I think about the U.S. fighter jet that killed my grandfather's two best friends when he was eleven, tucked behind a rock and certain he was about to die. How my family’s faces stretch awkwardly when they say this, let out hollow-bellied laughs as our feet touch the same dirt that once knew their blood. Joking about how it couldn’t have been Korea because their planes would’ve flown like crap. Oh harabeoji. He says dead bodies collected on the street like autumn leaves. You know his father would take their grenades and toss them in the water to fish. Pick up their flailing bodies. Survive. I don’t want to put words in my grandfather's mouth, say he’s desensitized to violence, to certain tragedies—say this of any of my grandparents—but his generation walks barefoot on burning mountains. They approach active beehives despite being deathly allergic to bees. Counter pain with more pain. 

It is weird, isn’t it. How often tragedy comes to you, belittled, when it is all you’ve ever known. When it is all you have been knowing. Study after study after study after study after study has been published within the past decade about society’s desensitization to violence. It has saturated Generation Z’s humor: whether it is because we do not fully understand that at which we are jesting, or we know it too well, or maybe we cultivate a sense of miscomprehension to shield us from our own knowledge of the truth, I don’t completely know; but I track immense irony in our tendency to grieve over the plights of fictional characters while turning, more or less, a blind eye towards the very real, near-identical devastations wreaking our world. It becomes evident through this that perhaps, should one take a step back to deeply process, speculative narratives are, first and foremost, meant to reveal the truth, present our current reality as an outlandish specter—thrust into space, enslaved by artificial intelligence, gnawing on each other for sustenance—through which we can properly digest the state of our own world without the barrier of desensitization. Speculative narratives do not tell us about our future any more than they tell us about our present, numbed to many by exposure. 

This. This last line is so terribly important. Damian Duffy, the script adapter of Parable of the Sower, mentions in an interview attached to the comic adaptation that the most challenging part of adapting Butler’s story was “the peculiar feeling of dramatizing dystopian fiction while the daily news renders it documentary…Octavia Butler was an amazing writer, a certified genius, but I think it does her a disservice to pretend like she was psychic. She was just paying attention” (Duffy, 265). She was just paying attention. This line feels especially loud to me. What did you analyze to get to Earthseed. Other people, myself, everything I could read, hear, see, all the history I could learn. One a warning, one a religion. Both built on truth; on revelation. Arguably, speculative narratives are somewhat our Earthseed, meant to elicit understanding within its readers, provoke a sense of urgency for change. “The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars,” Lauren writes (Butler, 184).

Butler, a genius, is telling us this: if you do not understand that we are headed here—for this decaying future—if you do not understand this, we will die. So we, the reader, must listen to her words, as Travis eventually listens to Lauren's. We cannot stand idly by. Just as Lauren worships God as Change, we, too, must put our hearts into building a different world in which our future does not sit atop a bed of bodies. Change isn't impossible. It isn't.

WE CANNOT STAND IDLY BY

Though very much about the persistance of humanity, Interstellar is just as much about family. In order to pilot the mission, appropriately named "Project Endurance," Cooper must leave behind his two children. There is no determined return date for Cooper: he could come back in ten years, twenty-five years, one hundred. Never. Cooper's mission into space is equally about his quest to return to his daughter, who, in his absence, eventually goes on to become a NASA scientist herself. The idea of taking root in something—a planet, family—plays an incredibly important role in the film, much like how Earthseed centers around rootedness. And, just as Lauren emphasizes that “In order to rise/From its own ashes/A phoenix/First/Must/Burn” (Butler, 122). Nolan names NASA’s first attempt to search for habitable planets the “Lazarus Program” after Lazarus of Bethany, who, Dr. Brand (the chief scientist of the expedition) reminds Cooper, “came back from the dead.” Cooper’s response is, “Sure, but he had to die in the first place” (Interstellar).

.

   .

          .

.