Of gifted children and gated communities: Paul Theroux's O-Zone and Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower.

Skywalker began his life as a slave on Tatooine, cared for by his mother, Shmi Skywalker, and owned by a Toydarian spare-parts dealer named Watto. It was obvious from the beginning that he was unusual and gifted: his mother claimed that she had experienced a virgin birth for Anakin, and even before he reached his preteen years he was successfully competing in pod racing, a sport normally impossible for humans of any age due to inadequate reaction speed. In retrospect, it" was obvious that Anakin was using Force precognition to glimpse a few moments into the future.

(The Science Fiction Database)

Everyone loves Harry Potter and his friends, but how many people recognize the gifted behaviors or the problems and concerns of gifted children reflected in the Harry Potter stories? Each of the protagonists in the series represents one common type of gifted child. And the story itself can be seen as more than a children's fantasy story. It can also be seen as the coming of age story of gifted children, about the struggles they time and the way they come to terms with their abilities, their intensities, and their concerns about themselves and their world. (Bainbridge)

Introduction

As this article's epigraphs make clear, two of the most influential pieces of popular culture in the last century--the Star Wars films and the Harry Potter books--deal at least partially with what it means to be a gifted child. Both the Jedi Anakin and the wizard Harry are very gifted individuals. While we obviously enjoy fantasy-realm fictionalizations of giftedness, the reality of the gifted child is a difficult one for most Americans to deal with. To be gifted is to be specially favored by God, genetics, or whatever term one uses for the prime mover. Most of us would say that that's just not fair. Success through hard work we believe in. Success through fate rankles. In Families of Gifted Children, Dewey G. Cornell argues that "the notion of giftedness both fulfills and clashes with the American value system. While the society institutionalizes egalitarianism and promotes the credo that all men are created equal, children are socialized to compete, achieve, and excel in endeavors, surpassing peers and earning recognition. The concept of the gifted child seems to straddle this dichotomy of egalitarianism and striving for individual superiority" (9). Cornell notes that "popular attitudes toward the gifted have been correspondingly ambivalent. While the gifted child is often praised and admired for his or her accomplishments, the notion of giftedness also arouses considerable antagonism. Charges of elitism are often made toward those who promote the gifted child" (9). Labeling the child's abilities as "gifts"--something bestowed, not earned--"heightens the conflict with American egalitarianism and the work ethic. It arouses feelings of antipathy and resentment toward the child" (9). Thus, portrayals of gifted children are often double edged. Slaughtering young Jedis wholesale, Anakin turns to the dark side and becomes Darth Vader, the Atilla the Hun of his day in a place far, far away. Harry's creator, J. K. Rowling, is routinely accused of promoting the practice of Satanism. I wonder whether part of the antipathy toward Rowling's work is for the way in which it presents gifted children being who they are. "While some might argue that Rowling's detractors object to the magic in the Harry Potter books and not the giftedness of Harry and his Hogwarts classmates, I would point out that certain kinds of giftedness--say the ability to visualize a problem in physics or even the ability to make three-point shots on the court--are magical to those who do not possess the talents. Thus, I think that in Rowling magic is a metaphor for giftedness.

One reason why the concept of giftedness is often difficult to deal with is that there exists no language to talk about gifts and talents. In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham, one of the leaders of the new strengths-based assessment movement, argues that nobody is very good at talking about strengths. Buckingham notes that "guided by the belief that good is the opposite of bad, mankind has for centuries pursued its fixation with fault and failing. Doctors have studied disease in order to learn about health. Psychologists have investigated sadness in order to learn about joy. Therapists have looked into the causes of divorce in order to learn about happy marriage. And in schools and workplaces around the world, each one of us has been encouraged to identify, analyze, and correct our weaknesses in order to become strong" (Introduction 3). Indeed, almost all of us are fluent in the patois of criminality, the language of sin, and the slang of psychological damage. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania and past president of the American Psychological Association even went so far as to note that psychology itself is "half baked, literally half-baked. We've baked the part about mental illness, about repair of damage. The other side's unbaked, the side of strength, the side of what we're good at." As Dewey Cornell hinted above, another reason why the concept of giftedness is problematic can be found in the Declaration of Independence itself: "All men are created equal." Of course, what Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams (all incredibly gifted people) had in mind was to deal a political death blow to the concepts of divine-right monarchy and noble birth. It's quite naive to assume that any of the Founders would have argued that all people are essentially the same. But just as the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which was designed by the Founders to allow state governments to raise militias, is currently used to justify the keeping of M-16s in our trunks, so too has the baseline political equality of the Declaration been translated by popular wisdom into a quasi-democratic and sometimes politically suspect sameness. Thus, not only does there exist almost a linguistic bias against gifted children, they are in the United States, at least, somewhat politically abhorrent.

As is true for all children, gifteds don't exist in a vacuum. They go to school, and they require teachers and mentors in order fully to realize their gifts. Unlike Anakin and Harry, most gifteds, especially those hailing from the lower economic classes, don't receive invitations to study with Jedi warriors or notification of admission to Hogwarts. Unless they are very lucky or economically well off, real gifted children have to deal with the unpleasantries of school systems designed to pump out standardized product. Indeed, the Rhode Island State Advisory Committee on Gifted and Talented Education notes that one of the myths about gifted children is that "gifted kids are so smart they do fine with or without special programs" ("Myths"). The Committee goes on to note that "they may appear to do fine on their own. But without proper challenge they can become bored and unruly." Schools often cannot serve the gifted children in their midst well because they're so busy trying to deal with "problem children." The irony is that the gifted children, because of lack of proper attention and teaching, can often become problems themselves.

Departing from the Jedi enclave of the Republic, I'm going to turn my attention to the education of two other very gifted children, Fizzy Allbright in Paul Theroux's O-Zone (1986) and Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993). In these two critical dystopias written at the end of the last century, both Theroux and Butler present us with two gifted children who must educate themselves amidst the postmodern rubble. In their texts, both writers examine the way in which schools and, often, parents fail the most gifted (and paradoxically, the most vulnerable) students. And it is these students who often have the potential to change society in utopian ways.

In this essay, I'll perform the following tasks. First, I'll begin my discussion by considering the form--the critical dystopia--in which these two authors work. Second, I'll briefly compare the lives and works of Theroux and Butler. Third, I'll journey to Cold Harbor and examine the way in which Theroux combines a coming-of-age story with a postmodern Robinsonade to criticize the way in which some gifted children are failed both by society and their own families. Fourth, I'll move from Theroux's East Coast to Octavia Butler's West Coast and describe the way in which the author of The Parable of the Sower illustrates for readers both the perils of being gifted and the way in which gifts can ultimately serve humanity. Finally, I'll end this essay, part of a special issue of Utopian Studies, by meditating briefly and somewhat personally on the concepts of giftedness, education, and utopia with special reference to Octavia Butler.

The Critical Dystopia

Basing his work on the taxonomy proposed by Lyman Tower Sargent, Tom Moylan in Scraps of the Untainted Sky says that the rise of the critical dystopia can be understood in terms of the "definition that Sargent added to those in his growing list of utopian textual types: 'a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as critical of that contemporary society but that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia can be overcome and replaced with a eutopia'" (193). Moylan notes that "stepping inside the ambient zone of anti-utopian pessimism, with new textual tricks they [critical dystopias] expose the horror of the present moment. Yet in the midst of their pessimistic forays they refuse to allow the utopian tendency to be overshadowed by its anti-utopian nemesis. "[hey therefore adopt a militant stance that is informed and empowered by a utopian horizon that appears in the text--or at least shimmers just beyond its pages" (199).

Do these dystopias, one might ask, still attack the state. The question is an important one because most conceptions--both scholarly and lay--of dystopia immediately conjure up critiques of state power given by Orwell and Huxley. The answer is, not directly. Peter Firchow, for one, would then ask what they have to do with utopia. Well, the answer to that question can be found in history or, if one subscribes to the views of Francis Fukuyama, the end of history. In the 1980s, free-market capitalism began appealing to the utopian impulse and conveying the message that consumers could buy their way to utopia. For example, the United Colors of Benetton seemed to suggest that if we all bought designer sweaters, the fractious nations of the world would miraculously come together. Rebok ran an ad in the 1990s that suggested that their sneakers let "u b u" and become a latter-day Emerson. Indeed, the commercials featured voice-overs by a young person intoning lines from "Self Reliance." Steve Jobs and Company played on the arrival of 1984 by having Apple defeat the Orwellian IBM. And this trend of achieving utopia through products continues to this day. Recently, at the University of Minnesota Computer Service, where I was placing my data-leaking laptop in dry dock, a computer kiosk quietly flashed pictures of people with Dell computers. One image featured a young woman with her Dell. The word on the screen was "Unique." The next one featured a young man jumping for joy. The accompanying word was "Utopia."

At the same time that corporate America promoted utopia through purchasing, transnational capital all over the world shredded the implied social contract with labor. Defined pension plans were replaced with 401(k)s, which were never meant to support an individual fully during retirement. Lucrative jobs fled Europe and North America to what was then called the Third World. The no-longer coherent "second world" was in chaos and--except for Cuba and North Korea--collapsed totally by the end of the 1980s. China is still Communist in name, but its authoritarianism seems to have less to do with Mao than it does with Milken. By the 1990s, few totalitarian states existed, and capital had become more powerful than any single state. Thus, the nation was no longer the target, at least in the West, of dystopian writers.

The critical dystopia concerned itself with, among other things, the emergence of an incredibly strong transnational capital and the rubble produced by privatization. In Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson argues that features of trans-national capital "include the new international division of labor, a new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous second- and third-world debt), new forms of media inter-relationship, computers and the flight of production to advanced third-world areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences" (xv). Faced with globalization and, as Tom Moylan explains, "the deligitimation of Utopia and the hegemonic cynicism of anti-utopia," contemporary writers "simply mimic the utopian expression of the 1970s. Consequently, they burrow within the dystopian tradition in order to bear on their epochs of the present moment and their explorations of new forms of oppositional agency" (199). Into this kind of politics step Butler and Theroux, who give readers critical dystopias revealing the horrors of unrestrained market capitalism while also allowing space for utopian dreaming.

Birds of a Different Genre Flock Together

At first glance, the lives and literary output of Paul Theroux and Octavia Butler couldn't be more different. Born to a large Catholic family in Medford, Massaschusetts, one that seems to grow writers, Theroux graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1963 and served as a volunteer in Malawi for the then-new Peace Corps. While in Africa, he taught English, found himself caught up in political intrigues, and apprenticed himself to V. S. Naipaul. Theroux's writing output has oscillated between novels and travel books. The latter corpus--including such works as Sunrise with Seamonsters, The Old Patagonian Express, and Riding The Iron Rooster--made him famous and wealthy. Also accounting for some of his popularity is The Mosquito Coast, a utopian novel set in the jungles of Belize and turned into a movie starring Harrison Ford. Much of Theroux's writing, especially the very early Family Arsenal and his essays, deals with European and African politics. Except for his Playboy essay, "Homage to Mrs. Robinson," and his very dark Chicago Loop, Theroux is a traditional writer, one working in the vein of English authors like Kipling and, perhaps, Conrad. Octavia Butler, who died suddenly in 2006, was one of America's most prolific and best-known science-fiction writers. An African-American lesbian born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Butler had a career trajectory very different from Theroux's. Spending the summer of 1971 at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop, she was mentored by writers such as Damon Knight and Samuel Delaney. She also enjoyed literary friendships with Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars Trilogy in some ways serves as a follow-up to the Parable books, and with Ursula Le Guin. Her stories and longer fiction deal with race and employ such elements as time travel.

What could these incredibly different writers possibly have in common? Not much, except that they essentially wrote the same book but from completely opposite perspectives. Theroux and Butler, working in very different literary traditions, created strikingly similar postmodern or critical dystopias. These two novels (O-Zone and Parable) deal with the education and development of gifted children in the age of Ecstasy and fertility clinics, of gated communities and transnational corporations, of militias and urban tribalism. In O-Zone, Theroux writes from the perspective of white upper-upper middle-class elites dwelling in a heavily guarded urban enclave of New York City in the early twenty-first century. In Parable, Butler focuses on Los Angeles and deals with the members of a lower-lower middle-class family of mixed ethnicity living in a rapidly deteriorating gated community.

Of Gated Communities and Gifted Children

In the relatively unknown O-Zone, on which very little scholarship has been done, Paul Theroux presents a coming-of-age story set in a world where rich Owners live in a contained section of New York City called Cold Harbor. Miens--poor blacks and Hispanics--are kept at bay by the security checkpoints manned by Federal troops and the helicopter gunships piloted by the members of private (but Federally sanctioned) militias such as Godseye. The novel concerns the economically successful but completely dysfunctional Allbright family. In rendering a portrait of this clan, Theroux perfectly captures the 1980s, when greed and right-wing political adventurism ruled the land. One thinks of Michael Milken and Oliver North. He also vividly captures the plight of talented and gifted children raised in places like the Upper East Side and seen as commodities by their parents.

Hooper and Hardy Allbright are the sons of a department-store magnate. Hooper moved the family chain of department stores from bricks-and-mortar locations to the world of direct-mail catalogues and now runs a billion-dollar sales empire from the living room of his Cold Harbor apartment. Hardy, after deciding not to enter merchandising, earned a Ph.D. and now works as a researcher for the Asfalt Corporation, which functions as the Archer Daniels Midland of weather. The project on which Hardy works involves the design and construction of asphalt mountains that serve several functions. First, they use up the world's glut of petroleum. Second, they draw heat to themselves and thus generate rain. Third, they serve as weapons because they change weather patterns and can cause droughts and floods. Hooper shills cheap electronics through the mail, and his brother is a merchant of death.

While Hooper is a bachelor, Hardy is married to Moura. About thirty-six years old, Moura has one child, Fisher. Unable to conceive with Hardy, who may be impotent, Moura, fifteen years before O-Zone's opening, visited a "contact clinic," which combines the services of Planned Parenthood, in-vitro fertilization, and the upper middle-class whorehouse of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Wealthy women who can't conceive with their partners visit the clinics to obtain direct sexual contact with sperm donors. These donors can be selected on any basis desired, such as physical characteristics or intellectual ability. Moura's donor is, as the case turns out, well hung, nicely proportioned, and incredibly intelligent. The catch is that while Moura pays for great sex and tight genes, the procedure is anonymous. The sexual partners make physical contact, but they don't see one another's faces because they wear masks as they copulate. In addition, by secretly videotaping and storing the sex sessions the clinic ensures that it will never be blackmailed or pressured by unhappy former customers.

The product of Moura's expensive, anonymous, and probably not very dangerous liaison with the donor is Fisher, called "Fizzy" by his relatives. At the age of 15, he is, quite simply, a mathematical genius. Although Theroux never discusses Fizzy's IQ, it's well over 160 or 170, clearly in the "profoundly gifted" range. A particle physicist doing cutting-edge research, he has been granted exemption from both high-school and university courses. Designated a "Remote Student," he works in his room at home drinking lots of Guppy soda and communing with no one but his mainframe computer, Paps. Theroux describes Fizzy's mind as "tireless," and his "intelligence [as] easily engaged. He fastened on a problem and would not let go until he had shaken a solution from it, and then he was bored and blank for moments-and deaf--until he snatched at something else to solve" (24). Fizzy was "like a hungry monster that could eat anything you fed it. He gobbled up the problems that were set before him--demolished them and then laughed because no more were provided" (204). His behavior is pretty normal for extremely gifted children, especially that subset of gifted with Asperger's Syndrome. In Enjoy Your Gifted Child, Carol Takacs says, "Gifted children exhibit a cluster of fairly common behavior patterns which frequently cause rejection by peers, teachers, and sometimes other family members. The problem areas most often reported in surveys of teachers and counselors of the gifted and talented include interrupting, correcting, know it all and mockery" (47). They are not tolerant of adults who have less ability than they do.

In Gifted Children Growing Up, Joan Freeman notes, "The intellectually gifted can have special problems of boredom because of the speed of their learning" (60). Freeman writes that it is "difficult to conclude that these gifted young people were more or less bored than others of their age. But far more high achievers reported the feeling of 'let down' which can come to everyone at the end of hard work, complete with the release of tension and the sudden vacuum of time--a well known aspect of stress in the business world" (61). Like Huxley's Alpha Double Pluses, Fizzy is the product of selective breeding. But unlike Huxley's elites, he, although certainly the best child money can buy, isn't really a member of a caste. He's a one-shot deal, and he's very alone. To get a sense of his isolation requires visually panning back from an image of him sitting at his computer. He's in a room, in a high-rise apartment, in Cold Harbor, in New York City. One in ten million.

In Hot-House Kids, The Dilemma of the Gifted Child, Alissa Quart, a former gifted child herself, discusses the development in the last 20 years of a new kind of child--the proto-professional. Quart argues that the treatment of many gifted and talented children represents a stripping away of the Romantic and Victorian notions of childhood (discussed so well by James Kincaid) and a return to the pre-Enlightenment view of children as essentially small adults. From a very early age, many gifted children are pushed by their parents and others into developing certain talents, essentially becoming, from the age of four or five, little workers or, in Quart's words, "child professionals." Quart writes that "in past centuries, children were neither free nor innocent. They were laborers, and were hardly distinguished from working teenagers or even adults" (73). Proto-professionals such as Fizzy, who engage in intellectual work far beyond the expectations for most people in their age bracket, are, according to Quart, "a strange echo of the idea of childhood in earlier centuries, except now it's the upper and upper-middle classes who labor so young" (73). One of the questions raised by Quart and other writers about gifted children is, of course, whether this early intellectual socialization as adults does damage.

The answer to Quart's question is slowly changing although perhaps the metaphor used to describe gifted children has not evolved very much. Theodor W. Adorno in his Minima Moralia fragment "Hothouse Plant," writes that "the talk about early and late maturers, seldom free of the deathwish for the former, is specious. He who matures early lives in anticipation" (101). Such anticipation, writes Adorno, "saturated, as it were, with itself, withdraws from the world and infuses its relation to it with the colour of neurotic playfulness" (161). Adorno, who calls the precocious "an irritation to the natural order," then goes on in his fragment to discuss the way in which gifted children become narcissistic and later in life have to, through suffering, pay back to the world a kind of psychic debt. In Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, Ellen Winner, who seems much less Freudian than Adorno, argues that most gifted children have a tripartite personality structure very different from that of members of their age cohort: they are often marked by precocity, a predisposition, in the words of Theroux's near namesake, "to march to their own drummers" and what she calls "a rage to master." Winner writes that gifted children are "highly motivated to achieve mastery, they derive pleasure from challenge, and, at least by adolescence, they have an unusually strong sense of who they are and what they want to do as adults" (74). Generally, gifted children such as Fizzy spend a great deal more time alone than other children do. Although many educators see this isolation as completely negative, Winner argues that it's simply necessary. If one is driven to master a particular skill or body of knowledge, one has to devote time to it: gifted children tend therefore to "be more introverted and lonelier than the average child, both because they have so little in common with others and because they need and want to be alone to develop their talent" (10). All gifts come with prices tags attached.

In giving readers an initial picture of Fizzy, Theroux suggests that the boy's intellectual uniqueness has had some deleterious effects. Although Fizzy was adorable as an infant--"with his milky breath, his tiny fingers, the way he slept in a little bundle"--the teenager is quite another matter. Before designating him as a remote student, his teachers had "found him volatile, quick to master anything, but with intelligence to spare--it brimmed in him, and he used it to mock the teachers and he mocked the work they gave" (204). Beyond high strung, Fizzy isn't polite to his adult relatives, often calling them "herbert" and "dong" although, as it turns out, some of them really are herberts and dongs. However, a tendency to criticize others is not his main problem. He's also "afraid of the dark" and often becomes terrified of the snot in his own nose. When it drips, he shrieks. In addition, Fizzy howls at insects, sometimes "saying loud simple words to them in his squawking voice" (24). This kind of compensation is typical of gifted children. In The Gifted Kids Survival Guide, Judy Galbraith writes, "The consequences of prolonged or intense stress are varied. But generally speaking, people without appropriate outlets for coping with unique anxiety or strain exhibit one or more of the following behaviors: nervousness, excessive daydreaming, apathy, laziness, withdrawal, chemical abuse, truancy, vandalism" (115). In Growing up Gifted, Joan Freeman confirms the presence of this kind of behavior by saying that "all children can have problems if their abilities develop unevenly. But when it happens to the gifted, the results for both child and parents can be much more extreme and difficult to cope with. The most common problem is when intellectual ability far outstrips emotional or practical development. The disturbing lack of harmony can cause a child to retreat into babyishness" (21). Fizzy "had no humor, no grace, only the rattle of incessant information. He did not converse, he argued and made noisy connections. Most of his questions were belittling or hostile" (24). In the words of Woody Allen, Fizzy is a connectivity asshole. And in light of Fizzy's intellectual brilliance and unstable behavior, it is no wonder that his mother asks, "Who is he?" (204).

As O-Zone opens, Fizzy, who has never been outside the confines of New York City, accompanies his uncle, mother, father, and two other couples on a rotor trip to the O-Zone, an area of the United States contaminated by nuclear waste. The ostensible reason for this visit is tourism. Hardy Allbright's work connection through Asfalt enables him to get passes for New Year's. The real reason for the trip is that Asfalt plans to build a petrochemical mountain in the O-Zone and re-open the area. During the trip, the group suffers through Fizzy's rather overbearing presence (as well as his spot-on navigating) and discovers illegal aliens in what was previously thought to be an empty region. Hooper, a camera buff--like Theroux himself--captures the image of a young female alien, with which he becomes obsessed.

The journey to the O-Zone transforms Fizzy and starts his real education and transition to adulthood. On his return to Cold Harbor, he does something completely out of character. Dressed in a quasi-space suit, he actually goes outside and tours the city. Months later, Fizzy returns to the O-Zone because Hardy wants to develop the area for Asfalt, and Hooper hopes to find the female alien he captured on film. Sadly, the two men have manipulated the boy genius. Hardy would "have promised anything to Fizzy to get him to go to O-zone for the raw data. Then he saw that the boy really wanted to go, but was afraid" (191). Because he knows that as a step-parent, "a silly flunky figure," he would have very little influence over Fizzy, "he was counting on Hooper's boredom and bullying to carry it off and help the boy make up his mind" (191). In the Gifted Kids Survival Guide, Galbraith says, "Sometimes, parents make great demands on you in order to fulfill their personal hopes and dreams" (107).

Eventually, Fizzy and Hooper head out to the O-Zone in a rotor with passes that Hardy has obtained. Hooper manages to find the as-it-turns-out fifteen-year-old girl of his photographic dreams, but he loses Fizzy in the process. The boy is kidnapped by a group of aliens who plan on swapping him for their comrade, Bligh. Shortly after his capture, Fizzy experiences something completely unfamiliar to him: people think he's an idiot. When the aliens ask him to write a note to Hooper saying that he has been captured, he writes "Bng hld bi lg no amd ppl" (254). Raised around computers and keyboards, Fizzy can't write very well. One of the aliens says, "He's retarded--handicapped or something. Maybe he's got a motor problem. He seems a little dystrophic, the way he moves, the way he was holding that pen--could hardly get his fingers around it" (254). Another alien says of the wonder boy: "He's a drooly" (255). Theroux accomplishes several tasks with this reversal. First, as a United States citizen who spent a great deal of time in Africa, Theroux makes the point that intelligence is culturally relative. Second, he also pokes a little fun at over-educated children who can do physics but practically drool in the real world. Third, he's formally constructing a postmodern Robinsonade. In the O-Zone, a technology free-island, Fizzy is every bit as vulnerable as Robinson Crusoe at the beginning of Defoe's novel.

Initially thinking that Fizzy's an idiot, the aliens nevertheless do something that his Owner relatives don't: they defend him. One of the aliens, Mr. Blue, decides to sell Fizzy to a group of Diggers. But upon discovering that the Diggers will be cruel to him, Mr. Blue changes his mind and keeps the boy, saying to him: "I occasionally have the feeling you might be human" (270). Upon being asked by his comrades why he didn't sell him, Mr. Blue responds, "They didn't want him" (270). A certain realization creeps over the boy. Someone has lied for him: "The lie gladdened Fisher and made him march harder. People had always told lies against him, but when had anyone ever lied on his behalf?. And it was an alien!" (270). Leaving his world of high-rises and mainframes, he's gained something he's never really had before: a sense of belonging. Although he's a pain in the side of the aliens, he does prove useful to them by employing his knowledge of particle physics to construct a beam weapon and burn down several Diggers.

The aliens eventually decide to walk to New York City and sell Fizzy back to the Allbrights. During the trip with the aliens to the now slightly rotten Big Apple, Fizzy's experiences change him. Before his trip, he believed that "the world outside him room didn't matter much" (440). Now, he's developed something resembling a social consciousness: "Just because people are poor doesn't mean they're dangerous. It doesn't necessarily mean they're dimbos either" (441). Non-academic experience does more to shape Fizzy and make him fully human than his quite formidable book learning. Not only does he develop a social consciousness, he also realizes that he's been treated terribly and exploited by his adult relatives. When he returns to New York, Fizzy telephones his mother and discovers that he's never even been reported missing. He leaves a message on his uncle's answering machine: "You lost me and you didn't even say so! There's something seriously wrong with you, Mister. You were responsible for my safety on this mission. I am very disappointed in you" (450). Having reamed his uncle out, Fizzy "felt very happy after this" (450). He's become an adult: "It was a feeling of quiet power--something he had seen in Mr. Blue. It was not a show of strength: it was confidence. He had been tested. The test might have broken him--yet it had strengthened him. We are what we are because of our difficulties, he thought" (450). Hardy, who briefly sees Fizzy upon his return, realizes, "There was no doubt that the boy had become a man--he was bigger, hairier, and his voice had a growly authority" (481). Hardy also notes of his foster son: "But he was calm, and there was something in that terrible patience that made him seem stronger and more dangerous" (481).

Fizzy faces the choice of either staying in New York or heading back to the outlands. He now knows that "he wanted more than New York--more than to be kept in a room, even with Paps and his data base. He wanted to lay claim to his own life" (481). And by returning with the aliens to the OZone, he makes that claim: "Mr. B. had once said, 'Shall we go?' The man had never believed in permission, and had seldom uttered a question" (482). Fizzy emulates the alien by asking: "'Can I come with you?' Their consent gave him power" (482). Only by leaving behind the most sophisticated and individualized schooling that his society could offer was Fizzy able to develop as a whole and completely autonomous person. The answer to Moura's question can finally be answered: Fizzy has become himself. Unfortunately to do so, he has to leave the society that could benefit from his abilities.

Of Creativity and Parable of the Sower

Saying adieu to Fizzy and wishing him well on his journey of self-exploration, I'll move from Cold Harbor to the West Coast and examine Octavia Butler's portrayal of another gifted child, Lauren Olamina. As Freeman notes, gifted children generally are lopsided. They aren't gifted at everything. Like Fizzy Allbright at the beginning of O-Zone, Lauren Olamina is 15 at the start of Butler's novel. Like Fizzy, she will embark upon a life-changing journey. However, other than these two similarities, these gifted children--Fizzy and Lauren--are mirror opposites. Fizzy is rich, white, male, and mathematically talented. Lauren is poor, black, female, and linguistically gifted. Lauren also possesses a talent that Fizzy simply does not: the ability to empathize with and organize others around a shared mission. In addition, Fizzy is an only child, while Lauren is the oldest in what can best be called a blended family. Interestingly, gifted children often are either onlies or oldest children. Although Fizzy simply lights out for the territory and goes native at the conclusion of O-Zone, Lauren takes to the open road as the founder of a new religion.

Lauren, like Fizzy, is born into a fragmented postmodern world in which large transnational corporations serve the role formerly played by governments. The stormy machinations of Asfalt have been replaced by the company-town slavery imposed by the conglomerate Kagimoto, Frampton, and Stamm. A Californian raised in Chinatown country, Butler focuses on fresh water rather than meltdowns as the core environmental problem in the United States. Leisure-class vigilante organizations such as Theroux's Godseye, composed of wealthy racists with time and money as well as aliens to burn, are replaced by poor right-wing fundamentalists. Tribal gangs roam the West Coast landscape looting, murdering, and burning, and an L. L. Beanlike retail chain--Hanning Joss--affords shoppers able to produce money a secure shopping environment complete with guards sitting behind machine guns.

As Peter Stillman notes in "Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler's Parables": "Except for the very rich, survival and betterment are difficult in this future America. line traditional American route of individualism is foreclosed almost entirely: rugged individuals striving by their own talents to improve their condition find that the changes in the United States make social mobility and individual advancement more and more difficult" (18). Stillman is of course right that part of the work that Butler performs in Parable of the Sower is to show that, a la Moylan's discussion of the critical dystopia, the free-market system can lead to complete chaos and postmodern splintering. However, I think Stillman slightly over-reads Butler's attack on individualism. As I will discuss below, the core of Earthseed grows inside of Lauren Olamina. Lauren's Earthseed, like all religions, is paradoxical. While Earthseed brings people together around a common purpose, the gestation of this religion is akin to the development of artistic ability. It's deeply individualistic, at least at the beginning. Just as Jesus Christ, Buddha, and Mohammed did, Lauren responds to a call from the infinite. Deeply personal, this call requires self-reflection and internal editing before it is presented to the world. Thus, Butler certainly attacks the consumerist and political individualism which leads to postmodern decay, but she's not decrying authentic, individual self-actualization. Rather, she's criticizing individualism based on the false consciousness created

by postmodern capital and hate-based politics. Only fully realized individuals, who understand their authentic needs, can strive to attain the communal vision offered by Earthseed.

Like Fizzy, Lauren lives in an enclave, but her walled-off cul-de-sac of Robledo is racially more mixed and decidedly down market from the Owners' Cold Harbor. Indeed, residents themselves constructed the wall surrounding Robledo. In Myths, Ellen Winner lists several fallacies about gifted children. One of these is that "gifted students only come from white middle to upper class families" (20). The problem with this assumption is that it effectively precludes the identification of many gifted children. In the United States today, a gifted child from the lower classes, especially one who is a quick speaker and fast thinker, is likely to be branded as having Attention Deficit Disorder.

Like Fizzy, Lauren was born with some very special qualities and has a step-parent to whom she's not terribly close. Lauren's birth mother, her father's first wife, was addicted to an Ecstasy-like designer drug called Paraceto. Playing with the concept and reality of crack babies, Butler imagines the long-term effects of drugs on addicts' children. Paraceto has made Lauren a hyper-empath who can feel the pain and pleasure of others. Here, Butler may well be playing with an already established truism about gifted children. Freeman writes that many gifted children are super-sensitive. And, Freeman notes, "It is not easy to live with exceptional sensitivity. The super-sensitivity of many gifted children means that not only may they take modest criticism terribly to heart, but they can also react to a wider range of subtleties. This super sensitivity can be either encouraged or blunted by ridicule. And for some less robust personalities, it can mean a turn inwards from a world which they find too painful to bear. However, it may be that it is a high level of innate sensitivity in infants which itself enables giftedness to develop" (57). Freeman notes that super-sensitivity often allows gifted children to be more empathic: "Even for the youngest children, the higher their IQs, the more they said they could see life through another's eyes--the more they could empathize" (57). As Lauren Olimina knows, being able to feel a great deal is not necessarily a good thing. When around someone who is hurting, Lauren experiences the person's pain. Carol Addison Takacs comments, "The slings and arrows of everyday interactions which glide harmlessly over the unaware head or off the shoulders of their companions can strike the gifted youngster to the quick" (57).

Takacs also remarks on gifteds' pronounced sensitivity. She explains that the "sensory perceptions from their surrounding which they are able to take in, attend to, and interpret at any given point are more numerous and intense than for average children." The gifted "see more, hear more, and feel more than most others in the same settings. They can attend to several events simultaneously. They seldom miss a trick. These perceptions include cues in the voice, posture and behaviors of other people in the environment." Takacs notes that "gifted children have been compared to sponges soaking up sensations from all directions. This strength in receptivity leads to the vulnerability of acute sensitivity. These children pick up on everything and react to everything" (57). Takacs opines that this sensitivity extends to the realm of social justice: "gifted children learn about and care deeply about social injustices occurring both in America and world wide. They feel confused and frustrated by their own perceptions of grievous wrongs that cry out to be righted and their personal inability to do anything about it" (60). Not only is Lauren empathetic to individuals, but throughout the course of the novel she proves incredibly sensitive to social injustice and founds her own religion, Earthseed.

Lauren's own take on her hyper-empathy is that it's a curse. She sees it as "some magic or ESP that allows me to share the pain or the pleasure of other people. It's delusional" (10). Like other gifted children who feel more than others, Lauren sees herself as "the most vulnerable person I know" (11). She is frustrated that she "can't do a thing about [her] hyper-empathy, no matter what Dad thinks or wants or wishes. I feel what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel. Hyper-empathy is what the doctors call an 'organic delusional syndrome'. Big shit. It hurts, that's all I know .... I'm crazy. I get a lot of grief that doesn't belong to me, and that isn't real. But it hurts" (10-11). Lauren is, of course, quite sane, but the sheer magnitude of her gift isolates her and makes her feel very different from others. This sense of isolation or difference doesn't dissipate later in the novel when she recruits two other sharers--Grayson and Emery--to her group. Lauren doesn't like Grayson although she admires him for his love for his daughter. And she talks to Emery about whether the hyper-empathy is passed on to children. Lauren's description of hyper-empathy and her discussion of whether children might inherit it actually bear an uncanny resemblance to the way in which bipolar disorder (which often affects those who are very bright) is discussed. Thus, the ability to feel more than others is both a gift and a curse to Lauren.

In the first half of Parable, Butler gives readers a picture of education amid the postmodern rubble. Lauren's father pedals his bicycle to a college where he teaches, trains the members of the community in urban-warfare tactics, and serves as a minister. Lauren's stepmother, Corey, teaches the community's small children. Lauren helps Corey with this task. Being a natural teacher and precocious, Lauren lands in trouble with her father when she wants to educate Robledo's residents about skills they'll need in order to survive when the community is destroyed, as she knows it will be eventually. Lauren's father literally personifies the traditional concept of the teacher: caring and concerned but quite dogmatic, the teacher as lawgiver. He encourages Lauren to hide her gifts, both her ideas about Earthseed and her hyper-empathy, and he makes her promise that she will be careful about not alarming others. The parents of gifted children often are ambivalent about their children's gifts, not understanding them and sometimes fearing or resenting them. Earthseed, of course, with its very impersonal Taoist conception of God, clashes with the Judeo-Christian uncaused cause that Lauren's father represents. He could see Lauren's empathy as a curse he himself visited upon her since she is the child of both him and Lauren's drug-addicted mother. The "gift" debilitates her and, thus, is double-edged.

In "Ophelia Triumphant," Michael M. Levy notes that Lauren, "an oldest child, is used to being in charge and getting things done. She feels no need to hide her intelligence. She's fortunate to have grown up with a father who, while patriarchal, is not overwhelmingly sexist" (38). Levy is correct that Lauren's father doesn't single her out for bad treatment because she's female, but she's not able to realize her vision fully while he's alive. The well-meaning father both understands she's bright and fears for her because she's gifted. Takacs suggests a "very close relationship between parents' overall definition of giftedness and their tendency to perceive their child as gifted" (67). The broader the range of parents' conception of giftedness, the more likely they are to perceive their child as gifted. Because of his religious worldview, Lauren's father doesn't view his daughter's hyper-empathy as a girl, and she in turn wisely does not share her newly-forming religious perspective with him.

Reflecting both Earthseed's notion that life is change itself and Butler's critique of the way in which postmodern forces destroy traditional structures, Lauren's family and her walled-off community literally disintegrate. After becoming involved in a power struggle with his father, Lauren's stepbrother Keith leaves the family, journeys to Los Angeles, joins a gang, and is brutally killed. Her father, a symbol of the disintegration of Old-Testament values and patriarchy itself, simply disappears one evening while bicycling back to the community after class. His body is never found. Some community members die in gang attacks, and others depart for Olivar, a new company town started by KFS. Finally, the rest of Lauren's family and the bulk of the Robledo's residents die during a gang assault on the compound.

But if one theme of the first half of the novel is disintegration, it's a form of Bergsonian destruction. The old order--of the modern nation-state, the patriarchal family, and even Judeo-Christianity--must die in order for something new to arise from the ashes. That something new is Earthseed, a religion created by Lauren herself. This faiths main tenet is that God is change, an impersonal force that both shapes and is shaped by people. Although Freeman writes that it's not certain "that gifted children are inherently more concerned with religious beliefs, the ability to think and act independently of the crowd is an aspect of leadership which several of the intellectually gifted in my sample were aiming for quite consciously. These young people spent time in deep and critical consideration of the ideas they had been given, and they worked independently and honestly towards living by their own principles, to a greater extent than the non-gifted" (62). However, Lauren, like many gifted children, discovers that her new religious beliefs bring her into conflict with her father: "But in doing so many had discovered that it brought them relationship problems--they felt they could see things so clearly, which others could not" (Freeman 62).

Lauren receives her real education by preparing herself to build an Earthseed community and keeping a journal about the experience. Hinting at the function of Lauren's journal, Clara Escoda Agusti, in "The Relationship between Community and Subjectivity in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower," focuses on how "Olamina counteracts the oppression that the system wields over her as a black woman and how she is able to re-write her own utopian community's approach to gender and racial differences" (352). She notes that "As a result of Olamina's recognition of the subject as a site of dialogic differences, here utopia remains open to conflict" (358). Lauren, although engaging in real-world community building, also uses the utopian space of her journal to rewrite herself and the world. Joan Gordon in "Two SF Diaries at the Intersection of Subjunctive Hopes and Declarative Despair," says that "the diary format is, I believe, a subjunctive form. Diaries are, by nature, open-ended.... Although diaries may reminisce about the past or speculate about the future, every entry begins on that intersection of past and future, where we make our changes: the present. A diary cannot foreshadow, so the future remains open to change. It is an intimate, proven form, more free from social and governmental determinism than any other literary form" (42). Thus, the diary is a form well suited for open-ended exploring, the kind of intellectual work in which a gifted child, especially one who is about to start a world religion, would engage.

The very first journal entry given in the novel defines the religion's parameters: "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is change" (3). If there will be a utopia, it will be one of flux, rather than stasis. In another journal entry, Lauren fully explores the implications of her religion. She says that the "literal truth" is that "God is Power--Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliable--Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change" (22). Lauren contends that "God can't be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused" (22). Humans "can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our intent" (22). Unlike her father's version of the Prime Mover, Lauren's god "doesn't love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love or loyalty to my God. My God just is" (22). Lauren's self-education involves the rejection of her father's religion and the creation of her own. What we witness in the novel is very profound, the coming of age of a founder of a religion akin to Jesus Christ or Mohammed. Unlike religious crackpots of the American variety, such as Jim Jones or David Koresh, Lauren experiences self-doubt and wonders whether any of this is real. Thus, part of her self-education involves the development of self-reflexivity, a constant questioning of her herself and her surroundings.

Like Fizzy and other gifted children, Lauren certainly marches to her own drummer, even though she knows that to do so can be dangerous. Perhaps feeling the same drive that her creator, Butler, did about fiction, Lauren says, "This thing won't let me alone, won't let me forget it, won't let me go" (22). Despite obstacles, including her own father, she says, "I'll have to do something about it. In spite of what my father will say or do to me, in spite of the poisonous rottenness outside the wall where I might be exiled, I'll have to do something about it. That reality scares me to death" (22). Freeman explains, "For the child, the sense of obligation associated with being gifted can be a source of pressure and anxiety. The child is expected to perform and must perform to be deserving of what he or she has been given" (102). Lauren's pressure comes from a tension between desiring and fearing self-actualization. In The War of Art, a meditation on creativity and resistance to it, Steven Pressfield notes that while fakes and charlatans seldom possess fears and doubts, real creators are often terrified when beginning their work because all creative work requires intuitive leaps and a deep belief in one's own power to engage with very mysterious forces. Lauren is the real deal, consumed by the desire to march to the very different beat of her drum.

The something that Lauren must do is eventually forced on her by the destruction of her family and community. She and two survivors--Harry and Zhara--take off on a journey to Canada, which offers, as it does in other dystopias such as Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a safe haven. Along the road, Lauren, disguised as a man, picks up many other travelers bound for Canada including an African-American former physician, Bankole, who, at 57, falls in love with the now eighteen-year-old old Lauren. During the journey northward, Lauren deals with the effects of her hyper-empathy. She also thinks strategically, and begins recruiting people to join her and eventually develop Earthseed. Lauren combines her gifts for language and social intelligence and effectively explains Earthseed to several members of the group, including Zhara and Travis. She has the preacher's ability to engage people in conversation and move them away from their own positions and toward hers. She also has the very uncanny ability to listen respectfully to other people's stories and use those stories to get the tellers of the tales to take Earthseed seriously. For example, when she discusses Earthseed with Travis, she says, "But there's no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you. You know that. You knew it when you took your family and got the hell out of your boss's house. God will shape us all every day of our lives" (197). In a sense, Lauren uses her genuine empathy to convert people to her new religion. The growing band, which eventually includes other sharers, decides to go to the log cabin house of Bankole's sister and her husband in Northern California. When they arrive, they find not the family but "five skulls" (284). After the bones of Bankole's family have been buried, Lauren and the rest of the group form Earthseed's first community, Acorn.

Theroux and Butler, then, give readers a picture of two very-different, gifted children, Fizzy Allbright and Lauren Olamina, but despite their different class positions, genders, and physical locations, Fizzy and Lauren share several similarities. Both are failed in fundamental ways by their parents and their societies. Possessing the rage to mastery, both gifted kids must leave behind their postmodern gated communities, which protect and stifle them, in order to fully realize themselves as individuals. Thus, Theroux and Butler make the same fundamental argument: gifted children are misunderstood, their talents are sometimes exploited, and their abilities are not fully developed by existing educational systems. The giftedness of Fizzy and Lauren is central to both texts. If Fizzy hadn't been brilliant mathematically, he would have never been able to navigate his uncle back out to the O-Zone. If Lauren hadn't been born with hyper-empathy, strong linguistic talents, and an ability to organize, she probably never would have developed Earthseed. The giftedness of these two children serves as a catalyst for their change and rejection of their old communities.

Conclusion: Giftedness, Education, and Utopia

I want to end this essay by meditating a bit on the concepts of giftedness, education, and utopia. In this meditation, I'm going to move from the personal to the wider realm and end by briefly talking about Octavia Butler and the debt I owe her.

Giftedness is a very strange proposition. I know this because in 1976 a psychologist for the Northwest Intermediate Unit near Erie, Pennsylvania, handed my father, who was also my elementary-school principal, a letter saying that I had qualified for inclusion in the gifted-children's program in my father's district. I was nine years old when this happened. I participated for three years in this program before leaving the public-school district for Mount Calvary School and eventually Cathedral Preparatory School for Boys. Fortunately for me, I had parents who nurtured me and gave me educational opportunities that most people (including most gifteds) never get: a boys' school that looked a little bit like Hogwarts (and, no, the staircases didn't move) and a ticket to the Ivy League. Unlike the Allbrights, the Texters didn't have a problem with fully supporting their gifted child. They also stuck with me as I discovered what my gifts were not. For example, I played the trombone rather badly for eight years, and I believe my parents and I were quite certain that I was not incredibly musically inclined. My mother and father would just shake their heads in dismay after hearing me practice each day. Having in the last three years taught at a community college and seen how some very gifted people have not had the space and time in which to develop their gifts, I realize just how fortunate I was. I've also had a couple of other experiences that have made me meditate on giftedness.

Last year, I had dinner with a former gifted child now in her early thirties and a speculative-fiction writer. After the Merlot arrived, she and I discussed what it meant to be defined by a psychologist as gifted. I asked my companion to tell me both her IQ and the area in which she felt especially gifted. The IQ was 180, clearly in the profoundly gifted range. She said that despite being a writer, she was most gifted in spatial relations. I asked her to give me an example. Without shifting her glance from my eyes, she told me the exact number of patrons in the room, their locations, and the manner in which they were dressed. I usually consider myself aware of my surroundings, but this was rather stunning. Most people, including me, can't do that.

What this encounter taught me was that the profoundly gifted experience life very differently from how the vast majority of people do. Like Lauren Olamina, my friend perceived more than most people do. There was more in the world for her. It's richer than it is for me and most other people. And like Lauren, my friend didn't always enjoy seeing and feeling more than others. My IQ isn't anywhere close to that of my dinner companion, but my discussion with her made me think about the amount of frustration that the really gifted must experience in school. If my companion's childhood is representative, then gifted children are often misunderstood and seen as rebellious simply because they perceive more than many of their adult teachers. More important, gifted children who don't find the right teachers and right schools may not be able to fully develop their gifts. Perhaps like Anakin Skywalker, they turn to the dark side: drugs, criminality, and promiscuity. Or they may simply fizzle out because of the sheer boredom that can occur in the classroom. In The Gifted Child in Peer Group Perspective, Barry Ho Schneider notes that "not long after the advent of free compulsory public education in North America, [scholars] bemoaned the fact that there is no institution that can more rapidly and effectively stifle precocious intellect and creativity than the public school" (36). These scholars probably had in mind not only awful curricula largely involving rote memorization but also the Foucaultian accoutrement of education: bells, attendance, ranks and files, and corporal punishment. Moreover, the development of the imagination often gets side-tracked in the rush to teach to the standardized exam. In "Imagination, Past and Present," Kieran Egan says, "Our public schools should have always been wary of imagination. It is a concept that has come down to us with a history of suspicion and distrust." (3). In "Critical Thinking, Imagination, and New Knowledge in Education Research," Maureen Stout argues that "when we think imaginatively and critically, we explore the familiar in unusual ways and the unusual in familiar ways" (46). Very little of what I experienced in K--8 had me do much exploring. Prep school--with Honors and AP classes--was a different matter. If schools do a bad job in educating the imagination for normal children, the actual damage they may do to gifteds could be quite profound. I found history and English teachers who encouraged me. Not everybody is so lucky. One wonders whether many of the children who are diagnosed with ADD are actually gifted. I think back to what Martin Seligman has said about psychology being half-baked. And beyond the personal level, there may be serious consequences to gifted not being given their due.

In his most recent book about utopia, Picture Imperfect, Russell Jacoby argues that the utopian impulse is on the wane partially because of the destruction of imagination and creativity in childhood. In a recent review of Jacoby's book for H-Utopia, I argued that Jacoby was incorrect in his assertion about the utopian impulse and pointed out that people of my generation can trace their utopian longings back to toys such as Lego and pieces of pop culture such as the Justice League of America. After reflecting on the matter a bit in the last year, I think Jacoby is both right and wrong. He asserts that two of the culprits responsible for assassinating the childhood imagination are bad popular culture and the over-organization of young people's lives. I think Jacoby's probably right that childhood imagination is under attack, but the villains here aren't DC Comics and the coaches of debate and sports teams. Rather, classroom teachers themselves, as well as the designers of nauseatingly standard curricula, may be doing profound damage to all children, including the gifteds. Learning to sit up straight and at least look like you're paying attention is socially important, but this ability doesn't advance society very far down any meaningful path. Not allowing people to fully develop their abilities may directly destroy the utopian impulse. Jameson has long argued that the utopianist is essentially a backyard tinkerer. If this is true, and I think it is, then attacking imagination in the classroom and especially the imaginations of young people with 180 IQs may be a social shooting of one's own foot.

Dystopian literature has long concerned itself with the fate of the talented people who see and do more than they should. For example, in Brave New World, Mustapha Mond banishes Helmholtz Watson to the Falkland Islands because the emotional engineer is just a bit too talented, so talented that he realizes that very few suitable subjects for writing exist in the World State. In Kurt Vonnegut's eponymous short story, the gifted child Harrison Bergeron must be handicapped because in the brave new year of 2081 equality, not only of opportunity but of ability, has been constitutionally mandated in the United States. Vonnegut's story brings us back to where we began this article: the zone in which egalitarianism and natural ability clash. This conflict--of self-actualization versus distribution of opportunities and resources--is a vital part of the quest for a better world, which sits at the heart of the utopian enterprise.

Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century utopian novels such as Bellamy's Looking Backward and Howells's Traveler from Altruria, lament the way in which capitalism doesn't allow individuals to develop their innate talents and abilities. If we are to advance toward anything vaguely resembling utopia, then we will need fully developed individuals, including those individuals who may have the most to offer. In addition, most notions of utopia base themselves on concepts of justice. One such concept that seems appropriate when thinking about gifted children and utopia is Kant's Categorical Imperative. We can apply Kant's four-pronged test of correct action to the following rule: "Society should allow all, including the gifted, to fully maximize their abilities." Would we want to exist in such a world? The question, I think, is why would we not? If we don't promote the learning of the most gifted, from wherever they hail in the class system, then we do a disservice to gifted children, to ourselves as a society, and to the promise of utopia.

I want to end this essay with special reference to Octavia Butler and the creative debt I owe here. In Creativity in the Classroom, Schools of Curious Delight, Alane Jordan Stanko argues that "individuals are not creative in a vacuum. They create within a domain" (27). Stanko argues that the domains in which a person becomes creative are affected "by the person's kinds of social intelligence, personality, support, and domain field opportunities" (54). People only develop themselves in certain areas when they have the proper instructors and educational settings. In the last five years, I have learned just how true Stanko's proclamation is.

In 2003, after realizing that I wanted to write fiction and not being particularly interested in producing the alcoholism and eating-disorder stories that are all too common in MFA programs, I spent a summer at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop. If ever there was an educational institution that I've attended that resembled Hogwarts, it's Clarion. Nervous newbies are taught by very cantankerous professionals (who, interestingly, are not full-time academics) running around mumbling strange things to each other and to the students.

I'll never forget the evening I arrived at Clarion. I had applied because I wanted to write a dystopia. And two of my favorite writers of utopian texts, Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, had attended Clarion in the 1970s. Somehow I had gotten in. Much to my amazement, I was even given a scholarship. Sixteen of us from all over the nation sat nervously in the critique room. Lister Mathieson, then academic director of Clarion, ambled into the room and introduced himself. He told us that one of the rules of Clarion is that one agrees to have everything that one writes during the six weeks archived. He smiled and said, "You can see what shit Octavia Butler wrote when she was here." Trying to crank out my stories and critique other writers' stuff while in the middle of a long-distance and quite painful break up, I never did get a chance to see what Butler wrote when she was at Michigan State for the summer. I doubt very much whether her student writings were complete excrement. I never met Octavia Butler, but I can say that her work The Parable of the Sower, about a gifted child, served as the catalyst for my decision to write speculative fiction and attend Clarion. For that work and the way in which Butler wrote about a gifted child who had the courage to march to her own drummer, I will always be grateful. From one former gifted child to another: Thank you.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. New York: Verso, 1974.

Agusti, Clara Escoda. "The Relation between Community and Subjectivity in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower." Extrapolation 46 (2005): 351-359.

Bainbridge, Carol. "Reflections of Giftedness in Harry Potter." <http://giftedkids.about.com/od/gifted101/a/harry_potter.htm.>

Buckingham, Marcus. Introduction: "The Strengths Revolution at Work." Now, Discover Your Strengths. Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. New York: Free P. 2001.3-4.

Butler, Octavia. The Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner, 2000.

Cornell, Dewey G. Families of Gifted Children. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research P, 1984.

Egan, Kieran. "Imagination, Past and Present." Teaching and Learning outside the Box: Inspiring Imagination across the Curriculum. Ed. Kieran Egan, Maureen Stout, and Keiichi Takaya. New York: Teachers College P, 2007. 3-20.

Freeman, Joan. Growing Up Gifted. London: Cassell Educational, 1991.

Galbraith, Judy. The Gifted Kids Survival Guide. Minneapolis: Free Spirit, 1983.

Gordon, Joan. "Two SF Diaries at the Intersection of Subjunctive Hopes and Declarative Despair." Foundation 72 (1998): 42-48.

Jacoby, Russell. Picture Imperfect. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:

Duke UP, 1991.

Levy, Michael M. "Ophelia Triumphant: The Survival of Adolescent Girls in Recent Fiction by Butler and Womack." Foundation 72 (1998): 34-41.

Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000.

Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art: Break through the Blocks and Win Your Creative Battles. New York: Warner Books, 2002.

Quart, Missa. Hothouse Kids. The Dilemma of the Gifted Child. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Rhode Island Committee on Gifted and Talented Children. "Myths about Gifted Children." <http://www.ri.net/gifted_talented/character. html#Myths.>

Schneider, Barry Ho. The Gifted Child in Peer Group Perspective. New York: Springer Verlag, 1997.

The Science Fiction Database. "Anakin Skywalker--Darth Vader." <http://www.optibrain.co.uk/sfdb2/viewer.php?view=1515.>

Seligman, Martin. "The Emergence of Positive Psychology: The Building of a Field of Dreams." <http://www.apa.org/apags/profdev/pospsyc.html.>

Stanko, Mane Jordan. Creativity in the Classroom. New York: Longman, 1995.

Stillman, Peter G. "Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler's Parables." Utopian Studies 14 (2003): 15-36.

Stout, Maureen. "Critical Thinking, Imagination, and New Knowledge in Education Research." Teaching and Learning outside the Box. Ed. Kieran Egan, Maureen Stout, and Keiichi Takaya. New York, Teachers College P, 2007. 42-60.

Takacs, Carol Addison. Enjoy Your Gifted Child. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1986.

Theroux, Paul. O-Zone. New York: Putnam, 1986.

Winner, Ellen. Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. New York: Basic, 1986.

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Author:	Texter, Douglas W.
Publication:	Utopian Studies
Date:	Jun 22, 2008
Words:	11314
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