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Octavia Butler's Speech Sound

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“Speech Sound” is a story by Octavia Butler, who is one of the best feminist writers of the science fiction genre. This narrative, is about a peculiar pandemic, leave human beings incapacitated of speaking and reading. In this short story, she describes topics like illness, dark, depression, death between two persons. Consequently, it is a debate about the significance of language and human speech in preserving a public civilization. Many individual’s feelings turn out to be inconstant and variable, which ends in sexual behavior, attack to each other and envy. For instance, Butler described in her story, two young men involved in a discrepancy. They were making a lot of inarticulate sound and gesturing to each other. The cause of this dispute

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Octavia Butler's Speech Sounds

...to societies. Language has dated back as far as the earliest civilizations of mankind, and it a crucial part of everyday life. Imagine trying to talk to someone without using any words, and the simplest phrases and commands become difficult to communicate. Now picture it on a larger scale, imagine trying to run a country or communicate with foreign diplomats, but no one can understand a word you are trying to say. This is a huge problem in works of literature and media such as Star Trek: The Next Generation or Octavia Butler’s short story Speech Sounds. These two-story lines have different outcomes of how the future plays out, but the role of communication and language in both is very important to the plot of the story. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the episode “Ensigns of Command” brings up the idea of how the two species’ language is different. In the beginning of the episode you do not notice much of a struggle...

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