31. Octavia Butler: The mother of Sci Fi

Octavia Butler: Visionary of Afrofuturism and Perseverance

This episode explores the life and legacy of Octavia Butler, an influential science fiction author renowned for her role in pioneering Afrofuturism. Raised in poverty and facing numerous challenges, including dyslexia, Butler's journey is one of remarkable self-belief, dedication, and groundbreaking vision. The hosts delve into her early influences, her determination to become a writer, and the significant impact of her works, particularly 'Kindred' and 'Parable of the Sower.' Butler's story is a testament to the power of persistence and the importance of diverse voices in literature.

Sources today are:

1 https://www.womenshistory.org/education-
resources/biographies/octavia-estelle-butler
2 https://www.octaviabutler.com/theauthor
3 https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/remembering-afrofuturist-
octavia-butler
4 https://writershq.co.uk/10-iconic-quotes-to-celebrate-octavia-
butlers-birthday/
5 https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/07/10/535879364/o
ctavia-butler-writing-herself-into-the-story
6 https://commongood.cc/reader/a-few-rules-for-predicting-the-
future-by-octavia-e-butler/
7 https://www.vulture.com/article/octavia-e-butler-profile.html

00:00 Introduction and Personal Anecdote
01:16 Casual Conversation and Weekend Plans
01:53 Inspirational Quote and Introduction to Octavia Butler
04:23 Early Life of Octavia Butler
07:48 Octavia Butler's Writing Journey
13:22 Octavia Butler's Work Ethic and Habits
18:15 The Challenges of Being a Writer
19:28 Octavia Butler's Bold Beginnings
21:30 Defining Afrofuturism
23:27 Butler's Impactful Works
27:29 Prophetic Visions in Butler's Writing
31:53 Butler's Legacy and Advice
36:21 Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

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So now I've signed up to eight pounds a month for St. John's Ambulance, which just, you know, it is valid. But he, he was preying on the vulnerable, I feel, right thing wrong reasons. Oh, I'll give you a piece of advice that I was given as a young girl and it's, it's succinctly pick him in the balls and run. I think if you ever feel cornered. By someone with balls. Yeah. Kicking in the balls and running because I misunderstood what he was. I was clearly lost and I like, clearly didn't know what I was doing and he waved me. That's what he was looking for and I thought, oh brilliant. You'll be able to tell me where Soandso is. And instead I signed up for 8,000 month, it was still lost. What a predator. I bet they don't even know he's in there. Yeah. And I hate it when they're like, just so you know, I'm valid. Here's my id. Here's our website, here's everything. And that's like the more you talk about that kind of stuff, the more it makes me feel like, no, this is, I'm being scammed. But then I was like, you are in ikea. They wouldn't just let you in ikea. Well, I've been in IKEA and I'm super shady, so do not take that as a guarantee quality. Shall we begin it? Shall we begin it? Indeed. Hi, Karen. Excellent. Hi Vicki. How are you? Yeah, I'm ready. I'm, I'm feeling good. How are you? Hey, I'm okay. I'm all right. I've got spa day Smart. I'm really looking. Yay. And I've got afternoon tea on Sunday. I've got a lush weekend ahead. So you have earned it by the sound and it start with, which is always lovely. Oh, thanks. Very happy, pleased to be grouped in with the same category as spa days and cream cheese. I mean, jeez. Quite, that's a, a thumbs up and a half. Absolutely. Yeah. I feel like we should try something a little bit different today. So I'd like to start with a quote. Um, do you feel, are you ready to begin? I'm ready. Absolutely. Okay. So here we have an excerpt from a note to self written by today's subject. Would you like to read it? Yes, quote, my books will be read by millions of people. I will buy a beautiful home in an excellent neighborhood. I will send poor black youngsters to writers' workshops. I will help poor black youngsters broaden their horizons. I will help poor black youngsters to go to college. I will get the best of healthcare for my mother and myself. I'll hire a car whenever I want or need to. I. I will travel whenever and wherever in the world that I choose my books will be read by millions of people. So be it. So see it. Oh, so be it. See to it. Thank you. Well, that's lovely. I feel like that should be my morning mantra and I get up. That's beautiful. It's a, it's, it's a rallying cry, isn't it? Yes. So you get the energy there. Think about a shy little girl who is sidelined in school because she has this unrecognized, unsupported dyslexia. Growing up to have the self-belief to say those things and to aspire to be a successful author. And not only achieving those goals, but smashing them, she being read by millions, uh, being considered the mother of an entire genre of fiction and hailed as a prophet by people who live in the age that she wrote about as the future. So get ready to be inspired to see new sons and to understand that the bridge that brings us to our goals is built from nothing, more or less than hard work and self-belief. Meet Octavia Butler. And today's sources are women's history.org. And. Author website for Octavia Butler herself, a biography about her on the National Museum of African American History articles on NPR and on the Common Good, and an article on vulture.com. So we are going back to 1940s. We are in California and Octavia Butler. Grew up black and poor in Pasadena. Legal segregation was dead, but de facto segregation was very much alive. So her father worked as a shoe shiner, but died when she was just three. And her mother, yeah, her mother was a working mom and often working in situations where they would live in the homes of the people that they worked. That she worked for. So she worked hard and eventually saved up enough to rent a home for herself and Little Octavia, but still working these really demanding hands-on jobs in the homes of white families. And Octavia had that kind of, housing instability. In addition to that, she was just this like tall, awkward kid who didn't really find it easy to fit in or to make friends. Okay. And she sort of said I was lonely, but when I wrote I wasn't. So, it was a resource for her. And she loved animals, she loved horses, she loved reading books. She apparently would sit on her. Grandmother's porch on the chicken farm and dream up these stories about animals. And when she could, she would escape to the local library where she would love to read science fiction and comic books and other work that just lit her imagination up and gave her this. Escape from her awkwardness, from the kind of drudgery that she saw as adult life and the insecurity that she must have felt. Yeah. Books are so special, aren't they? They really are. When you are lonely. Books are just, yeah. And the radio actually, I always think that about the radio, that it's really good company and we're so lucky to have access to like, what if that library wasn't there? You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. That such an important point. And you know, in a time, well, in all times, I suppose when there's such a competition for. Cash resources. They always seem under threat as well, don't they? Libraries and radios. Yeah. It's like an easy cut, but devastating to people's lives, so, yeah. So we've got, um, Octavia, little Octavia and one day, I think she's about maybe about 11 years old, she's taken to see this movie called Devil Girl from Mars, which doesn't sound amazing. It's worse than it sounds. No, and it's so bad that Octavia kind of realizes two things. One, somebody got paid for writing that nonsense and two, damn she could do better. So she decides her path is set. She is going to be a science fiction writer, so right. We're gonna do this, but it was inspiring. But in like the complete opposite way in what they want, the worst way. But sometimes that's a great thing where you're just like, well, geez, if that's all it takes, I've definitely got that, that in my locker. If they do it. Yeah. Like absolutely. Why can't I? So we're gonna now like zip ahead, we're gonna skim over school, school, school, teens, early adulthood. And since we are both into self-development, all that sort of thing, I thought it would be kind of fun to dip into the how of Octavia Butler's work life and how she got to the point in her career where she achieved some of her goals and was a published author. I think it's a great example of how relevant she is to our modern ways of thinking. So sweet. I would say, uh, that Octavia Butler is somebody who was a craftswoman as well as an artist. So she had these huge, like bolt from the blue artistic ideas, but she also just knuckled down and got on with the daily grind of the job, which, you know. She's from a lower working class background and nothing's handed to her. So that is, that is hard. Specifically after she graduated from high school, she would get up at 2:00 AM. Every day to write before work. And then she would go off and do whatever job could keep the lights on without sort of like draining her mentally or her creativity. So her website lists a few of the jobs she had as she was a telemarketer, which I would find quite draining, but fine. Yeah, sounds right. She was a dishwasher and this one I'm feeling like I could do right now. She was also a potato chip inspector. Oh, so there you go. Be sure. But yeah, so taste, this is the, this is unclear, but I might write to them and try to find out, um, at any rate, they're not like super taxing jobs necessarily for the mind, but to get up every day and to have the dedication every single day to get up and write for work. And then after work, she's going to these creative writing groups, creative writing workshops. A bit of community college. So she's just making it happen. Yeah. And. L as luck could have it, one of the workshops she attended was, being taught by an author called Harlan Ellison, who had this like, really well established track record in speculative fiction, sci-fi screenplays and anthologies. Whose work she respected and the respect was mutual. So, oh, he's, yeah, he saw something in her, and he's quoted as saying she could not write screenplays, which is what he was actually teaching in the course she attended, but she could just write, like, he could see that she was really skillful. Okay. So not necessarily, and that's another important lesson, isn't it? That. Um, you're not gonna be able to specialize in everything. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that you can't do the, I'm also ing holding as well, isn't it? Like, don't, if you don't fit in one hole, that's fine. Like there's a gazillion other holes you can fit in. Like find your tribe, isn't it? You will find your Yes. Absolutely. And sometimes we love something and we admire it, so we want to be able to do it. But then you realize like, actually that's just not me. I, I'm more of a consumer of that thing than a producer of that thing. So I think that must have been right or Yeah. Yes, precisely. So she's good at it. Just not good at that specific thing. But he says, I know of a workshop, called the Clarion Workshop, which is for specifically science fiction and fantasy writers. And I think you should go. And apparently he even chucked some money into the travel fund'cause it was all the way across the country. I think it's in. In the year she went, I think it was in Pittsburgh, she's in California. There's thousands of miles on a Greyhound bus. So a lot of money and it's six weeks long, so she's out of work for that time. But damn I just make the point of. Like, leave me your job for six weeks and like,'cause I imagine she'd have had to quit. I don't think they'd keep a dishwasher post open would they? For six weeks, right? No. And then like that takes guts, doesn't it? It really does. And. Vulnerability. If you are earning at that level and you're coming from that background, you probably have not got a nest egg to fall back on. You're probably kind of living hand to mouth. So for her to kind of say, okay, this is important to me. This isn't in my notes, but just as an aside, she makes this point. Uh, she has this aunt who trained to be a nurse and her aunt. Was the first person in the family to go to any kind of formal post high school education, and her aunt was impressing on her the importance of, you know, having a trade and so on and so on. But Octavia Butler said, actually, the example that I got was. You do what you know is right for you. And so for me, that was to follow my dreams and become a writer. So I took the lesson, not in the way she intended. Yes, because her aunt really wanted her to learn a trade. But yeah, anyhow, she had this like inner funk fire and just kind of went, went for it. She went to this workshop bet on herself and had that. Support of her family. And she went and she wrote, and she struggled socially. It wasn't some sort of like magical pania that fixed her, you know, social awkwardness. And I say fixed her in scare quotes, but you know what I mean? She, she went, even though it was uncomfortable. Yeah, and it worked because soon after the workshop and her completing her associate's degree at the City College, she started selling her stories and within 10 years she become successful enough to be a full-time author, which is Get Out accomplishment. She was doing so good. I haven't heard of her. Her. Yeah. So this is it. The theme is Hard work support. Self-belief, most of all. Hard work. Um, like she reminds me, there's a quote that's like, hard work puts you where good luck can find you. And I think that's her vibe. I love to me. Love that. I totally agree with that. I was discussing with my, um, friends the other week like, what does look mean to you?'cause look such a fascinating concept. And we all, there was four of us in the conversation, I think three or four, and we all had completely different concepts of what look means. Like, oh that's really interesting with a pot and then you get. Apart for life and then it, you use it throughout your life, basically. Oh, no. Fine. Yeah. So some people use it really early. Some people get their look later on in life, but there is like a set amount and then there was me who was basically trying to say that, but I was not saying it as elegantly as like, I kind of think you make your own look a little bit and you take your opportunities and you make opportunities, which are then seen as lucky. Right. But I. Basically what she was saying. What did she say? Hard work puts you where? Good look, I think it was. That's, that's it. Yeah. That's much more elegant than my rumbling. Well, it's three Proseccos down late at night, but like Yeah, it's, I believe that I genuinely, yeah. Well, if you liked that one, I think you're gonna like this one. Okay. I've got another quote for you here, which I think aligns to what we, you were just saying there, and probably is quite useful to anybody who works in any kind of creative way. Quote first, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you are inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice, unquote. Yes. This is like the 5:00 AM club thing, isn't it? It's the 2:00 AM club thing. It's the 2:00 AM club consistency. I've never heard of the 2:00 AM club. When she said 2:00 AM I was like, my God. But I guess she was starting work at six or something, wasn't she? Right. Not nine. Yeah. I think that's consistency, baby. That's it. Exactly. Um, and to just to bring that kind of real work a day, getting on with it work ethic to what could be quite an airy fairy thing to be a creative. Amazing. So one of the habits that worked for Octavia, as we saw in the opening is to write notes to herself. And these kind of like. Vision boards that outlined her mission and how she's gonna achieve it. The one at the start was from one of her notebooks, and I feel like if she was alive today, she would be the kind of person who have the, would have this like private insta that she was the only follower on. And she would have all these ideas she wrote in colorful pens and she just gave herself these lovely little pep talks. And I've, I've put a couple of them here, but yeah, the one, the one thing that's coming through is she's, she's reminding herself constantly how to write beautifully and persuasively. I love the final one. It says, no entertainment on earth can match a good story, compellingly told, and this is something I, I. Just love. No matter what you're doing, if you're playing a video game, if you're listening to a podcast, if you are, telling your friends an anecdote at a party, that's what it boils down to. You're just trying to compellingly tell that story. So all those notes are in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where they have a collection of our stuff that you can see. A lot of them are available online it just shows that journaling's been forever. Like it's not a cool millennial thing or like a Gen Z thing, where we bullet journal now and we, you know, it's been going on. This teaching yourself and manifesting with yourself and affirming yourself has been going on for actual decades. I dunno, man. I think this might be an example of her being a front runner.'cause she, oh her, her fiction is all about predicting the future. So I just took it to be that she was just ahead of the curve. That she was completely, she was part of this new modern. But that's'cause I'm an old fuddyduddy who doesn't do any of those things. So what we're, what we're building towards is a person who is self-motivated and self-determined and maybe has felt like enough of an outsider where she was quite happy to follow her own compass and. It fits because I think being a writer is quite an isolating job and Oh my gosh. Yeah. It takes a person, it's a special person who can do that job and who can do it in the face of rejection well and doing well, like, and yeah, not being funny. Like the amount of celebrities that get book deals nowadays and you're just like. Are you though? Are you a true writer? Deep down. And they might be. They might be, but it's, the numbers don't stack. Yeah, that's, I wanna give people the benefit of the doubt, but it, I know, I know, I agree. Yeah, there's some real, but then you see all this effort getting up at 2:00 AM practicing and workshops and it's like, have those, have, has Reverend Coles has whoever been to. Or if they are, they just making, hey, you know, which I don't know. We probably won't be able to put this in the podcast, but it's just what I think. No, I, I fully appreciate what you're saying and it is, I'm always slightly looking a scan at anything that's published by anyone whose name I know because you're like, if you put a random name on this, is it still making it through those gates? Probably not. Probably, uh. So, yeah, I, I hear you. Right, so she is somebody who is willing to get to work in a field where there are really no examples of someone like herself working. She's Oh, yes. True. She's very bold. And when interviewers asked her how the courage to begin, she, gave a really good answer. I've got a quote there. If you give it. Uh, when asked how she set out to become a science fiction writer, when there were so few examples of black women working in the genre, Butler said she never doubted her abilities. I assumed that I could do it. She said I wasn't being brave or even thoughtful. I wanted it and I assumed I could have it, unquote. Oh, yes. More of this. Please, Karl. Brilliant. I want more issues in the world. So inspiring. Yeah. So yeah, her intention is to write science fiction. It's nothing more or less revolutionary and act Yeah. Than assuming that her work was just as legitimate as anyone else's. Yeah. Which seems self-evident, except it wasn't published work in science fiction in specific had then and still has got a strong skew towards publishing white male authors. So for her to get out there and do it was actually extraordinarily impactful. I. I hate that word, but I've just said it. So there we are, blah, blah, blah. Um, it had a big impact. So women in science is still rare as obviously it's getting better and better because of all the, work that's being done around it, but that I imagine they're still a minority in that field and Absolutely. Yeah. And that's in reality, let alone in fiction. Yeah. That's amazing. Live it. Well, she took charge of her own career and thought, I'm going to do it. I don't care if anybody thinks I can or should. I just am. And it was a fulcrum point to this new. Sub genre of science fiction called Afrofuturism. Um, I'm putting you to work today. There's another quote here if you'd like to give it that defines Afrofuturism. Yes. Quote, Afrofuturism, which you see LA defines as a wide ranging social, political and artistic movement that dares to imagine a world where African descended peoples and their cultures play a central role in. The creation of that world. Good. Get that. So she, she moved the ball down the field for this. Okay. And something to consider in Counterpoint is that Butler herself is quoted as saying, I don't recall ever having wanted to be a black woman fiction writer. I wanted to be a writer. Mm-hmm. I'm kind of anxious to explore that because I don't wanna minimize the importance of what she did for diversity of point of view, or to imply that that wasn't what she was aiming at or to, kind of minimize the necessity. I think the point that she's making is that she refuted the assumption that there's such a thing as a standard science fiction writer and that she's an exception. So. The idea that she's other is fundamentally flawed. Yeah. And all points of view should be understood to be equally valid. Of course, African descended people and culture play a central role in the world. Any suggestion to the contrary, she just shoes away. Which is so refreshing and so, um. I want a different word than inspirational, but so, um, self-assured, isn't it? Yeah, it is. The word that kept coming to my mind was dignify. Like she is just a person of so much dignity and just. I'm not even gonna dignify that. I'm not indulging the viewpoint that my point of view isn't worthwhile. And so I'll throw this quote out there that she said about her own writing as a female and an African American, I wrote myself into the world. I wrote myself into the present, the future, and the past. Lived experience of the world wasn't there in fiction and she made them appear and the kind of, probably the best example. Or the most familiar example of that is a book she wrote called Kindred and that is overtly about race. And she uses a story about time travel to engage with that and takes a modern in her time, African American woman and hurtles her back into Antebellum Southern Maryland. And she sees the lives of her enslaved ancestors and she has to kind of adapt to survive. So. It's taking on race in a really overt way. Mm-hmm. But throughout her work, Butler has protagonists and bit part players who are black and just live in their lives and doing it. Babe, just, just part of the I know, because why not? Yeah, exactly. Because that is one of the ways in which her work. Is relevant and real because that's what life is actually like. It's not just this weird homogenous space with white dudes. It's everybody out there working together and doing stuff. So writing herself in the picture Butler by intention or by accident, made her writing so much more real. So. There. We've got her not dignifying, ignorance and prejudice with any kind of legitimacy, and then having the discipline to just sit down and absolutely work at it. And so that's two of the three legged stool of her career, that dignity, that hard work. The third part. Is magic. It's just vision. And that is where we get to why science fiction was kind of the right choice for her. So. Like you said, there's so much awful writing in the world. Devil Girl from Mars wasn't the only, you know, bad bit of writing she will have come across, so it can't just have been, I can do better. That drove her to that genre. But she does say in the quote here why science fiction particularly appealed to her. It was so wide open that it gave her a chance to comment on every aspect of humanity. There are no closed doors and no required formulas. You can go anywhere with it. Yeah, and I was just thinking about the context of where we're in. Is this like the 1960s? Yeah. Uh, sixties and seventies. I think she's, putting these works out. Yeah. So what? What does that mean in terms of like science fiction as a whole? Like it must be quite a golden age, I imagine. I think that TV shows like Star Trek and Battle Star Galactica lost in Space and movies like Star Wars really brought it in. It was a hot property kind of culturally. There were all these anthologies. Planet of the A. Yeah. All of that stuff is out there and it's hugely mass market appealing in the United States at that time, probably in the UK as well. So she's joining a movement in its moment and she's bringing something new to the table. She took it, took that kind of like openness of it. To show near future versions of American society and the world that we're familiar with sometimes. Mm-hmm. And where it goes, if it stays on the trajectory it's on. And she o openly says, these were cautionary tales and she got it right. So often. You might wanna have a sip of water. There's a quote here from the New York Times about, the first book of a trilogy, which never ended up being completed. She only ever got to write two of them, but it's a book called Parable of the Sower and the New York Times here talks about, I. This book, if you would give us this. Mm-hmm. Enormous quote. Uh, quite the effects of climate change are reshaping America. Those with sufficient resources retreat inside protective communities. Those, oh my god. Those with even greater resources. Finance and exploratory Mars Mission, presumably an attempt to one day escape her's destabilization. In the political realm, a populist presidential candidate, denounces clothes made by scientists promising the electorate that he's going to return us to the glory wealth, an order of the 20th century unquote. My God, you are joking. How eerie is it to read that? So that is what she imagined. 31 years before, Fun. It was published in 1993 and as a prophet, she's nailing it. Yes. Also, the other thing that this has made me think of, sorry, is, you know, have you seen in bookshops sometimes they have a section called. It's a cautionary tale, not a stretch manual, but yeah. The Margaret Atwood, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Handmade tale. But she should be right there. It sounds like this trilogy should be there. I think it often is. Um, especially because it deals with a lot of ecological issues that Yeah. She called it climate change 31 years ago. The. First time this book appeared in the Times bestseller list was in 2020. Ah. And people were reading it in Covid Times, of course. And those, those sort of prescient cautionary notes. I wonder if Butler who sadly had died by then, died back in 2006. Might have been her reaction. Might have been, I'm sorry. To have been Right. But I'm really glad that people are listening now. Mm. Um, so yeah, I, I just, I cannot say enough, having done this research, I've left out as much as I could. I really have. You just had the wind knocked out of you again and again by how on the nose She is. Wow. So there's like an interview Nice intellectual next level, right? Yeah. Just being able to kind of see where. The road is leading in which way the wind is like society. Wind is blowing. Yeah, exactly. And imagine where we're going. And you know, there's like a quote from her in 2005 talking about how she's unsettled to see, we're now at a point where we're more interested in building prisons and schools and libraries. And she talks about where that leads and. It's here, this, this, this current sort of like swing to populism and so on and so on. All of these things that she's like, uh, hey guys, this could be what's happening. It's what's happening. So you, you come away from reading her fiction thinking about it for a very long time, and I don't think you can give a higher compliment to a person whose central concern was to kind of point at. Likely negative outcomes and try to warn people. Mm-hmm. So for all of that, somebody in one of her workshops, asked her how to end the suffering in the world, which was a theme in so many of her books. It is, you know, a big ask, See all those problems that you've flagged up, what would you like us to do about them? Uh, and this is what she said, uh, quote, there's no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There is no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers. At least you can be one of them if you choose to be unquote correct. I mean, Greta Berg wasn't even. A glimmer, I imagine, in her parents' eye at this point and Yeah, absolutely. I like her just kicking it back as well. So she wasn't saying, I have all the answers. Mm-hmm. But she was definitely saying we all have a part to play in it. Mm-hmm. And so I'm gonna set down those kind of heavy themes for a moment and say there there was hope and optimism and recognition in her lifetime. People saw what she was doing, they liked it. She did have a great readership. She was the first science fiction author to win the MacArthur Fellowship Grant, which is cheekily called the Genius Grant. She did not like it being called that. Oh, she didn't, I personally, no. She was like, that's not a thing. Don't be stupid. But yeah. But it was though, um, she was also given a Nebula Award, which is. Unsurprisingly, an award given for the outstanding works in science, fiction and fantasy, and she had a Penn West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. And I think that continued popularity of her books gives her insights a chance to reach the people who can still. Effect change and be the answers and um, okay. So since ultimately how we live our personal lives is the most effective way we can change anything whatsoever. Mm-hmm. I thought we would end on a more personal note with some advice. From the lovely Octavia Butler who herself went from being this shy, dyslexic child to this, she was dyslexic, power house, everything else, she was dyslexic. Yeah. And never supported because in that day, yeah, it wasn't, yeah. So yeah, she went from shy, awkward childhood to knocking out these absolute mind, bendingly, accurate. Fiction works. Mm-hmm. They're on the market today and still doing quite nicely. Um. Mm-hmm. Just because she saw this dumb movie and thought I could do better than that. So, yeah. Yeah. And then the converse thing of doing the hard work and letting opportunity find you ready, like ready to roll. So be ready baby. Get up at two, get up at two, get that writing done. Get that thing you love done. And yeah, in that spirit we have a quote. We started with a quote and we'll end with a quote. Okay. So if you care to, um, could you, could you wrap it up for us? Quote, do the thing that you love and do it as well as you possibly can and be persistent about it, unquote. Oh mate, we need that on a t-shirt. We need that on a diary. We need some, yeah. Oh, it is absolute. Hashtag goals, we. Respect and admire the hell out of Octavia Butler on that basis alone. Let's go do it. Let's see to it. I, I think I can't say it better than she said it herself, so that is where we will leave it today. Wow. Well, thank you. My gosh. I feel like I am, boom. I feel like I've been no size weights by that one. That's, um, I, I'm delighted. She's, she's so cool. Mm-hmm. Who wouldn't wanna talk about sci-fi for an hour? Mm-hmm. Probably most people, but I, you know, I'm into it, so like, it's just, it was my absolute pleasure to be able to do that. I'm up to Modern Day as well. 2006. I know a lot has changed. Simon Aways asks, wonder what she'd be like today in today's climate. Like, he often asks that about the women that we cover. And I, she's one who I can see. Yeah, like you say, call into arms, like she would, her voice would be very loud and very clear, I imagine. Yeah. And calm and rational and just like a parent side of kind of that parenting style of natural consequences where you just say, well, you could choose to eat an entire pack of Oreos instead of your dinner, but you probably won't feel very, you know, she's just that level-headed. Facts, not feelings, which is a phrase that's co-opted by some really gross people. So I regret having said it, but yeah, like, yeah, I, I really just admire and respect her so very much and she would be amazing to have her insights on what's Saul going on now? Time? Right. Oh, well thanks Car. Thanks so much. My pleasure.

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