In the Imagination of Octavia Butler: Rewriting the Future Before it Arrives

By Nella Rohan, ArtWell Staff Writer

“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

The Blueprint

Before I understood what speculative fiction was, I knew Octavia Butler was doing something different—something necessary. Her stories transported, warned, challenged, and dared me to imagine parallel worlds. I envied Butler’s imagination and longed to pluck meaningful worlds from my own, painting them onto the page in ways that would hold a reader rapt and ignite their imagination in turn.

Reading Butler felt more consequential than just reading fiction; it was like finding a blueprint for survival, especially as a young Black woman dreaming beyond the swirling -isms in the social atmosphere, each one threatening to limit my self-concept—and, with it, my potential.

In Imagination: A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin writes: “The imagination is a field of power. Every act of perception is an act of creation.” She urges us to wield our imagination as a political force, and it makes sense that she returns to Butler “again and again.” If anyone understood imagination as a site of resistance, revolution, and rebirth—it was Octavia E. Butler.

The Parables and the Practice of Possibility

In Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Butler envisioned a future that feels eerily close to our present—rampant climate catastrophe, corporate greed, state-sanctioned violence, and rising authoritarianism. But at the center of the chaos, she placed a young Black girl named Lauren Olamina, who dared to imagine something else.

Through Earthseed—a fictional belief system based on the idea that “God is Change”—Lauren offers a critique of the present and a vision for what could be. Earthseed teaches that we must shape change rather than resist it, and that humanity’s destiny lies in reaching the stars. Lauren dreams not of returning to the world that was, but of constructing a new one—a community rooted in adaptability, empathy, and the belief that shaping change is sacred work.

What makes these novels remarkable isn’t just their prophetic accuracy—Butler provides readers with a way through. Her work doesn’t promote naïve optimism, but a consistent insistence on possibility. And that’s where Ruha Benjamin’s work dovetails with Butler’s: not in escapism, but in the radical imagining of justice. In Imagination: A Manifesto, Benjamin writes, “Let us engage in speculative fabulation, not as a luxury, but as liberation.”

That call—to use our creativity as a tool for collective freedom—feels especially urgent today, as we face overlapping crises that demand critique and vision.

Imagining as Preparation

Butler's work remains a beacon whether we’re organizing for climate justice, reimagining education, or seeking spiritual and emotional refuge in chaotic times. She reminds us that imagining the future is not a passive act—it’s preparation. “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns,” she wrote.

In other words, we don’t have to accept the future we’re handed. We can write something else.

A Prompt for the Present

If Butler rewrote the future before it arrived, what are you imagining into being? Ruha Benjamin invites us to consider: “What if your imagination was the most reliable oracle of what’s to come? What future are you rehearsing?”

So we ask you:

• What worlds are you quietly dreaming that deserve to be spoken aloud?

• What patterns are you ready to disrupt?

• What does liberation look like, sound like, feel like to you?

Let this be your first act of speculative liberation. Write a verse, sketch a scene, and maybe share it. The future isn’t waiting to happen—it’s waiting to be written.