Take root among the stars? Emancipatory homemaking as critical worldbuilding in Octavia Butler’s Parables

Abstract

This paper draws on geographical literature on home to explore two strategies of emancipatory homemaking in the Science Fiction novels of Octavia Butler. It examines, homemaking as a strategy, first, of persistence and, second, of adaptability. Analyzing these two strategies in the way they combine, we argue, allows us to define the home as a critical place that links various geographical scales, from the most intimate to the planetary. We build our argument by tracing the ways in which the protagonists of Butler’s Parables build homes in respect of a necessary negotation between persistance vis-a-vis violence and threats on the one, and the necessity to adapt to the precarious social institutions that surround them on the other hand. Such critical, multiscalar geography of home is proposed as a middle ground between extraterrestrial escapist tendencies, and the introvert isolationism of the homely enclave. Butler’s novels help critical geographers frame the paradoxical space of the home as a productive tension: Home is as much a place of loss, instability, and uncertainty as it is a locus of political agency, counteracting violence and liberating (inter)subjective kinship.

Introduction

At the outset of Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler teases a radical philosophy of change – Earthseed – which centrally guides the novel. As the basis of all life, as a productive tension humanity must confront and negotiate, as a foundational truism, change is perhaps the only divinity there is:

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change. ¹

The Parables series (PoS, 1993; Parable of the Talents, PoT, 1998), in this emphasis on navigating the greatest magnitudes of change, provide invaluable insight into the art of homemaking under what has been aptly termed a ‘polycrisis’ ² – the compounding of existential crises in late capitalism. In Butler’s depiction of a near-future (now contemporary, 2024) US, the polycrisis has deepened: beset with climate catastrophe, political instability, and mounting violence, as well as shortages of food and water, people are forced to abandon their homes, or are expelled from them by drug-addled arson. The idea of home becomes a central motif, but not in an understanding of static boundaries or fixed walls. The epigraph to PoS, in juxtaposition to that first ode to change, spells out the interrelated demand for adaptation, and obsessive persistence. ³ We believe that these elements reconfigure the nature of home: as ‘sedentarist and as mobile’, ⁴ simultaneously – a continual process of homemaking.

Building upon geographical literature that explores the precarious nature and paradoxical conceptions of home – the vision of a discreet, ultimate sanctuary on the one hand, ⁵ against the reality of instability and constant threat on the other ⁶ – this paper examines homemaking as a quotidian act of resistance, a ‘performative act intended to reconstruct the damaged, imperfect home into a safe place it should have been’. ⁷ In so doing, we interpret the Parables, in part, literally: a prescient vision of petrofascist, (post-)Trumpian America, they act precisely as a parable of what will come to pass if not actively resisted, and, should such fascism take hold, as a parable of how this may be opposed. The home functions as a key site of this resistance, ⁸ emplacing the struggle for emancipation, and yet is in Butler’s formation always more than mere place-to-be-protected. In its aspect of homemaking, the home becomes a place of and for critical worldbuilding, in which ‘the production, circulation, and consumption of imagined worlds (. . .) inform and are informed by our histories and political present. Worldbuilding is (. . .) a fundamentally geographical exercise and an unavoidably political act’. ⁹ We examine homemaking as such a form of political worldbuilding through a close reading of Butler’s Parables. Set in a dystopian very-near-future, the acclaimed speculative fiction duology is essentially a cross between a coming-of-age story and a travel or migration novel – and it revolves around a particular notion of home that centers on change.

Across the extensive scholarly engagement with Octavia Butler’s work, home and homemaking have rarely been studied, ¹⁰ though related themes such as violent displacement, expulsion, belonging and worldbuilding have received attention. Reading Butler for the practice of dwelling illuminates a nuanced picture of how social bonds, kinship formation, and survival in disrupted and, at least for some, apocalyptic worlds, may contribute to a redefined, less localized understanding of home, one that speaks poignantly to Alison Blunt’s work on the multiscalarity of home. Such multiscalar homemaking entangles the natural and the cultural, the domestic and the political, the local and the global. ¹¹ Commencing with a conceptual articulation of our understanding of homemaking as a political and emancipatory process, with an emphasis on the creation of kinship bonds, and after situating the Parables within Butler’s oeuvre, we analyze emancipatory homemaking as a strategy characterized by persistence and adaptability, those integral features of Butler’s philosophy of change. In a fictional world where physical structures crumble, so too do the social institutions once manifest in the architectures and infrastructures of enclaves, neighborhoods, and nation-states. The home, in this context, emerges as a pivotal socio-political stance rather than merely a fixed geographical location. While this understanding of home is domestic to scholarship in critical geography, we find it necessary to further explore collective strategies that allow for well-informed, emancipatory responses to climate change, conflict and widescale dispossession and displacement. The Parables may represent a polycrisis worse than our parallel present, but its dystopian elements grow increasingly likely, or, in the case of climate change, all but irrevocable. In tow, strategies for coping, resisting and thriving in the face of dystopia will become all the more important. After navigating the destruction, uncertainty, solidarity, and creativity prevalent in Butler’s Parables, the concluding section of our paper forwards a geographical notion of emancipatory homemaking as a progressive response to such contingencies and impending disasters that mark our own planetary polycrisis.

Multiscalar geographies of home

Adaptability and persistence are ethical principles of Butler’s Earthseed community, the religion of protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina, who is deeply devoted to Change. While Butler does not define the terms as such in the novels, she introduces them as mutually dependent, or dialectic, in the epigraph to PoS. Adaptability naturally entails flexibility, open-mindedness for improvization, and resilience in the face of ever-shifting circumstances, requiring a readiness to learn, evolve, and discover new ways of living and thriving in a world of perpetual flux. Persistence, in tow, is the capacity to endure in the pursuit of one’s beliefs and goals despite the challenges presented by a world in constant transformation. We read the latter term through the lens of feminist scholar Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of endurance: how individuals navigate adversity and challenges over time; how they ‘suffer, and yet persist’. ¹² Within this temporal framework, the process of homemaking takes on an ‘eventful’ quality, enabling us to understand individuals’ perseverance as a general strategic mode of existence, incorporating a set of cautionary, solidaric, and caring acts, as tactical responses in immediately threatening occasions. Adaptability, on the other hand, we see as an affective state of alertness that is necessary to cope with the affordances of an improvised life. ¹³ Butler extrapolates the tendency of the US-American housing sector to provide privately guarded and policed condominium settings in gated communities, mostly for the more affluent. This includes the protagonist’s original dwelling in a gated compound, as her father is employed in academia. The omnipresent threats of Olamina’s dystopian US West Coast – heat and water scarcity, militias, robbers, organized Christofascism – compel new strategies, either collective or individual, to safeguard oneself and one’s dwelling. This persistence–adaptability continuum illustrates how individuals simultaneously endure ongoing challenges while remaining alert to present threats, adapting their behaviors and practices or enduring in the face of threats accordingly.

Conceiving of the home as a space that combines principles of persistence and adaptability follows the literature that sees it as an intensely political site ¹⁴ imbued with Doreen Massey’s ‘global sense of place’. ¹⁵ The material arrangements of houses co-evolve with cultural transformations in the wider society, ¹⁶ the interior, private space becomes a way to understand and mark heterogenous life-worlds and cultural difference. In this sense, ‘home matters’ ¹⁷ as a place to be protected, materializing collective efforts to build one’s shelter in violent surroundings and staff it with diverse technologies of surveillance to keep a dangerous world out, including undesired forms of life or threatening materials such as pollutants. ¹⁸

This intense politicization of the home speaks to the Parables: their setting is akin to a future Fortress America, ¹⁹ tying into the literatures on defensible architecture, as well as those concerning urban segregation. When home is read as a space of persistence it becomes configured as purely defensible space, in extremis manifesting a tendency to isolationism, the retreat from dangerous Others into the gated, sequestered homely enclave, often observed in respective urban studies literature on home, housing, security as well as segregation. ²⁰ This isolationism is frequently political, and racial: responding to a perceived weakness of the state to shield a privileged class of citizen from cultural diversity and migration. ²¹ This form of homemaking becomes a way to live and spatialize xenophobia and nativism on both a local and a national scale, ²² and further drives societal polarization and entrenched racism; it has become a widespread global phenomenon. ²³

Critical geographies of home are skeptical of an understanding limited to an isolated housing unit inhabited by a nuclear family, ²⁴ epitomized in Isaac Asimov’s satirical ‘Living Space’, where a middle-class family inhabits ‘the only house on an uninhabited planet’ ²⁵ in individualistic bliss. Rather, they understand home as precarious, a defendable position in society that is constantly exposed to potential threats, such as forced resettlement, violent conflict, or climate crisis-induced loss of habitat – all of which are thematized in the Parables – requiring not just persistence, but also (forced) adaptability. As the emplacement of adaptability, home becomes a place of desire and imagination, a place to design one’s position in the world, to express taste, to live distinction from others; a place of profound emotion and belonging. Migration studies necessarily attend to this dimension of home, where dwelling itself becomes a central push-or-pull factor, a voluntary or involuntary departure that must be adapted to. A loss of home, accurately termed ‘home unmaking’ ²⁶ or ‘un-homing’, ²⁷ often accompanies and indeed demands a reinvention of the self. ²⁸ The neologism domicide has even been coined to describe ‘the intentional destruction of home’, ²⁹ typically by state or wealthy actors for political or financial ends, related to ‘urbicide’ ³⁰ ; threats to the place of one’s dwelling and the planetary dimension of home are intertwined spatial dimensions.

Adaptability and persistence, or alertness and endurance, emblemize the paradox of home: the constant threat of expulsion on the one side, and the related desire to fortify and defend one’s home on the other. This paradox comes out clearly in Blunt and Dowley’s key contribution to the field. ³¹ They delve into the intricate processes of destruction and reconstruction of homes, particularly through the example of Hurricane Katrina. They juxtapose this with the concept of co-housing, which embodies a tangible manifestation of progressive ideals striving for inclusivity and equity in communal living arrangements, a fresh perspective on the notion of ownership and belonging. Their analysis underscores the imperative for a multidimensional approach to understanding the geography of home, one that navigates the intricate interplay of various scales.

Butler’s Parables push us to zoom in to these notions of home and to think about one’s place in a world of disaster, going one step further in radicalizing the collective sentiment, and experience, of loss and instability. Extrapolating existential uncertainty as the new normal, the Parables undermine conceptions of home as a safe place in an unsafe world, demanding a rethinking of homemaking as a relational, multiscalar process. From the microcosm of neighborhood dynamics to the broader context of national and transnational crises, as well as aspirational visions for the future, a nuanced understanding of home emerges – one that acknowledges its complex entanglements within broader socio-political contexts and anticipates its potential for transformative change. Described as survival strategies, adaptability and persistence are thus also two interrelated ways to conceive of home and homemaking as a political challenge.

Locating the writing of Octavia E. Butler

Literary fiction has imagined life in devastated worlds in many ways, ³² and existential threats to the survival of the human species are a key motif in speculative and science fiction (SF), the broad generic home of the Parables. Dystopian SF often turns the threat of losing home into a reality. These fictional worlds of instability and change cast human beings out of their home, confronting readers with ‘nostalgic desires for the resurrection of lost metanarratives’ ³³ such as industrialized forms of capitalist production, paternalist values and social hierarchies based on markers of race, class, and gender. Dystopian SF also offers a promising account of how individuals and collectives navigate a world of chaos, organize their struggle for a livable world, and challenge the very structures that unsettled their homes in the first place. ³⁴

Butler is one of the most eminent Black Feminist SF authors, and her oeuvre centrally concerns the search for more just futures. ³⁵ Our motivation to work with the Parables was twofold: First, they forward an account of kinship beyond consanguinity or even an assumed cultural homogeneity. Second, they are works of near-future climate fiction which often depicts worlds characterized by uncertainty, loss, and displacement. ³⁶ The two novels are part of an incomplete sequence – at least four more were planned and named – situated along the Pacific Coast of California and Oregon. The narrative unfolds in a world marked by profound social and political upheaval, including racialized and sexualized violence, debt enslavement, corporate enclaves, and an authoritarian regime, establishing them as works of dystopia. The Parables vividly depict the widespread destruction of homes and the relentless movements of mass migration.

The storytelling follows two protagonists, Lauren Oya Olamina and her daughter Larkin, whose perspectives are chronicled in diaries spanning from 2024 to 2090, and incorporates a compelling manifesto authored by Lauren, titled Earthseed: The Book of the Living. In this, Lauren develops her philosophical vision for a translocal community, based on mutual respect, equity, diversity, and solidarity. The Parables function in this way as a postcolonial, programmatic call for the organization of utopian communities arising out of a politicized and plural practice of homemaking.

Butler’s Parables trace trajectories of home and loss: forceful expulsion and the formation of a new yet vulnerable community. First published in the mid-1990s, Butler’s prose is an alarming and yet uncannily realistic analysis of our socio-political and -ecological present. Her work is acclaimed for being the result of an endeavor of archiving the effects of anthropogenic climate change in past and present constellations, annotating them with a futuristic perspective. ³⁷ She anticipates the effects of global warming and the climate crisis on the US West Coast and a polarized geopolitical world of authoritarian police-states with seriously weakened liberal democratic regimes. The homes of all societal classes are existentially endangered and destroyed both by human acts and effects of the climate crisis, to the degree that the planet’s scarce inhabitable surface is subject to interstate and civil wars.

In both Parable of the Sower and Parable of Talents, Butler reinterprets parables from the bible. Where Luke 8:5-8 sees only those seeds that fall on ‘good ground’ growing and bearing fruit, Butler’s narration of an adaptability of seed to ground casts simplistic subject–object relations into question, outlining relational co-dependence. Hence, where the biblical Sower seeks ‘good ground’ for unchangeable seed, Butler ascribes to human beings, the metaphorical seed, the ability to persevere and adapt to what is already there in an act of unlearning: ‘Earthseed/ cast on new ground/must first perceive/ That it knows nothing’. ³⁸ In this way, Butler exacerbates the spatial fragmentation of communities, the polarization of ideologically opposed groups, and the privatization of a felt necessity to be prepared for the worst. Told through a narrative depicting the loss of home in an apocalyptic world ³⁹ and the continuous search for new places to seed a utopian community whose ‘God is Change’, ⁴⁰ the Parables describe a society in which terror and barbarism have been rationalized into state politics and a Christofascist government. ⁴¹ In this Neo-Darwinist world, social contracts offer no protection. Instead, survival depends on individuals’ or small communities’ protective measures to secure their homes. Analyzed as novels about power and subjectivity as well as community, ⁴² PoS and PoT are also a future that failed to confront structural racism, colonialism, systemic inequality, and the exploitation of Black populations. ⁴³

We may now turn to our analysis of the role of homemaking in facing these existential crises. As Butler’s novels tell stories of survival, empowerment, and kinship formation through the material, political, and symbolic process of homemaking, they allow us to speculate about the ways in which existential threats and looming crises will shape our conceptions of the home. Homemaking, between domestic and planetary scales and as an emancipatory endeavor, means projecting ‘home’ beyond place-making attempts and anchorings of belonging.

Principles of emancipatory homemaking in the Parables: adaptability and persistence

In this section, we present the results of our close reading of the Parables, drawing on the principles of adaptability and persistence as defined above. While adaptability focuses on the tactical ability to consciously and collectively navigate through a world exposed to profound social and environmental change, persistence refers to the strategic ability of endurance, keeping one’s long-term goals, virtues, and values alive despite living a life in limbo. Our understanding of homemaking thus resonates with Povinell’s and Simone’s analyses of people’s strategies of survival in a post-liberal world and an urban south, respectively, who continue to build homes and interact socially. ⁴⁴ Lauren’s political and religious journey combines both strategies, teaching openness and malleability to her followers while maintaining a solid foundation of trust and solidarity as the basis for novel, translocal, transnational and thus multiscalar homemaking collectivities. In the following, we detail how these interdependent strategies contribute to manifesting emancipatory change. In the trajectory between exile and the (re-)making of home, the protagonists’ search for kinship creates a space for human and posthuman empowerment. The home, in both novels, becomes a place for such an emancipatory move, breaching domestic and intergalactic scales.

Persistence: the multiscalarity of homemaking

The first strategy combines the physical and social destruction and reconstruction of homes. The power of arson to destroy and disrupt social cohesion, along with Lauren’s evolving faith, are leitmotifs. Lauren’s story begins in Robledo, a gated community in southern California. California’s polycrisis is further inflamed by the Pyro drug which compels its users to start fires hedonistically and compulsively. A devastating fire, triggered by Pyro addicts, terminates Lauren’s community by destroying critical resources – fruit trees, vegetable gardens, and the walls that maintained an illusion of security. The protagonist recognizes the necessity of both literal and metaphorical destruction for the sake of new beginnings: ‘In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn’. ⁴⁵ In the final chapters of PoS, Lauren and the Earthseed community begin settling on land owned by Bankole, Lauren’s much older lover, even though the property had been unexpectedly destroyed by fire previously. They plant seeds in the remaining land, intending it as a memorial and as a symbol that land affected by fire can still yield fertile ground, echoing the themes presented in the biblical Parable of the Sower.

Pushing people to flee the ruins of their houses, neighborhoods and cities, fire in the Parables metaphorizes the loss of inhabitable space to a heating planet. The de- and restructuring of home by fire as a catalyst of change, sets out a multiscalar and -sited stage on which homemaking occurs. The figure of the marauding Pyro user anticipates a global health issue, with drug abuse and Pyro’s individual, body-centered effects connecting to environmental issues. While the drug is Butler’s invention, it resonates with current research on the alarming link between climate change, the use of harmful substances, and (mental) health issues. ⁴⁶ Climate trauma and anxiety around the looming loss of home and family bonds amidst increasingly polarized societies affects particularly the younger generations, with the rising frequency and severity of regional heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and storms ⁴⁷ undermining social participation and contributing to accidents, financial precarity, and mental- and physical-health morbidity. ⁴⁸

Before the decisive fire and invasion by Pyro users, Lauren frequently engaged in discussions with her father about reinforcing the community in place or heading north where there might be better access to water and cheaper food. Lauren expressed a clear desire to organize such a collective move, but her father considered this a sign of weakness, a flight. Facing looming destruction and considering collective strength in an organized move northward, Lauren preaches the moral of perseverance: ‘The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary’. ⁴⁹

A persistent homemaking becomes, counter-intuitively, an adaptive one; Lauren describes persistence not through stabilization or further defense of the community. Rather it is about risk-taking, an openness for change, community building and collective intelligence: ‘Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation’, ⁵⁰ when flight is not an act of weakness but rather of learning: ‘Out here you adapt to your surroundings or get killed’. ⁵¹

After a long journey north, collecting followers as she goes, Acorn, a new home for Earthseed is inaugurated towards the end of PoS. The subsequent PoT narrates how they seek to remake this lost home but are enslaved by a fanatic Christian militia acting in the spirit of the Christofascist government. As all their material structures are destroyed and their freedom is violently denied through rape and forced labor, Lauren remains stoic: ‘Acorn is dead’, ⁵² she utters, but ‘Earthseed lives and will live’. ⁵³ Survival, a future home, extends beyond geography. Within Lauren’s Earthseed community, the house represents both a tangible and a symbolic embodiment of home, functioning as a political territory where potential futures are actualized. This homemaking is processual: Lauren is repeatedly exiled from her home and compelled to establish a new one elsewhere. Her journey becomes a poignant analogy for how the act of dwelling can concretize and safeguard the conditions for the essential changes required for humanity’s survival on planet Earth.

Butler’s apocalyptic Black imaginary explicates the loss of an ‘ontological security’ ⁵⁴ in the dwelling, but, critically, it lays out strategies for its reclamation, too; for the creation of future, emancipatory homes. This evokes bell hooks’ ‘homeplace as a site of resistance’, ⁵⁵ the task of ‘making home a community of struggle’ ⁵⁶ :

Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization (. . .). Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation. ⁵⁷

Homemaking as a political strategy of kinship, endurance, and survival also speaks to the insights of migration studies on migration triggered by structural discrimination and persecution based on markers of social difference, such as gender and sexuality. ⁵⁸ A human need to preserve a self-identity free from persecution and emotional, epistemological, or physical violence provides a strong motive for homemaking elsewhere. While homemaking is thus a mobile, nomadic praxis, emancipation through homemaking may also imply staying, stabilizing. The ‘yearning’ ⁵⁹ for a homely retreat from everyday violence, from the intergenerational trauma of slavery and displacement, reverberates with the constant threat of racialized and sexualized violence and enslavement present in the Parables.

The tension between mobility in search for better living conditions and staying put in defense of one’s place condenses in Lauren’s reflections on why she baptized her project-community Earthseed:

I found the name (. . .) thinking about the way plants seed themselves, windborne, animalborne, waterborne, far from their parent plants. They have no ability at all to travel great distances under their own power, and yet they do travel. (. . .) I think we’ll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place. ⁶⁰

The Parables address this tension in outright violent ways. Lauren’s hyperempathy, an inherent condition of her ‘bodymind’ ⁶¹ experienced since birth, intertwines her intimately with the emotions and pains of those around her. This unique trait becomes the linchpin for forming kinship bonds and on-the-go processes of homemaking. The intricate web of emotions woven through these connections extends the notion of home beyond the social realm, also encompassing the physical environment. In alignment with the concept of domestic multiscalarity proposed by Blunt and Dowley, homemaking in disrupted worlds relies less on establishing fixed locations and more on ‘cohousing’, a strategy that demands fostering of mobile kinship formations. The travelers in the Parables need to perform the imaginative and affective aspects of home, underscoring the emotions involved in their interactions with a physical residence, such as the need for belonging, emotional support, shelter, and security, demanding the Earthseed citizens to ‘[e]mbrace diversity or be destroyed’. ⁶² This praxis of collective and affective persistence emphasizes the multiscalar spatial imaginaries of home, locating its making as much in a house as a neighborhood, a town, a nation, or a transnationally negotiated imaginary on the move.

Homemaking thus persists through life-as-journey, a contingent, collective becoming. Yet, homemaking also demands surviving in an adaptable manner, thriving in environmental conditions one relies on to build such mobile homes as worlds without a fixed place.

Adaptability: the affordances of change

The correlation between socio-material architecture and change emerges clearly at the outset of PoS. The gates to Lauren’s compound represent the last privilege of an eroded middleclass in a society that ‘favors profit at the expense of human well-being’. ⁶³ Lauren is enlightened by a dream shortly before the world of her childhood collapses: ‘The neighborhood wall is a massive, looming presence nearby. I see it as a crouching animal, perhaps about to spring, more threatening than protective’. ⁶⁴ The wall, for her neighbors and family, is a materially fading, yet symbolically powerful protection for the middleclass community against the feared population of ‘poor-squatters, winos, junkies, and homeless people in general’. ⁶⁵ In Lauren’s dream, the wall itself becomes the threat, potentially turning against those it is meant to protect. When it is finally jumped over by the undesirables, the wall becomes the trigger for change, transformation, pulling down those who had for years been able to stand above the outcasts.

The Parables teach us that homemaking in a polycrisis demands being able to think and feel with strangers, surmounting diverse experiences and histories, and forging connections to lifeworlds that have long been divided. This reframing prompts us to conceive of home as a fluid entity, a spatial frame for the second strategy: adaptability. The Parables configure the multiscalar home in the image of the diasporic home: a reality in which distinct and heterogeneous perspectives, emotions, and customs are negotiated in a multiplied geography. This multiscalar home is a spatial imaginary that encompasses the interplay between emotions, attachment, dwelling, and various places. In building the Earthseed community upon its members’ multiple stories and experiences, Lauren reminds of a diasporic experience of loss and novel hybrid identity formation. ⁶⁶ Yet, instead of a feeling of loss and nostalgia, Butler emphasizes the essential need for openness and transformation. Their loss is absolute, there is no return or communicating with those back home, no sense in maintaining diasporic, translocal bonds; rather needed is the willingness to make home as a set of intersecting ideas and feelings that shape places, extend across spaces and scales, and establish novel connections between them – in short, adaptability.

Adaptability further qualifies the conditions of persistence as a strategy of resistance, configuring it rather as an enduring ‘enthusiasm’ ⁶⁷ beyond the moment: When writing about the Parables in hindsight, Butler made it clear that even in the consequential futuring of present precarities and crises, there lies a seed of hope in one’s corporeal presence: ‘There’s no single answer that will solve all 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’. ⁶⁸ Hope, thus, is not a passive attitude, but intricately tied to individual and collective acts of creation and adaption. This is central to hope-as-agency, a recognition of mutual dependencies: ‘All that you touch/You Change/All that you Change/Changes you/The only lasting truth/Is Change/God/Is Change’. ⁶⁹ Similar to a seed that, cast on unsuitable ground, cannot flourish, emancipatory homemaking in the Parables necessarily involves a transformation both of the soil into inhabitable ground, and of the seed itself. Butler’s writing does not rely on the essentializing notion of ‘good seed’ and ‘roots’ suitable to a given geographical location, fleshing out instead the perils of any homemaking that resorts to variants of settler colonialist logics, subjecting environments to one’s will. Adaptive homemaking rather entails nomadism, and remaining contingent on the affordances of the surrounding world, casting us into both the hopeful aspect of change, but also its anxious aspect of the unknown: ‘“Change does scare most people.” – “I know. God is frightening. Best learn to cope.”’ ⁷⁰

Adaptability is a strategy to cope with disruption, pushing to the extremes what in geographical literatures on home and migration is described as the feeling of loss and nostalgia. Adaptability means coping with anxiety of the future as the Earthseed home is no longer ‘a site that is fixed in the present or only understandable in relation to the past’. ⁷¹ In this sense then, the Parables model homemaking amidst the massive displacements of the climate crisis and armed conflicts that increasingly define our present polycrisis. ⁷² In this reality, Blunt et al. conceive urban dwelling as ‘intertwining the past, present, and future, generations and life courses, and housing, family, and migration histories’. ⁷³ Given that the Earthseed community is entirely cut off from such roots, due to the complete destruction and loss of homes, their homemaking is also a story of coming-of-age as reinvention upon one’s lost former home.

The affective bond of the Earthseed community lies precisely in that collective experience of exile: ‘We’ll be moved, all right. It’s just a matter of when, by whom, and in how many pieces’. ⁷⁴ Highlighting loss and nomadic search for a new place to localize a house, Butler reminds humans of their ancestral history of displacement. Such foundational uncertainty is a key motif of nativist and nationalist ideologies of privilege, ownership, and belonging, borne of essentialist logics of ‘blood and soil’, prevalent for instance in white settler-colonialist US American history as well as fascist ideologies. ⁷⁵ In contrast, Butler’s protagonists, spreading her idea about the Earthseed community, do not romanticize this collective apocalypse. While ‘it is not “very comforting,”’ ⁷⁶ Lauren seeks to motivate her peers to emphatically embrace contingency as a base condition of their world.

Consequently, Lauren’s God turns their followers back towards themselves, and their gentle, social agency towards one another: Lamenting about a lack of transcendental love and care, one of the Earthseed members points out that ‘[y]our God doesn’t care about you at all.’ ⁷⁷ Again, homemaking is not located or based on an inherited, legally protected privilege to reside in one’s own plot; rather, Butler’s prose disrupts the legal institution of property itself. Belonging to land and home as portrayed in Earthseed is built on social formations of care, complicating the relation between people, place and land in, for example, recent studies in Black geographies of home that highlight that in ‘life beyond staying, ownership is organized not around property, but around the deep, complex bonds between people, place, and land’. ⁷⁸ Becoming a displaced being, all that is left for the nomadic subject is ‘to care about myself and others. Even more reason to create Earthseed communities and shape God together’. ⁷⁹ Displacement as involuntary departure from home may entail a defensive act of self-preservation but it also engenders a more creative process – working on a different possible future through the making of a new home, and a new community.

‘Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all’ ⁸⁰ : homemaking as critical worldbuilding

Drawing on Octavia Butler’s Parables, this paper expanded on the geographical notion of homemaking as a political practice. We have shown how homemaking is also a process of critical worldbuilding, one that we can learn about from science fiction. ⁸¹ As a political practice, homemaking builds a world of aggravated tensions that connect the here and now with the past future. In Butler’s words, the Parables construct a world that is, while fictitious in plot and characters, realistic in facing the effects of ‘problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters’. ⁸² While today we may not be witnessing the exact disastrous developments Butler outlined for the decades between 2024 and 2090, we nevertheless observe polarized tendencies when it comes to the spatial reorganization of homes, and a world in which ‘exile is our planetary way of existence’ ⁸³ as Donatella Di Cesare puts it.

A notion of a positive obsession defines the contemporary wave of dystopian literatures. These portray a space that, while reflecting unsettling aspects of our current lifeworld, simultaneously creates a realm for contestation and opposition. This space becomes an arena for collective ‘ex-centric’ ⁸⁴ subjects – individuals whose positions, be it class, gender, race, sexuality, or other facets, are disempowered under hegemonic rule – to engage in ‘a positive obsession’ ⁸⁵ for one’s kin and environment. As elucidated by Baccolini and Moylan, the narrative strategy of hope revolves around ‘rejecting the traditional subjugation of the individual at the end of the novel’. ⁸⁶ Lauren Olamina’s unwavering optimism throughout Butler’s novels aligns precisely with this approach, aiming to overcome individualistic trends. In the concluding chapters of the second book, as Lauren contemplates the fading of her own life, she acknowledges that her mission bears a name she, for historical and political reasons, would have rejected. In spite of this, she places trust in her community, asserting that the spaceship ominously named ‘Christopher Columbus’ will not perpetuate the settler-colonialism which has characterized Euro-American history as it ventures into the stars. The ship’s ascent to new horizons is envisioned as a collective experience, where the individual – including the movement’s founder – no longer plays a decisive role. Constantly adapting to the evolution of the Earthseed movement yet persisting in her role as its central figure, Lauren herself has deeply incorporated the twin strategies of persistence and adaptability.

The interdependency of adaptability and persistence is at the core of our Butler-informed understanding of homemaking. Persistence as resistance marks the need for an ongoing struggle to foster social bonds and reconfigure spatial structures, including protective architectures and translocal networks between communities. As a strategic counterpart, adaptability focuses on the necessity to interact with the given surroundings and their affordances. Butler describes the act of homemaking in a world of uncertainties and permanent crises, insisting that actors might do better by avoiding both extremes of a spectrum of seemingly possible responses: an escape to the stars or a turn towards the exclusionary intimacy of one’s own. Rather than escaping off-planet, and abandoning planet Earth via some technophilic phantasy, a habitable planetary future depends on forging novel multiscalar kinships on Earth.

The question posed in the title of this paper does not center on choosing between escaping to the stars or isolating oneself in a sealed environment. Instead, it focuses on the conceptual place of home, as articulated in Olamina’s manifesto:

The Destiny of Earthseed

Is to take root among the stars.

It is to live and thrive

On new earths.

It is to become new beings

And to consider new questions.

It is to leap into the heavens

Again and again.

It is to explore the vastness

Of heaven.

It is to explore the vastness

Of ourselves.

The Destiny of Earthseed carries no imperative, but a question. Taking root among the stars is a question humanity must confront in the present. By questioning the conceptual place of home, we acknowledge its fluidity, shifting between the vastness of the ‘heavens’ – the stars – and the intimacy of ‘ourselves’ – our bodies. Destiny, therefore, unfolds as a continuous exploration of ‘earths’ and grounds, of ‘beings’ and seeds in constant correlation.

In conclusion, reading dystopian SF novels such as Butler’s Parables alongside scholarly literature on the home speaks to the need for critical worldbuilding. The latent transformative character of home and world is promising: As Butler’s protagonists engage in weaving novel kinships during their journey, we think of them as ‘territorial subjects-in-formation’ ⁸⁷ – a relational process wherein we can locate subjects as they are forming novel collective identities. Catering to a critical understanding of homemaking, the persistently changing and adaptive search for identities and new communities provides an outline of kinship beyond essentialist relations of family bonds, bloodlines, or racialized categorizations. In this regard, Butler’s novels sketch out how intellectual and emotional ties can and must coexist alongside an existential uprootedness. This uprootedness, in turn, frames the material and social context for an emancipatory worldbuilding in recognition of the home as a mobile place.

Based on this, we take the Parables as an urgent call to realize the potential of homemaking. Rather than defending the home as a place to be secured and cared for, the novels flesh out strategies and tactics of an emplaced subject formation as homemaking with someone else, embracing diversity. In this sense, Butler’s novels help critical geographers frame the paradoxical space of the home as a productive tension: Home is as much a place of loss, instability, and uncertainty as it is a locus of political agency, counteracting violence and liberating (inter)subjective kinship.