Octavia’s Brood Delivers with Visions of the Afro-Future

I was a little late to the party on Octavia’s Brood, not finding out about it until well after the IndieGoGo campaign had closed, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy this anthology that so many people contributed to. (Thank you all!) The premise — Speculative Fiction with a Social Justice mindset — is so appropriate, so right now, I had to read it. The title is in honor of Octavia Butler and her trilogy, Lilith’s Brood. Butler has immense influence on the field of speculative fiction, especially as a Black woman author writing well before there was even the barest institutional support for her writing. Butler wrote in worlds that were both evocative and original, and in terms that imagined a world where social justice for marginalized people was not only possible, but inevitable. These writers and their characters are consciously Octavia’s descendants, and for my part I think Butler would be damn proud. Every story has at its core a revolution, a revolution for people of color, for the poor, the physically disabled, the mentally ill, and others of us who land at intersections of all of the above. Many of the authors are themselves first-time writers, coming from backgrounds in social justice advocacy and the like. This makes for a book that takes the importance of diverse books as an assumption and that utterly crushes any remnants of the centrality of white, able-bodied, CIS-gendered males in speculative fiction. The editors, adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha go on…