Two of the most star­tling­ly orig­i­nal sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers of the past cen­tu­ry, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. But­ler, emerged in the 60s and 70s and cre­at­ed dystopi­an visions that res­onate with us today with more depth and imme­di­a­cy than the major­i­ty of their con­tem­po­raries. Both writ­ers also hap­pened to be African Amer­i­can. But why should this detail mat­ter? Why indeed, asked But­ler, in an equal­ly rel­e­vant ques­tion, “is sci­ence fic­tion so white?” She went on to explore the ques­tion in a 1980 essay pub­lished in Trans­mis­sion, not with a his­to­ry of the genre, but with rebut­tals to the rea­sons for exclud­ing peo­ple like her.

“A more insid­i­ous prob­lem than out­right racism is sim­ply habit, cus­tom,” But­ler writes. Peo­ple get com­fort­able with things as they are—an atti­tude anti­thet­i­cal to the spir­it of sci-fi. “Sci­ence fic­tion, more than any oth­er genre deals with change—change in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, and social change. But sci­ence fic­tion itself changes slow­ly, often under protest.”

But­ler died too young, in 2006 at age 58; but she lived to see resis­tance to change in sci­ence fic­tion per­sist into the 21st cen­tu­ry. Yet in her most com­pelling, and slight­ly ter­ri­fy­ing, pro­jec­tion into the future—her mid-90s Para­ble series of nov­els—change is the only thing that any­one can rely on.

All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change Changes you.

N.K. Jemi­son quotes these lines from Para­ble of the Sow­er in her intro­duc­tion to the book’s reis­sue this year. Pub­lished in 1993, Para­ble’s futur­ism didn’t have the same fris­son as that of, say, William Gib­son at the time. “Rov­ing, uncon­test­ed gangs of pedophiles and drug-addict­ed pyro­ma­ni­acs? Slav­ery 2.0? A pow­er­ful coali­tion of white-suprema­cist, homo­pho­bic, Chris­t­ian zealots tak­ing over the coun­try?” writes Jemi­son. “Nah, I thought, and hoped But­ler would get back to aliens soon.” Set in the con­text of a U.S. post-mas­sive cli­mate col­lapse (pos­si­bly), hyper-finan­cial­iza­tion, and cor­po­rate rule.… the nov­el now seems all too pre­scient to its cur­rent-day read­ers.

But even Butler’s alien sto­ries are sto­ries about humans in rad­i­cal tran­si­tion, and col­lec­tive social actions with both dev­as­tat­ing and trans­for­ma­tive out­comes. In Dawn, the first nov­el in her Xeno­gen­e­sis tril­o­gy (now called “Lilith’s Brood”), human woman Lilith Iyapo “awak­ens after 250 years of sta­sis,” fol­low­ing an apoc­a­lyp­tic nuclear war on Earth, “to find her­self sur­round­ed by aliens called the Oankali,” as the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bai­ley tells it. These beings want to trade DNA with the remain­ing humans, there­by cre­at­ing a hybrid species. The alter­na­tive is ster­il­iza­tion.

The chill­ing sce­nario in Dawn and its suc­ces­sors has its moments of Love­craft­ian dread, but it goes in an even stranger direc­tion, bring­ing an added dimen­sion to the mean­ing of the word “dehu­man­iza­tion.” What would it mean to slow­ly trans­form into anoth­er species? Such pro­found­ly uni­ver­sal ques­tions about the mean­ing of human iden­ti­ty reached “read­ers who had been exclud­ed from the genre,” notes Emanuel­la Grin­berg at CNN. But­ler peo­ples her books with humans of every col­or and eth­nic­i­ty, and aliens only she might have imag­ined. But most of her pro­tag­o­nists are black and brown women. Many of the read­ers But­ler influ­enced, like Jemi­son, are women of col­or who became genre-chang­ing sci-fi writ­ers them­selves.

Butler’s work “helped define the lit­er­ary cor­ner­stone of Afro­fu­tur­ism,” notes Grin­berg. Her writ­ing was strate­gic, a way to con­front dehu­man­iz­ing polit­i­cal and social polit­i­cal real­i­ties. Para­ble of the Sow­er, the TED les­son explains, was part­ly a response to Butler’s home state of California’s Propo­si­tion 187, which denied undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants basic health­care, edu­ca­tion, and basic ser­vices. In the fol­low-up, Para­ble of the Tal­ents (1998), an author­i­tar­i­an pres­i­den­tial can­di­date cam­paigns on the slo­gan “Make Amer­i­can Great Again.” Her best-sell­ing nov­el, Kin­dred, pub­lished in 1979, tells the sto­ry of a con­tem­po­rary woman repeat­ed­ly pulled back in time to the Mary­land plan­ta­tion of her enslaved ances­tor.

Why should we read Octavia But­ler? You’ll have to read her to answer that ques­tion your­self. But I’d ven­ture to say—along with the intro to her life and work above—because she had a bet­ter read on how the time she lived in would turn into the time we live in now than near­ly any­one writ­ing at the time; because she told strange, won­der­ful, out­landish, com­pelling sto­ries that stretched the imag­i­na­tion with­out los­ing sight of the human core; because, like Ursu­la K. Le Guin, she chal­lenged the world as it is with pro­found visions of what it might be; and because she not only excelled as a sto­ry­teller but specif­i­cal­ly as a com­mit­ted sci­ence fic­tion sto­ry­teller, one who deeply touched, and thus deeply changed, the form.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Octavia Butler’s 1998 Dystopi­an Nov­el Fea­tures a Fascis­tic Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Who Promis­es to “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again”

The Dai­ly Rit­u­als of 143 Famous Female Cre­ators: Octavia But­ler, Edith Whar­ton, Coco Chanel & More

Cel­e­brate the Life & Writ­ing of Ursu­la K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Clas­sic Radio Drama­ti­za­tions of Her Sto­ries

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When we talk about what could put an end to civ­i­liza­tion today, we usu­al­ly talk about cli­mate change. The fright­en­ing sci­en­tif­ic research behind that phe­nom­e­non has, apart from pro­vid­ing a seem­ing­ly infi­nite source of fuel for the blaze of count­less polit­i­cal debates, also inspired a vari­ety of dystopi­an visions, cred­i­ble and oth­er­wise, of no small num­ber of sci­ence-fic­tion writ­ers. One won­ders what a sci­ence-fic­tion­al mind of, say, Isaac Asi­mov’s cal­iber would make of it. Asi­mov died in 1992, a few years before cli­mate change attained the pres­ence in the zeit­geist it has today, but we can still get a sense of his approach to think­ing about these kinds of lit­er­al­ly exis­ten­tial ques­tions from his 1978 talk above.

When peo­ple talked about what could put an end to civ­i­liza­tion in 1978, they talked about over­pop­u­la­tion. A decade ear­li­er, Stan­ford biol­o­gist Paul Ehrlich pub­lished The Pop­u­la­tion Bomb, whose ear­ly edi­tions opened with these words: “The bat­tle to feed all of human­i­ty is over. In the 1970s hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple will starve to death in spite of any crash pro­grams embarked upon now. At this late date noth­ing can pre­vent a sub­stan­tial increase in the world death rate.” With these and oth­er grim pro­nounce­ments lodged in their minds, the best­selling book’s many read­ers saw human­i­ty faced with a stark choice: let that death rate increase, or proac­tive­ly low­er the birth rate.

A decade lat­er, Asi­mov frames the sit­u­a­tion in the same basic terms, though he shows more opti­mism — or at least inven­tive­ness — in address­ing it, sup­port­ed by the work­ings of his pow­er­ful imag­i­na­tion. This isn’t to say that the images he throws out are exact­ly utopi­an: he sees human­i­ty, grow­ing at then-cur­rent rates, ulti­mate­ly housed in “one world-girdling sky­scraper, par­tial­ly apart­ment hous­es, par­tial­ly fac­to­ries, par­tial­ly all kinds of things — schools, col­leges — and the entire ocean tak­en out of its bed and placed on the roof, and grow­ing algae or some­thing like that. Because all those peo­ple will have to be fed, and the only way they can be fed is to allow no waste what­ev­er.”

This neces­si­ty will be the moth­er of such inven­tions as “thick con­duits lead­ing down into the ocean water from which you take out the algae and all the oth­er plank­ton, or what­ev­er the heck it is, and you pound it and you sep­a­rate it and you fla­vor it and you cook it, and final­ly you have your pseu­do-steak and your mock veal and your health­ful sub-veg­eta­bles and so on.” Where to get the nutri­ents to fer­til­ize the growth of more algae? “Only from chopped-up corpses and human wastes.” It would prob­a­bly inter­est Asi­mov, and cer­tain­ly amuse him, to see how much research into algae-based food goes on here in the 21st cen­tu­ry (let alone the pop­u­lar­i­ty of an algae-uti­liz­ing meal replace­ment bev­er­age called Soy­lent). But how­ev­er deli­cious all those become, human­i­ty will need more to live: ener­gy, space, and yes, a com­fort­able ambi­ent tem­per­a­ture.

Asi­mov’s suite of pro­posed solu­tions, the expla­na­tion of which he spins into high and often pre­scient enter­tain­ment, includes birth con­trol, solar pow­er, lunar min­ing, and the repur­pos­ing of some of the immense bud­get spent on “war machines.” The vol­ume of applause in the room shows how hearti­ly some agreed with him then, and per­spec­tives like Asi­mov’s have drawn more adher­ents in the more than 40 years since, about a decade after Asi­mov con­fi­dent­ly pre­dict­ed that the world would run out of oil,  a time when an increas­ing num­ber of devel­oped coun­tries have begun to wor­ry about their falling birthrates. But then, Asi­mov also imag­ined that Mount Ever­est was uncon­quer­able because Mar­tians lived on top of it in a sto­ry pub­lished a sev­en months after Edmund Hillary and Ten­z­ing Nor­gay made it up there — a fact he made a rule of cheer­ful­ly admit­ting when­ev­er he start­ed with the pre­dic­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

Isaac Asi­mov Laments the “Cult of Igno­rance” in the Unit­ed States: A Short, Scathing Essay from 1980

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Com­put­er­i­za­tion, Glob­al Co-oper­a­tion, Leisure Time & Moon Min­ing

Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Sto­ry “The Last Ques­tion” Read by Isaac Asi­mov— and by Leonard Nimoy

Isaac Asi­mov Explains His Three Laws of Robots

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy Dra­ma­tized in Clas­sic Audio

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.