Between Earth and Sky: Atmospheric Ambiguity in Octavia E. Butler’sParableSeries

The term “atmosphere” carries so many different literal and figurative meanings that perhaps its defining semantic features are ambiguity and uncertainty. In its most denotative sense, “atmosphere” refers to the layer of gases—or “air”—surrounding the Earth. Atmosphere separates the terrestrial surface from the void of outer space, protects life forms from harmful radiation and earth-bound projectiles, mediates weather and the water cycle, and moderates global temperatures. There are many physical qualities of this ethereal dome that make it particularly conducive to figurative translation. Typical descriptors of air include light, extended, diffuse, ephemeral, and invisible. Such qualities lend themselves to standing in for one aspect of human lived experience, in particular: mood. Understood as the ambient sphere of feeling that coats the surface of intersubjective relations, but exceeds the interiority of any individual subject, mood is to affect what atmosphere is to air, and it is to bodies what atmosphere is to Earth’s surface. What mood and atmosphere share is an overriding sense of betweenness, of spatial ambiguity regarding position, materiality, and identity.