WHAT KEEPS MANKIND ALIVE?: This past week, I read Octavia Butler’s short story, “Asylum.” [eta: Yeah, it might help to get the story’s title right, you know? It’s “Amnesty.” SORRY.] You can find my review of her story collection Bloodchild here. “Amnesty” isn’t included in that collection.

I can see why. It’s just not as well-crafted as the stories in Bloodchild. It’s clunky; you can see the duct tape on the girders. There are speeches and the pacing is off and the metaphors are too abstract. In the stories in Bloodchild, the characters and imagery are almost transparent–they’re metaphorical, in the weird “twelve connotations at once” way of the best science fiction, but they feel real. The connotation feels like it has a denotation, a real person or image or moment there, and “Amnesty” lacks that shock of recognition.

Oh, it has other shocks, though. Like the other Butler stories I’ve read, it portrays the world as a collage of complicity and need. And of course that’s true. (The fact that I think there are other true narratives of the world–which Butler in “Amnesty” seems to deny pretty strenuously–doesn’t make the complicity-need narrative untrue. The fact that the complicity-need narrative, in isolation from any uncompromising love or hope, does always end up with a lot of powerless people dead [if you can articulate your powerlessness, someone else is more powerless than you, almost by definition, so there’s someone for you to hurt or sacrifice] doesn’t make the complicity-need narrative untrue.)

I’ve spent a significant fraction of this week reading about torture; and all kinds of details in “Amnesty” could have been taken from this week’s ACLU press release. This is the real world.