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This collection of stories isn't perfect, but how could it be. It is more like a collection of passionate conversations held around a dinner table with brilliant people, terrified and exhilarated for the future. Some are clumsy in their passion, some are cooly pessimistic, some are flighty with imagination, some grounded in present day inequality. I love this book and I will reread it over and over. This is the future, both of writing and of humanity.
Amazing collection, but many of these short stories seemed like they wanted to be longer works. Several times, I turned to the last page of a story and thought, "That's it? Where's the ending?" But even though many of the stories seemed to leave me dangling, the authors build worlds or futures that suck you in and create characters that you want to keep following. Here's hoping that they continue writing (and that some of them pick up full-length book contracts to continue building those worlds
Reading this I'm reminded of a collection of Voltairine de Cleyre's work I have that includes her forays into fiction. There is a certain earnest conviction and honesty about the work but it just isn't good and often borders on unreadable.*I found the same to be true about too many of the stories in this collection to be able to recommend it (regardless of how much I may sympathize with the authors' points of view).I'm also reminded of When the Music's Over (subtitled: "An Anthology of Tales Aga...
For conception, experimentation and and variety I give the book four stars; for well-executed fiction, I give it 2.5 or 3. There were a couple stories I really liked - mostly in the 2nd or 3rd parts of the book. I tried to mark all of those in the updates. The last three or four pieces are essays. Tananarive Due's essay about Octavia Butler as a speculative storyteller and inspiration is well worth a read for its distillation of Butler's recurring themes, little tidbits about the early AfAm spec...
I was extremely interested in the premise of this collection: speculative fiction built around social justice movements and/or concerns of today. And, the collection partially lived up to the hype, with intersectionalities of race, gender, sexuality, reproductive rights, social class, and spirituality confounding the direction(s) we may or may not be taking as a society. And a damn good story by Levar Burton--why did no one tell me he's an author?!Other stories in the collection were dull, or ev...
This incredible collection of stories is as important as it is fun and fascinating. Sure, not all the stories are brilliant or perfect, but most of them were compelling and many left me wanting more. I laughed out loud, cried, had my expectations continually exceeded, and was very sad to finish the last story. In fact I put off finishing this book for months because I didn't want it to end. The themes of change, struggle, spirit, and hope in the face of extreme challenges are reminiscent of Butl...
Add a new category to your bookshelves (and your life): "visionary fiction." This impressive collection, a publication collaboration by AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, defines the genre as connecting science fiction with social justice. There are 22 authors contributing the stories that comprise this volume, and their bios, printed at the end, provide an additional dimension of enjoyment and interpretation for the book. They all are community activists of various sorts (an amaz...
+2 stars because I respect Walidah.I feel so many feelings about this book. You know when you want to like something SO MUCH, because it's something your friend made, or something on your team did, but no matter how hard you try, you can only see the things to work on? That was this book. The folks who wrote these stories are all strong bad-asses in their activism, but write spec-fic like they need to clobber the reader with their politics. I'm already on board with the politics, that's why I'm
This is really beautifully done.What a delightful tribute to my favorite author ever💜
I love Octavia Butler, I love her stories and her ideas, love sci-fi, and I am more than happy to try any creative writing that aspires to inspire radical and revolutionary political activism. The thought of Butler's writing giving birth to a generation of speculative fiction activists who use the written word to support the intentional dreaming of radical movements as they/we struggle towards a better, free-er future -- that thought is sends chills. It gives a few extra ticks to the beating of
Octavia Butler united us in a way, as one of her books suggested, as kin. She united all who have needed worlds where we could find inclusion, because for so many of us, painfully, we have met with some form of exclusion or another. During an interview once someone asked Octavia what made her write the way she did; what drove her. She responded, “You’ve got to write yourself in.” To paraphrase, if you don’t already see yourself in a world, then you write yourself into it. I can’t say that I love...
One of the joys of reading science fiction is the vastness of the genre and the speculative nature of it. Science fiction is, more often than not, the genre that challenge mindsets, addresses social issues, prompts imagination of different realities. It asks the questions "Why are things this way" and "Why can't they be another way". By its visionary nature, it is well-suited tackle topics of social justice such as gender norms, sexuality, discrimination, work and labor, and more. So I was very
An anthology of 20 stories--many of them quite short--of visionary fiction: speculative narratives that explore marginalization, social justice, and radical social change. Many of these stories come from activists who have never written fiction (others are poets, writing here in prose). The lack of experience shows in clumsy, unconvincing worldbuilding, hamfisted social justice themes, and a general dearth of technical skill. There are a few happy exceptions, like the density of "Evidence" by Gu...
This is a great anthology of writers who have been impacted by the legendary, Octavia Butler. It’s always a welcomed fresh air to read sci-fi though the African/African Diaspora lens.
I love speculative fiction that reflects political activism and intersectionality, and found a lot of the ideas to be interesting. I would've loved to have seen them expanded into a full-length novel because many of them feel incomplete or end abruptly. There were quite a few stories where I could tell this was an author's first published work, resulting in a dip in the quality of writing or a choppy story. Because of that, the anthology is inconsistent with not many stories that stood out to be...
As the subtitle makes clear, this is an anthology with an agenda, and it's an agenda that will inflame certain parties in recent kerfuffles in the science fiction community.That said, this is an enjoyable collection. The stories are varied in setting, viewpoint, and kind. There's an incipient uprising against both a horde of zombies and the politically repressive response to the zombie horde. There's a gentle story of a woman attempting to reconnect with both her dead grandfather and her very mu...
This book calls upon the knowledge, creativity and experiences of folks fighting for social justice. The stories in here use many themes Octavia Butler focused on: community, interdependence, shaping the future, dreaming of the stars and surviving as a human race worth saving. There are stories of resistance and resilience (Hollow by Mia Mingus), characters who choose to fight for humanity despite great personal cost (Black Angel by Walidah Imarisha), and a warning about allowing history to be f...
Between escapism and social imagination?--Prior to reading critical nonfiction, I read like a child. Reading fiction was like watching television, in-and-out escapism with some visceral reactions. Whatever deep social commentary the authors may or may not have intended, I simply filled in with whatever nonsense I was raised on. This reminds me of seeing Orwell’s 1984 in so many readers’ favorites list, despite their vast range of sociopolitical affiliations (consider: https://www.goodreads.com/r...
I have a great deal of respect for the concept and the actual badass organizing work the authors and editors do. I think the writing workshops & other events Octavia's Brood does as a group are incredibly innovative and necessary. But as for this book... I wish I knew who the audience was supposed to be. I would recommend giving it to that one cool relative or acquaintance in your life, who perhaps loves mainstream media sf but has not been exposed to much critical analysis of how it upholds whi...
Make no mistake: Octavia's Brood belongs. It is modern sf—an anthology of speculative fiction (including both science fiction and fantasy, wherever you draw that line) from authors both known and unknown, collected here in honor of the late Octavia E. Butler by editors Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha (who is a local, by the way—on the faculty at Portland State University!). This anthology contains dystopias and utopias, angels and aliens, genetic engineering and time travel—even a coup...