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Confronting Environmental And Social Crises: Octavia E. Butler’S Critique Of The Spiritual Roots Of Environmental Injustice In Her Parable Novels, Melissa Vargas

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

We are living in the midst of environmental and social crises. This fact was not lost on late African-American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, whose 1993 Parable of the Sower and 1998 Nebula Award-winning Parable of the Talents depict and critique the current environmental and social crises in the United States. Speaking of Sower in an interview with Essence magazine, Butler says that all she “did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters” (“Brave New Worlds” 164). In another interview with Randall Kenan, Butler describes environmental …