Posted on 06/22/2018 8:15:54 AM PDT by Celerity
"By writing black female protagonists into science fiction, and bringing her acute appraisal of real-world power structures to bear on the imaginary worlds she created, Butler became an early pillar of the subgenre and aesthetic known as Afrofuturism. (Kara Walker cites her as an inspiration; and, as Hilton Als has pointed out, Butler is the “dominant artistic force” in Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade.”) In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Kellyanne Conway made a strong case for George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” when she used the phrase “alternative facts” and sent the novel to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” also experienced a resurgence in sales, and its TV adaptation on Hulu inspired protest costumes. But for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler’s novel and its sequel may be unmatched."
"The Donner Administration has written off science, but a more immediate threat lurks: a violent movement is being whipped up by a new Presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot who is running on a platform to “make American great again.”
(Excerpt) Read more at octaviabutler.org ...
>>personally, I like duckduckgo.com.
plus, they have a bang-search for freerepublic built in.
“!freep duckduckgo” :)
I use duckduckgo but don’t like the search results it gives me as much as what Google gives me.
However, I plan on continuing to use duckduckgo and put up with it.
If anybody asks me, I recommend Slimjet as a browser with the AdBlockPlus, ReaderView, and Ghostery add-ons and DuckDuckGo for searches. Google sucks.
I can't decide which is more dangerous, violence inducing and hateful...
Fake News?
Fake history?
Fake "ancestry.com" glorious feel good crap about African greatness that never was and never can be?
From your link:
Scholarship Fund
The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship enables writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Octavia got her start. Visit the fund page for more info.
That’s racist.
Use Google, just avoid clicking on any of their links to sites which are marked as ads (word “ad” appearing in a small square). The same company’s site without the ad link will appear later down in the search results.
Use them, but starve them of their ad dollars.
Common mistake.
I would rather have an "I like it" as that IS your opinion humble or not, and as adults we can decide "good" for ourselves.
Does any search engine usefully index Free Republic any more? Google and Duck sure don’t.
I can't say this for ALL alternate search engines but startpage (I use) completes your search using google. They just hide that its you from the googlers. It should come as no surprise that you would get similar results.
Hold it right there. Octavia Butler is black. Science fiction was created by whites. This is cultural appropriation.
What’s Google?
Big Internet needs to be broken up. I’m not a huge fan of antitrust, but this might be a really good use for it.
Most annoying is RETRO-afroism:
Black Vikings, black leprachauns, black knights, black cowboys, etc.
If Slimjet blocks all adds why AdBlockPlus?
And I use ReminderFox. I’m going to try Slimjet for a bit. Need to get ReminderFox hooked up to it if possible.
I recall her worst, which she allowed to be published once, and then refused that it ever be published again, because it was so bad.
Title? I didn’t know that and it increases my respect for her. Not every author recognizes their own stinkers. The best of the best produce them, from time to time.
I read her plots as more sociological dystopian than hatred of western civilization. Look at the present Deep State situation. It pervades everything, including what we currently acknowledge as western civilization. I can see an outsider (which is how I’d characterize Butler in her time) looking for ways to *overcome*.
Heinlein, who was a patriot,could be quite biting when writing about political constructs.
The book is “Survivor”
https://www.amazon.com/Survivor-Doubleday-Science-Fiction-Octavia/dp/0385133855
Butler considered it really, really, bad.
I agree with her. It was filled with idea after idea that was simply not believable.
Good science fiction takes one big, difficult to believe thing, (such as faster than light drive, or reliable ESP) and builds a whole world or storyline from it.
But being confronted by unbelievable thing after unbelievable thing, after unbelievable thing just converts science fiction into a series of “miracles”.
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