotee to Octavia Butler, my ideas about love and community and family, and of course, the future have been shaped by her fiction. But brown offered a new and utterly useful prompt, a way to integrate all of my selves (for I’d long viewed my “activist” self as some separate person). In this provocative collection of fiction, Walida Imarisha and adrienne maree brown provide boundless space for their writers—changemakers, teachers, organizers, and leaders—to untether from this realm their struggles for justice. Most of these stories are written by people who are new to fiction. Political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal literally writes from behind walls. Yet he writes with abandon, giving us new, imaginative analyses of an American classic. Like Butler’s fiction, this collection is cartography, a map to freedom.” —dream hampton, filmmaker and Visiting Artist at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts

  “Those concerned with justice and liberation must always persuade the mass of people that a better world is possible. Our job begins with speculative fictions that fire society’s imagination and its desire for change. In adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s visionary conception, and by its activist-artists’ often stunning acts of creative inception, Octavia’s Brood makes for great thinking and damn good reading. The rest will be up to us.”—Jeff Chang, Who We Be: The Colorization of America

  “Octavia once told me that two things worried her about the future of humanity: The tendency to think hierarchically, and the tendency to place ourselves higher on the hierarchy than others. I think she would be humbled beyond words that the fine, thoughtful writers in this volume have honored her with their hearts and minds. And that in calling for us to consider that hierarchical structure, they are not walking in her shadow, nor standing on her shoulders, but marching at her side.” —Steven Barnes, author of Lion’s Blood

  “Conventional exclamatory phrases don’t come close to capturing the essence of what we have here in Octavia’s Brood. One part sacred text, one part social movement manual, one part diary of our future selves telling us, ‘It’s going to be okay, keep working, keep loving.’ Our radical imaginations are under siege and this text is the rescue mission. It is the new cornerstone of every class I teach on inequality, justice, and social change. It is my new reference for how to think across fabricated boundaries—organizers vs. artists, academy vs. community, real world vs. utopia, doing vs. envisioning. It should take pride of place on our nightstands, within reach any time we become weary with the world as it is. [Octavia’s Brood is] a portal, a gateway, a glimpse in to an alternate reality where the answer to the perennial question, What Do We Owe Each Other?, turns out to be ‘Everything, Everything…’ This is the text we’ve been waiting for.” —Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier

  To Octavia E. Butler, who serves as a north star for so many of us. She told us what would happen—“all that you touch you change”—and then she touched us, fearlessly, brave enough to change us. We dedicate this collection to her, coming out with our own fierce longing to have our writing change everyone and everything we touch.

  “I am not going to die, I’m going home like a shooting star.”

  —Sojourner Truth

  Contents

  Foreword 1

  Sheree Renée Thomas

  Introduction 3

  Walidah Imarisha

  Revolution Shuffle 7

  Bao Phi

  The Token Superhero 15

  David F. Walker

  the river 23

  adrienne maree brown

  Evidence 33

  Alexis Pauline Gumbs

  Black Angel 43

  Walidah Imarisha

  The Long Memory 57

  Morrigan Phillips

  Small and Bright 79

  Autumn Brown

  In Spite of Darkness 89

  Alixa Garcia

  Hollow 109

  Mia Mingus

  Lalibela 123

  Gabriel Teodros

  Little Brown Mouse 135

  Tunde Olaniran

  Sanford and Sun 145

  Dawolu Jabari Anderson

  Runway Blackout 167

  Tara Betts

  Kafka’s Last Laugh 177

  Vagabond

  22XX: One-Shot 187

  Jelani Wilson

  Manhunters 197

  Kalamu ya Salaam

  Aftermath 215

  LeVar Burton

  Fire on the Mountain 225

  Terry Bisson

  Homing Instinct 239

  Dani McClain

  Children Who Fly 249

  Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

  Star Wars and the American Imagination 255

  Mumia Abu-Jamal

  The Only Lasting Truth 259

  Tananarive Due

  Outro 279

  adrienne maree brown

  Acknowledgments 283

  Bios 287

  Foreword

  Birth of a Revolution

  Sheree Renée Thomas

  “We believe it is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.”

  —Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown

  In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. cautioned us about adding “deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”1 He wrote that darkness cannot drive out darkness, that hate cannot drive out hate, and he reminded us that only love can do that. Thirty years later, Octavia E. Butler wrote in her novel Parable of the Sower that our “destiny is to take root among the stars.”2 The activist and the artist seem at first to have been engaged in markedly different lifework, yet they embraced a shared dream for the future. Their work is linked by faith and a fusion of spiritual teachings and social consciousness, a futuristic social gospel. In its essence, social justice work, which King embodied and Butler expressed so skillfully in her novels and stories, is about love—a love that has the best hopes and wishes for humanity at heart.

  Today social justice represents one of the most serious challenges to the conscience of our world. New technology and corporate political policies make it possible to accumulate wealth and power in startling, fantastic ways, while widening the gulf between those who have and those who don’t. In America and in the big beautiful world beyond, the gulf widens perversely, making a mockery of freedom, justice, democracy, and even mercy. James Baldwin said that we are not born knowing what these concepts mean, that they are neither common nor well defined. If we “individuals must make an enormous effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply,�
�� as he wrote, then our communities must make a sustained and concentrated effort to create societies that reflect that same sense of respect and meaning.3

  The stories in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements represent a global quest for social transformation, for justice. They are about people from different backgrounds and worlds, expanding the notions of solidarity and community, redefining service, and exploring and rediscovering the human spirit in baffling times, under challenging circumstances. The writers collected here offer stories that explore a broad range of social justice issues, from urban gentrification, bioterrorism, racism, and militarism to motherhood, environmentalism, spiritual journeys, and psychological quests. Culled from artists who in their other lives work tirelessly as community activists, educators, and organizers, these stories incite, inspire, engage. If the purpose of a writer, as Toni Cade Bambara said, “is to make revolution irresistible,” these writers, these stories represent.4 With incisive imagination and a spirited sense of wonder, the contributors bridge the gap between speculative fiction and social justice, boldly writing new voices and communities into the future.

  A trickster, teacher, chaos, and clay, God, as described by Octavia E. Butler in her Parable novels, is change, and Octavia’s Brood is an important resource in our journey toward positive cultural and institutional change. May it spawn new conversations in classrooms, inspire vigorous discussion in coffeehouses and book clubs, and create new organizing tools and “case studies” for strategizing in our community organizations.5

  1 Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), p. 47.

  2 Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1993), 77.

  3 James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 156.

  4 Toni Cade Bamabara, interview with Kate Bonetti (Columbia, MO: American Audio Prose Library, 1982).

  5 For more information, see Octavia’s Brood, http://www.octaviasbrood.com/.

  Introduction

  Walidah Imarisha

  Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds—so what better venue for organizers to explore their work than science fiction stories? That is the premise behind the book you hold in your hands.

  In the years we have been working on this book, many folks have asked us what science fiction could possibly have to do with social justice organizing. And every time, we have responded, “Everything. Everything.” We want organizers and movement builders to be able to claim the vast space of possibility, to be birthing visionary stories. Using their everyday realities and experiences of changing the world, they can form the foundation for the fantastic and, we hope, build a future where the fantastic liberates the mundane.

  We titled this collection in honor of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Butler explored the intersections of identity and imagination, the gray areas of race, class, gender, sexuality, love, militarism, inequality, oppression, resistance, and—most important—hope. Her work has taught us so much about the principles of visionary fiction, inspiring us. The title plays on Butler’s three novel collection, Lilith’s Brood, which is about adaptation as a necessity for survival. Changes will occur that we cannot even begin to imagine, and the next generation will be both utterly familiar and wholly alien to their parents. We believe this is what it means to carry on Butler’s legacy of writing visionary fiction.

  “Visionary fiction” is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.

  This anthology of visionary fiction contains short stories from people who have dedicated their lives to making change. It also includes pieces from well-known science fiction writers Tananarive Due, Terry Bisson, LeVar Burton, and Kalamu ya Salaam, and from award-winning journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal (who writes here about Star Wars and imperialism).

  The process for creating this anthology was unlike any either of us editors had been involved with before, one that was both very intensive and highly collaborative. We worked with contributors over the course of many rounds of edits to pull out the visionary aspects of their incredible stories, as well as to ensure that the writing and storytelling captivated and inspired. We appreciate immensely the countless hours each writer poured into this creation of love. And we both feel lucky beyond words that we had the support and advice of the incredible Sheree Renée Thomas, who edited the groundbreaking anthology Dark Matter: 100 Years of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora.

  Many of the contributors to Octavia’s Brood had never written fiction before, let alone science fiction. When we approached folks, most were hesitant to commit, feeling like they weren’t qualified. But overwhelmingly, they all came back a few weeks later, enthusiastically, with incredible ideas and some with dozens of pages already written. Because all organizing is science fiction, we are dreaming new worlds every time we think about the changes we want to make in the world. The writers in this collection just needed a little space, and perhaps permission to immerse themselves fully in their visionary selves.

  We especially wanted to make space for people whose identities are marginalized and oppressed within mainstream society. Art and culture themselves are time-traveling, planes of existence where the past, present, and future shift seamlessly in and out. And for those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us. For adrienne and myself, as two Black women, we think of our ancestors in chains dreaming about a day when their children’s children’s children would be free. They had no reason to believe this was likely, but together they dreamed of freedom, and they brought us into being. We are responsible for interpreting their regrets and realizing their imaginings. We wish to continue the work of moving forward with their visionary legacy.

  At a retreat for women writers in 1988, Octavia E. Butler said that she never wanted the title of being the solitary Black female sci-fi writer. She wanted to be one of many Black female sci-fi writers. She wanted to be one of thousands of folks writing themselves into the present and into the future. We believe in that right Butler claimed for each of us—the right to dream as ourselves, individually and collectively. But we also think it is a responsibility she handed down: are we brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries of “the real” and then do the hard work of sculpting reality from our dreams?

  Revolution Shuffle

  Bao Phi

  She got to the top of the high hill first. She sat in the grass, dropping her pack down beside her, and drummed her fingers on the machine pistol holstered at her hip. As he caught up and stood beside her, she looked up, cocking her head, and flashed a crooked grin. The moon was out, lighting wispy bare clouds in the sky. “Old man hair clouds,” she quipped.

  After a moment of silence, she asked him, “What do you miss right now?”

  This game again. “A messy plate of nachos,” he said with a sigh. “You?”

  “Phở,” she replied, pronouncing it the way only a Vietnamese American whose best language skills revolved around a menu could. He heard it the way a Vietnamese American who understood Vietnamese best when it was coming from his parents would. He smiled. Phở was al
ways her answer.

  “How about that lady with the shack out by that camp,” he asked softly, craning his neck, peering up at stars. “You remember, that camp just outside the remains of Kansas City?”

  She let out a dismissive puff of air through her lips. “Dingy beef water and spaghetti noodles do not a phở make, buddy,” she laughed. “You of all people should feel me on that one.”

  “Certainly wasn’t as good as my mom’s, that’s for sure,” he deadpanned.

  She laughed loud and sudden, her smile cornering deep into her cheeks. They were about the same height and roughly the same age, so most assumed that they were brother and sister, though they could not look any more different. While both had black hair, hers cascaded down her back, a river in the dark. His was ragged and short like a burnt field. Her small long eyes slanted, like two dark swans, beaks dipping in to kiss above her nose. His eyes were deep, difficult. She was beautiful, magnetic, even if she did not want to be. His appearance was forgettable at best; for better or worse, he was always the background.

  In the distance, the rough silhouettes of nine giant metal pistons rose into the night sky, temporarily blotting out their view of the moon and stars. The hydraulic arms lifting the pistons repetitively jackknifed and then stretched with a low bellowing groan. The drums of steel hung suspended in the air for a moment like the hammers of gods poised to strike, then dropped dully to the earth, thumping the ground, the noise and impact felt and heard for miles. Though they were used to tremors from the machinery, the two companions started slightly and looked down the hill at the prison camp surrounding the gigantic ground-shaking devices.

  The dim light emanating from the interior complexes barely illuminated the pacing guards and nesting snipers on top of the tall walls. The guards’ heads constantly turned on their necks as the guards vigilantly watched the two populations, one on either side of the barbed wire and thick concrete. On one side were the throngs of shuffling zombies attracted by the sound of the giant pistons, groaning listlessly against the slanting thick concrete base of the wall. And inside the work camp were the Asian Americans and Arabs forcibly interned there. Officially, the incarcerated were doing a service for their country by maintaining the rhythmic dance of the giant pistons, keeping them fueled, repairing them, as the sound and impact of the giant tamping devices lured the shambling hungry masses. Less officially, the smell of the inmate’s flesh, tantalizingly out of reach of the zombies on the other side of the wall, kept the undead there, fresh meat outside of the lion’s cage.