Octavia E. Butler on Mars
On February 18, 2021, a rover named Perseverance landed on Mars. Weeks later, NASA announced they had named the landing site after the late Octavia E. Butler, deeming her name a “perfect fit” for the mission since her protagonists “embody overcoming challenges.”1 Known for her contribution to Afrofuturism, Butler persistently addressed themes of racism, climate crisis, and capitalist exploitation of the working class in her books, starting in the ’70s, when science fiction largely shied away from social analysis of power. In the era of performative wokeness, NASA has appropriated Butler’s name to symbolically designate US territory on Mars, under the pretence of objective scientific interests. What can we make of this irony?
Made possible directly through the Cold War, the US space program has always been endowed with a frontier spirit echoing the—harking back to science’s primary role in the historical colonial enterprise as a tool for controlling and commercializing nature.
