I love how practical Octavia was about how we move toward the future — considering not just how things need to change, not just that we need to reorganize ourselves into functional communities, but what we need to pack, what we need to study, what we need to practice in order to change. She’s the voice in my head saying, “Sure, but how?” My novel Grievers is fundamentally about harnessing life even when the odds feel impossible. Surviving apocalyptic conditions requires learning new skills, radically changing your priorities, and understanding there is individual work to do inside collective survival. In writing Grievers, I felt inspired by how Octavia wrote younger people, who generate different solutions than people who have had to run a family, write a budget, and negotiate with bureaucracy. In that way, my protagonist, Dune, follows in the footsteps of a character like Lauren Olamina, the protagonist of the Parable series. I wanted to evoke Lauren in terms of how much more risk we are willing to take when we are young, even if it is the risk to be alone. I hope I wrote Dune such that if she and Lauren ran into each other, they’d want to stick together, survive together. —Adrienne Maree Brown, activist and author of Emergent Strategy
