Extrapolaton, vol. 61, nos 1–2 (2020) htps://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2020.10 “A More Realistc View” Reimagining Sympoietc Practce in Octavia Butler’s Parables Reimagining Sympoietic Practice in Octavia Butler’s Parables Doug Stark In this essay, I contend hyperempathy syndrome consttutes a kind of new materialism avant la letre, prefguring problems we are perhaps only now in a positon to address academically. In other words, if both current scientfc and philosophical conceptons of life atest that beings are always already co-consttuted by their surroundings, we can no longer rely on a model of subjectvity and personhood that presupposes clear, bounded individuaton. Before the populari- zaton of afect theory and new materialism, Octavia E. Butler’s hyperempathy—a conditon causing possessors to have an embodied response to visual percepton of others’ emotons—provides a speculaton on the consequences of the felt, interconnectvity of beings that “sympoiesis” characterizes. Against assumptons that interconnectvity necessarily precipitates more ethical modes of being in the world, Butler challenges statc claims about shared substance and experience by providing a more complex depicton of what it means to feel as others do. I argue that Butler’s presentaton of hyperempathy demonstrates that sharing experience is not a panacea for human and non-human relatons but a restaging of the politcs of identfcaton and insttutonal power on another dimension. Sometimes, to look beyond, it helps to look back and recognize the future is already here. Octavia E. Butler has always done “Afrofuturism 2.0” (Anderson and Jones) and not just because she is prophetic. 1 Long before Martine Syms’s critique of Afrofuturist fantasy tropes and call for a “mundane” Afrofuturism, Butler’s fction was grounded in the realities of lived experience. For Butler, there was always a need for “science fction to refect a more realistic view” and, at times, be more realistic than a clouded reality (“The Lost Races of Science Fiction”). Indeed, while Butler is rightly associated with the 1990s’ “1.0” wave of Afrofuturists, we do not have to take Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones’s articulation of the thematic development of black speculative arts movements in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (2015) to be chronological. As John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (1996)—in which Butler is a signifcant presence—attests: sequential “time is