Great to hear from you,

I'll reply as I go since I'm not sure how soon you need these answers and that was you can ask follow up questions if necessary.

1. What is your name (will be used to attribute you in the piece)

Zachari Brumaire

2. What is your age

Age 27 (Day 10,207)

3. How were you introduced to Octavia Butler's work, and what kind of impact did it have on you?

ironically I first encountered Butler through Orason Scott Card. At the time I was a kid and very enthusiastic about writing and my godparents have me Card's 'How to Write Sci-fi and fantasy' book, which quotes and praises Butler's work at length, especially her book Wildseed. 

I say ironically because Orason Scott Card was/is a far right homophobic author and Butler's work is extremely queer, it's a very consistent and central theme of her corpus. 

So I first encountered Butler through praise of Wildseed and later that was the first novel I read of hers. I'm very interested in SF that deals with magic and religion and the occult, Wildseed follow a woman believed to be a witch or goddess, as she has the power to change shape into an animal, become young again, live for centuries, metabolize curse to infections by conscious use of her own immune system. She's sad because while some of her children have been born with abilities, none have had the ability to extend their lifetime on her order of magnitude. This was and remains one of finest novels I've read.

4. Are there specific books that are particularly appealing to you?

Wildseed is my favorite Butler novel. I'm pretty fond of a couple of the Blood child anthology works. 

5. From a social/political perspective, how does Butler speak about the world around her, does this resonate with you?

I think Wildseed is great as SF and great as literature about dealing with exploited and have one's labor used to further the ill effects of capitalism and colonialism and patriarchy against your will, and how to survive and resist that. I can't really call it a hopeful book, but I can't call out world particularly hopeful either. what matters to me is that it's a stratigic book. not in the sense that it prescribes steps per se--it's about the emotions of being vigilant, undermining your enemies, striving and sometimes succeeding at becoming ungovernable.

I would point to China Mieville's Iron Council for a similar quality, it's this steampunk New Weird novel about an attempted revolution in a grimmy, grimdark fantasy world. His attention to the body, as something immanent and grotesque and fragile and queer, I think it very much is in line with and inspired by Butler, she definitely deserves to be recognized as a grandmother or godmother of New Weird.

Separately from New Weird, I would point to Bleed Out, Songs for Pierre Chauvin, and other albums by The Mountain Goats. Like Butler, these albums deal very heavily with being exploited and abused and still fighting, still surviving, still plotting, reveling in the zones of the alien, the haunted, the old gods and psychedelic mazework. 

There's maybe something to the idea that if you can't find your way out of a prison or a paradigm by the normal methods of looking, it's worth seeing if a pathway presents itself under a stranger fire, and Butler is all about profane illuminations, to palm a phrase from Walter Benjamin, who is a rather Butlerian philosopher, in a way, in the style of Borges' essay "On Kafka's Precursors". Benjamin has this idea of Messianic Time, the time of disruption when a new world might--it's always provisional, there's no guarantee of success--break through, when change becomes imaginable precisely because change generally is inevitable because the status quo has become impossible possible, history or social conflict is driven to such extreme that raw and unchecked powers get unleashed and transform the landscapes that originated them. to quote Borges' contemporary and another Butlerian precursor, "The Old World is Dying the New World is struggling to be born. Now is the the Time of Monsters." 

6. As a young person, what impact does "Speculative Fiction" have on you

well as a young person, born into the end of history, neoliberalism, late capitalism, becoming politically aware during the Great Recession, stuck in a world with awful work and a collapsing climate and rising food prices and health care prices and no real institutional resistance to covid and genocide, everything is so incredibly bleak.

to imagine the world as it is is verboten. you can call out these problems as the inherent attributes of capitalism and empire, but politicaly speaking no one in power is entertaining calls to abolish capitalism, to stop the crises. everything must just be treated as so much bad news, so much bad luck. the symptoms are bad, but the causes, the causes are very good.

likewise, to imagine the world differently is verboten. capitalist realism removes capitalism as a historicized process which can be isolated as existing or not existing, and abstracts it into just the way things are, just human nature, as indelible as mathematics. 

so speculative fiction exists in this risky space and moment where the imagination has been politicized, that is, where the political imagination has been strictly stamped out, because you can't imagine the world as it is (theorize) nor imagine the world as it might otherwise be (revolutionize) at the level of material policy making. which means you get put into this risky situation where imagininitive or fictional works, think especially of sword and sorcerer, high fantasy genre spaces which are very often very far right, many such works end up embracing the  politically conservative role into which the imagination has been cast and end up reproducing Randian fantasies of hierarchy and good versus evil and white colonialist revelry, just with dragons and wizards. under capitalist realism is very easy for fantasy to "non politically" reproduce and naturalize the status quo.

In contrast, speculative fiction, at least what I would call radical speculative fiction of which I would include Butler as a very prominent author, can help us to see and thereby step outside of the naturalized assumptions about how the world is and how it can be, making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. it brings fresh light from strange fire to the analysis.

At the affective level, just in terms of maintaining morale, speculative fiction is a gasp of fresh air when the conceptually impoverished smog that passes for political discourse as practiced and prescribed by those in power is threatening to engulf you. Butler helps us exercise our imagininitive faculties which is absolutely necessary in a paradigm which would prefer to see them atrophy or go wall-crazy.

7. Why does dystopian literature appeal to you?

dystopian and utopian works are particularly (though not uniquely) invested in providing fiction about society, and I'm very interested in imagining and discussing society and social change. storytelling is a pretty essential component to organizing people and culture. that's pretty central to what I'm about as a reader and a writer.

8. Do you think books like Parable of the Sower, which is set in 2024, and published in the 90s serve as a cautionary tale? If yes, how so?

Not so much a cautionary tale as a a warped mirror of where we already are. it probably was a cautionary tale when it was written, but the authoritarianism and exponential climate collapse and fortress society aspects are I think already largely in place and dominating our politics.

9. Can you pull from the text on their resemblances?

I mainly listen to audiobooks so I don't have direct quotations handy, but one passage I would point to and which I'll try to track down is the part in Wildseed where the protagonist has transformed herself into a dolphin and lives for years in the ocean and reflects on how she'll never be free from her exploited/pursuer Doro until either she allows herself to be killed or until Doro posseses her body and thereby kills her personality or until Doro, who has been immortal for four thousand years at this point, can in some way be killed. I think that passage exemplifies the sense of being trapped and still struggling to survive and evade and resist one's enemies which is so central to the lives of us the dispossessed.

10. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

11. Who else can I speak to?

you should contact the lovely folks at Locust Review, a small independent press which publishes works if Critical Irrealism, and which professes to be inspired by Butler, genre SF, magical realism, surrealism, etc. 

if at all possible you should also reach out to the author Jo Walton, she has an encyclopedic like familiarity with SF and speculative fiction. she has a podcast with fellow SF novelist Ada Palmer called the Ex Urbe Ad Astra podcast about the craft of writing and the cultural history of science fiction.