Five minutes to read/jot

Five minutes to chat in pairs…

You probably remember Donna Haraway’s slogan, “Don’t Make Babies, Make Kin,” as well as her emphasis on shrinking “spaces of refuge” for “human and other critters.”  What are some ways that both of these themes appears in this novel, some 25 years before Haraway’s essay? How does Butler posit “kinship” as something to be “made” or “constructed” rather than as a function of biological reproduction as “family” or “race”? How do these constructed “kinships” aid in finding refuge in a forbidding landscape? Find a couple of quotes from the text to support your answer.

How does the aftermath of the burning of Robledo question or revise Lauren’s understanding of “family”? In her earlier life in Robledo: Who made the rules? What were the rules? What happened if you don’t follow the rules? How do each of these change once Lauren and the remnant from Roblebo’s community head North?

I thought you might be interested in reading this interview with climate fiction superstar Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the “Mars Trilogy” and the “Science in the Capital” trilogy. Robinson throws some serious shade at Ghosh’s argument about the “outhouse” of science fiction v. the “mansion” of the “serious” or “literary” novel:

Kim Stanley Robinson: We Need Democratic Socialism

Utopian thinking gets a pretty bad name. But for author Kim Stanley Robinson, we should resist the idea we’re simply doomed to climate disaster – and insist that there is a world beyond capitalism.

We should be reading Robinson, but his books are very long, so they got cut from this syllabus!