Jemisin questions the limits of the world we have been conditioned to accept and explores what might be found when we break away from it to explore a landscape beyond those limits.

Through this rupture, we are exposed not simply to something new but to a different way of being that has been there all along. Her Broken Earth Trilogy begins with a literal earth-shattering rupture-an earthquake with global implications that is brought on by the power of a Black man who desires to set the stage for the creation of a new world. Jemisin’s work, for example, presents methods that challenge anti-Blackness, resisting the colonial disciplining that limits our vision of possible futures. Jemisin’s creative works and in Simone Browne’s concept of dark sousveillance. How, then, can we use Butler’s call to elucidate the theory and the practice of Black techno past/present/future? A partial answer to this question resides in Black speculative visioning in N. In these negotiations, Butler grapples with what it means to access otherwise ways of being in a world where technologies of whiteness and coloniality maintain and expand European/American imperial projects globally. People in this space must constantly negotiate the axis of Afrofuturist possibility and colonialist modernity that structures the world as many of us have come to know it. Even her Parables series reveals a possible future in which Butler’s version of a more just, sustainable, and philosophically mutable world thrives in a bubble alongside a white, colonialist world that endures just beyond the trees that encapsulate it.

Butler’s vision of the current world and the other worlds we might one day inhabit is far from utopian in nature. To seek them out and challenge ourselves to explore and embody the different modes of being that emerge within them. As an epigraph to her incomplete book, Parable of the Trickster, Octavia Butler writes, “here’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” I take this to be her call for opening ourselves up to those other worlds that are already here, yet we have been conditioned to ignore.

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