My seventh-grade daughter had a dystopian fiction unit in her humanities class this year, so we went to the bookstore and I failed to induce her to buy PARABLE OF THE SOWER; she wanted THE HUNGER GAMES instead. So, fuck it, I bought PARABLE OF THE SOWER. I figured it would be around the house at least. And if I bought it, I might as well reread it, because it had been a hell of a long time. And, well, see above. I was not prepared for it to be set in 2024. The protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, starts the book aged 15; my oldest daughter (the seventh-grader) is 12.
I remembered from prior reads that the book’s slow apocalypse felt alarmingly plausible. Rather than a specific event that precipitated society’s collapse, and the book occurring on the canvas of a post-collapse steady state, PARABLE happens during a collapse that’s been going for a while at which society, though very bad, has not obviously hit bottom yet. The causes of the collapse aren’t super clear and that, too, is plausible. You know it by its symptoms, not by its inciting incident. Violence is high, people are poor, government is capable of little and willing to do less; migration toward opportunity is common even inside the US, because opportunity is so scarce. There’s a sense that some social trust has broken, some social fabric has torn, but there’s no moment of breaking or tearing you can point to, only the fact of the damage.
What I didn’t remember is just how much Butler got right. Science fiction shouldn’t be judged by the events it happened to predict, and we of course don’t live in Butler’s then-future; there’s not drugs floating around that make people want to set fires, there’s not hyperempathy syndrome, there’s not gangs invading neighborhoods in California. But the damage of climate change in Butler’s future, the scarcity of rain; California parched and scarred by wildfires; the president tearing down worker protections in the name of opportunity; the country slowly fragmenting into disconnected, semi-permeable regions… none of it’s exact, except maybe the wildfires, but it’s all very familiar.
Again, the point isn’t that Butler knew what was going to happen in 2024. Science fiction, no matter how far in the future it’s set, is always a diagnosis of the present; the accuracy of Butler’s 2024 is a testament to the accuracy of her diagnosis of 1993.
Currently reading: MAEVE FLY, by C. J. Leede, read by Sosie Bacon.
If you’re a fantasy reader in the market for a different twist on dragons, have a look at BRIMSTONE SLIPSTREAM, the opening novella in the Streets of Flame series — free to download on all the major retailers.
