In Butler’s 1976 debut novel, Patternmaster, the author explores dominance and power in a community of telepaths. Not seeing herself on the pages of the mostly white, mostly male genre she loved inspired her to imagine fantasy worlds with black girls and women at the helm. A black girl coming of age in 1960s Pasadena didn’t have the luxury to invent worlds in which race and class didn’t matter. But reality for Butler, even in a genre that’s supposed to be boundaryless and reward creativity, posed a particular challenge. Sci-fi writers build futuristic worlds that connect the imaginary with reality. She was shocked that someone had been paid to write it, and knew she could do better. Octavia Estelle Butler had decided at 12 years old that she would become a writer after watching the 1954 movie Devil Girl from Mars on television. When Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was finally published in 1962, following a brutal 26 rejections, a teenage black girl in California was sowing the seeds of a future as the grand dame of science fiction.

Even the Oankali don’t trust the constructs, especially when we get into the third book, and we see ooloi constructs who are characterized as a reproductive mistake.Octavia E. There’s so much in here about bodies, like construct bodies, and how those people in the book are viewed really suspiciously by the humans. Because there are moments of deep identification I feel between myself and various different characters in the book, moments where there are angry humans outside, and inside there’s intimacy and exploration and connection, and alien bodies and human bodies. Nat: Asking the hard-hitting questions, and I’m going to answer by equivocating and saying… maybe! Honestly, it is a really complicated question. Nino: Do you think of this as a queer book? Wray, who talks with us about consent in kink and the erotics of power. The conversation focuses on consent and compromise, and they’re joined in the first half of this episode by kink practitioner, performer and astrologer E. Nat and Nino discuss Xenogenesis, Octavia Butler’s three-book series about alien invasion, human resistance and survival, alien-human family-making, tentacle sex, colonization, third genders, and so much more.

On the podcast, we discuss classic and contemporary novels, poetry, comics, games, tv-shows, and films that help us understand our dystopian moment-and imagine what could come next. Queers at the End of the World is a thoughtful, nerdy, and very queer conversation on the apocalypse.

Octavia butler xenogenesis series