Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [493]

I suspect that a living world might be easier for us to adapt to and live on without a long, expensive umbilical to Earth. Easier but not easy. Still, that’s something, because I don’t think there could be a multi-light-year umbilical. I think people who traveled to extrasolar worlds would be on their own—far from politicians and business people, failing economies and tortured ecologies—and far from help. Well out of the shadow of their parent world. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 493

Note

The metaphor is developed rather than decorated: ‘umbilical’ gets scaled up to ‘multi-light-year umbilical’ and then quietly negated, so the image turns from lifeline to tether to something that finally can’t reach. The list after the dash is deliberately mixed in register — ‘politicians and business people, failing economies and tortured ecologies’ — placing human institutions and ruined biospheres in the same flight path. ‘Well out of the shadow of their parent world’ closes on an image that reads simultaneously as astronomy and as adolescent wanting to leave home.