Octavia Butler class

A friend at work just gave me a brochure for Germantown Friends School Adult English enrichment courses because she thinks I should try to teach one. I think I want to take one, though: "Wild Seeds: The Science Fiction of Octavia Butler," taught by Yolanda Palacio. Eight weeks of reading and discussing Butler's short stories and "one novel from each series."

I wonder if they'll do Fledgling, and how she has picked which novel from which series. Same for Kindred, which is wonderful but a stand alone and not too science fictiony. I'd go with Dawn from Xenogenesis because you can't beat the exposition of the series. From the Patternists, I guess I'd pick Wild Seed because its so rich, but they are all so different that I might want to chose something like Clay's Ark because it's so unexpected. Or Patternmaster itself, because it might be interesting to study world creation among the first books in this series and Xenogenesis. And from the Parables, I'm not sure. Parable of The Sower is world-establishing and scary and wonderful, but Parable of the Talents gives a happy ending (sort of) and builds just as multilayered a world. And the three part narration would be interesting to study as a fictional strategy that is different from Dawn or Fledgling or Patternmaster. And Olamina's daughter's anguish is so brutal... Here's a wikipedichronology, because it's hard to keep straight.

anyway, I think I'm going to convince Ray to take this GFS class, which shouldn't be hard because he's the one who turned me on to her in the first place. Here are two pictures of me with Octavia Butler, when she read at Robin's shortly before her untimely death. Hopefully you can't see how red my cheeks are and that I was hyperventilating...