User:Doctorxgc/sandbox/Butlerbio2

"To try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet."--in Essence.

"Butler's great gift as a writer was her ability to tell moving, realistice stories about how people would survive in futures far more harrowing and strange than anything that ever appeared on the Enterprise's sensors in Star Trek." Newitz 147

"In an essay for O, The Oprah Magazine, Butler recalled a formative experience. She visited a zoo with her elementary school class, and watched in horror as the other kids threw peanuts at a caged chimp, taunting him. As the animal wailed in frustration (and possibly madness), the young Butler realized she had more sympathy for this ape at that moment than she did for her fellow humans. She'd caught her first glimpse of humanity as it might look through alien eyes, and the experience left its mark on her imagination forever.
 * At age 7, I learned to hate solid, physical cages--cages with real bars like the ones that made the chimp's world tiny, vulnerable and barren, she wrote. "later I learned to hate the metaphorical cages that people try to use to avoid getting to know one another--cages of race, gender or class."

Newitz 147

"The strength of Lilith's Brood as a thought experiment lies in Butler's suggestion that human survival means an endless and increasingly profound series of compromises." Newitz 150 "This is why we survive, Butler suggests. We want to witness the birth of something better." Newitz 151

"Though her future humans are vastly more powerful than us, they don't achieve a state of perfection. They are the hybrid result of compromise--better than we are, but stealing with conflict and disappointment.

One of the great lessons about future survival that we can take away from Lilith's Brood is that it will require us to change. And those changes may be a lot more difficult, and a lot weirder, than we expect." Newitz 151

On religion: "I used to despise religion. I have not become religious, but I think I've become more understanding of religion...Religion kept..." See http://www.locusmag.com/2000/Issues/06/Butler.html (*get original)

"The Parable novels are, in essence, a story about reconciling religion with social change, God with science, and the past with the future." "Humanity's story must be one of constant change because that is one way to transmute pain into hope." Newitz 152

Solutions: "there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.” - See more at: http://exittheapple.com/a-few-rules-for-predicting-the-future/#sthash.WzUVKn9P.dpuf http://exittheapple.com/a-few-rules-for-predicting-the-future/

Reference
 * Newitz, Annalee. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. New York: Anchor: 2013. ISBN-13: 978-0307949424 ISBN-10: 0307949427