Speaker
Description
This paper examines how Octavia E. Butler’s Parable novels and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon represent crisis as a catalyst for adaptation, resilience, and ethical innovation. Both texts are set in near-future societies disrupted by climate change, political instability, and entrenched social inequalities. Rather than treating environmental and social breakdown as inevitable apocalypse, Butler and Okorafor depict communities of diverse, often marginalized individuals who reorganize themselves, develop new belief systems, and experiment with cooperative strategies to survive.
Drawing on Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown’s notion of “visionary fiction”, the paper argues that these works anticipate “solarpunk” yet more precisely embody the emerging category of the “thrutopia”: narratives that move through crisis rather than around it, and that model long-term, justice-oriented responses rather than nostalgic returns to stability. Butler’s Earthseed religion (“God is Change”) explicitly reframes resilience as continual adaptation, while Okorafor’s sentient ocean beings dramatize the interruption of extractive practices and the possibility of collaborative, green technologies. Both authors show characters relearning how to live together—replanting local crops, cleaning water, establishing community communications—while confronting violence, scarcity, and loss.
By situating these novels within Butler’s documented environmental activism and Okorafor’s engagement with oil politics and folklore, the paper highlights how speculative fiction can function as a social science of crisis: it reveals patterns of collapse, models collective problem-solving, and imagines sustainable futures born from disruption. Reading Butler and Okorafor as thrutopian rather than dystopian clarifies their relevance for understanding how communities might adapt to ongoing environmental and cultural crises today, offering templates for resilience, radical care, and ethical innovation.
| Keywords | crisis and adaptation, climate crisis, solarpunk, ecocriticism, thrutopia, Octavia E. Butler, Nnedi Okorafor |
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| aschmalstig@hbku.edu.qa |