Marthas Choice Reading Guide
Octavia Butler's "The Book of Martha"
Martha's Choice
STUDENT READING GUIDE • PAGES 1–10 ANALYSIS
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Analytical Focus: Free Will, World-Building, and the Law of Unintended Consequences
The Narrative Landscape (Pages 1–10)
The story starts with Martha Bes, a forty-three-year-old novelist, who suddenly wakes up in an endless gray space. Soon, she meets God. God's look keeps changing depending on what Martha expects to see—first appearing as a giant, bearded white man like Michelangelo's Moses, but later shrinking down to her height. Martha learns she is not dreaming or in a hospital. Instead, God has given her an unbelievable, scary job: she must make just one positive change to human nature to help save humanity from destroying itself.
Martha is terrified of this responsibility. She argues with God, pointing out the law of unintended consequences—the idea that even a good change could turn into a total nightmare. For example, she suggests her first idea: limiting every person to only having two children to solve the overpopulation problem. But God points out the flaws. Over generations, because of diseases, wars, and accidents, humans wouldn't be able to replace themselves. Eventually, this rule would make humans go extinct.
To make sure Martha is fair, God adds a major rule: after she makes her choice, she will be reborn into the new world at the very bottom of society—poor and without power, with no memory of this meeting. God compares changing humanity to a "nova" (an exploding double star), warning that taking away human competitiveness or free will might mean they aren't "human" anymore. Realizing that other people might make cruel changes if she refuses, Martha reluctantly agrees to keep thinking, trying to find a way to reduce war and greed without taking away free will.
Vocabulary for World-Building
1. UNINTENED adjective
Not planned or expected; an accidental result of an action.
Your Sentence:
2. SUSTAINABLE adjective
Able to be kept going or maintained
Your Sentence:
3.
A pair of stars where one drains energy from the other and explodes.
Your Sentence:
4. UTOPIA noun
An imagined, perfect world where there is no crime, greed, or suffering.
Sentence: (I am not asking you to create a Utopia, Martha"(10)
Unit: Dreaming Heaven (Octavia Butler) Page 1 of 2
The Book of Martha Reading Guide
Utopian Dilemmas & Analysis
SECTION 2: COMPREHENSION
1
God selects Martha for this task because of her creative writing background:
"You write stories for a living... You create characters and situations, problems and solutions. That’s less than I’ve given you to do."
Why does God view a novelist as the perfect person to reshape humanity? How do her skills as a storyteller help her, and how do they make her more afraid of making a mistake? p.10
2
God demands that Martha must experience the consequences of her design:
"When you’ve finished your work, you’ll go back and live among them again as one of their lowliest... whatever you decide is to be the bottom level of society... that’s what you’ll be."
Why is this rule so important? How does forcing Martha to live at the "very bottom" of her own created world change the way she must think about her decision?
3
Martha's first idea is to limit human reproduction to exactly two children. Why does she think this is a good solution, and what "unintended nightmare" does God point out that makes her abandon it?
Martha's Reasoning
God's Critique
4
God uses the scientific model of a nova (exploding twin stars) to explain the danger of altering human nature:
"If you limit their competitiveness or their inventiveness, you might destroy their ability to survive the many disasters and challenges that they must face."
Why does God argue that taking away human flaws (like being competitive or aggressive) could actually cause humanity to die out instead of helping them?
Unit: Dreaming Heaven (Octavia Butler) Page 2 of 2
