Mind of My Mind

Octavia E. Butler is a seminal figure in Afrofuturism, a genre explored through literature, art, and music. Afrofuturism seeks to explore both the past and future of African culture on the continent and around the world as it pertains to imagining new potentials. At its core, Afrofuturism sees the union of political and social thought with various artforms: “Afrofuturism, more concretely, can be understood 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” (Bruce, Delan. “Afrofuturism: From the Past to the Living Present.” UCLA Magazine, 3 Sept. 2020).

Butler’s fiction was foundational to Afrofuturism before the term was even coined. Writing in the 1970s, she was part of a small cohort of Black speculative writers, including Samuel R. Delany, who challenged the overwhelmingly white and male-dominated science fiction landscape. Alongside her contemporaries in feminist science fiction—such as Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin—Butler helped open the genre to broader questions of race, gender, power, and social structure.

Butler is renowned for her work in the science fiction genre, with novels like Parable of the Sower and Kindred reaching wide audiences. Butler, from California, began writing in her home state: “Butler was born as Pasadena in 1947. A self-described hermit, she would venture to the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library in pursuit of her passion for storytelling. At the library, she wrote her first book, Patternmaster, published in 1976” (Bruce, Delan. “Afrofuturism: From the Past to the Living Present.” UCLA Magazine, 3 Sept. 2020). Patternmaster would become the final book in her Patternist series, of which Mind of My Mind is the second novel. The setting of California is one Butler often returns to in her work, with the final three novels of the Patternist series occurring outside Los Angeles and Parable of the Sower taking place within the city. Butler’s grounding of speculative fiction in familiar landscapes like California reinforces her interest in imagining near-future transformations of real-world conditions, especially in Black communities.

Many of Butler’s protagonists are Black women who explore worlds dominated by classic science fiction tropes, like telepathy and space travel. A central aspect of Butler’s writing is her scrutiny of society and the ways in which people can imagine alternate ways of life, such as the Earthseed religious commune created in the Parable duology. In Mind of My Mind, the protagonist creates a society of telepaths that slowly begins taking over Forsyth, California, and the surrounding area. Their new society is one in which families do not depend on blood relations and everyone has an important role in society. In doing so, Butler reimagines community-building and social evolution from a Black, feminist perspective—offering a counter-narrative to Western individualism and hierarchical power.

In recent popular culture, Afrofuturism that imagines new possibilities include such films as Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which imagine how the union of African cultures and advanced technology in the form of the fictional nation of Wakanda and its hero, the Black Panther, could influence society and the world at large. While Butler’s work predates these films by decades, her influence is unmistakable. Her speculative worlds laid the groundwork for later pop culture phenomena that center Black futurity. In this sense, Black Panther is not a contemporary to Mind of My Mind—it is connected to Butler’s legacy. In Mind of My Mind, Octavia E. Butler pursues a similar course by imagining what a society of telepaths, descended from and cultivated by an immortal man from Africa, could develop into.

In many of her other works, Butler also focuses on such themes as the legacy of slavery and gender roles in society, all through the medium of science fiction. Common in Butler’s works is the exploration of alternative forms of society, with emphasis on community built through shared experiences and unity, rather than division. In Mind of My Mind, the telepaths that form the Pattern come from all different backgrounds and communities to form a new kind of society. This vision, rooted in speculative imagination but grounded in material histories of oppression and survival, is at the heart of Butler’s Afrofuturist project.