This chapter looks at reading groups as times and spaces for making collective sense of science fiction. It draws on research with two online book groups discussing Octavia. E. Butler’s Parable series, works of dystopian science fiction published in the nineteen nineties. Drawing on digital ethnographic approaches, this chapter draws on two discussions with two reading groups: an asynchronous discussion forum on Goodreads and a fortnightly zoom discussion group, Multiplicities, in 2018. Our data is rich with new insights about how people talk together about science and fiction. We consider how readers were drawn to Butler’s books and how they made them relevant to contemporary questions of ecology and society, destruction and survival, crisis and change, racism and justice, subjectivity and community. We interrogate their commitment to plural collective readings and attachment to worlds and characters that ‘feel real’. We preface this analysis by exploring in detail how in her own time Butler was deeply engaged with the climate crisis, framing it through a Black Feminist lens to creatively produce a fictional techno-socio-political for readers to explore.