Re:The Life of Octavia Butler
by maxbond on Saturday November 26, 2022 @12:29PM
(#33754678)
I really doubt Butler would be in favor of these particular people pursuing space for these particular goals. Something tells me that a leftist black woman would see Musk, who holds antifeminist views, who seems like he wants to personally rule mars, who's wealth literally originates from apartheid, and who's power comes from deep pockets and not from creating a movement of dedicated survivors who achieve power through collective action, as the wrong person to be involved in space exploration.
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That’s why I wish she was here: to articulate an alternative view
You may enjoy Becky Chambers's To Be Taught, if Fortunate and Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden. Neither is very Butlerian in its writing but they's taking aim at the same question of how we may do space colonization without space colonialism.
Politics makes strange bedfellows! We live in a strange enough timeline that it wouldn't surprise me if she was in support of "these people". It would certainly be a choice that would provoke and make people think hard about what it is they truly value.
Are you speculating that based on familiarity with her work or general principles about how things may work? Given what you say about the timeline being strange, and how that seems to be what motivates this speculation, I suspect maybe you haven't had a great deal of exposure to her, and so this conversation about her views on space travel might give you a skewed impression of how important to her space travel was? And therefore, how likely she'd be to make profound compromises for those views?