Octavia Butler Predicted Our Current Reality With Parable of the Sower

Young people who have read Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel say it’s not only prescient, but also carries lessons for today.

Imminent drought, rising sea waters, destructive borders, a vanishing middle class, “smart drugs,” Big Pharma, privatized public schools and cities, and a governing body with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” These are all themes from Octavia Butler’s postapocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower.

Published in 1993 and set in 2024—the protagonist’s first journal entry is July 20, 2024—the story imagines a highly capitalistic America, dominated by industry, corporate greed, and impending doom. At the time of its publication, the novel was categorized as dystopian fiction with a climate catastrophe twist, but Butler later self-labeled it as “speculative fiction.”

As our calendars finally catch up to the timeline of her imagination, Butler seems to have predicted many realities that are playing out this year in her novel. She did not shy away from being “political.” Still, readers are left wondering what happens when science fiction resembles reality so uncannily.

For young people, classified as “Gen Z,” the questions that Butler poses in her works are at the forefront of contemporary literature, exploring stories that are meant to illuminate, anger, and more importantly, liberate young people and lift up their causes.

Butler opens the novel in Robledo, a fictional suburb 20 minutes from inner-city Los Angeles, from behind the walls that surround the home of 15-year-old protagonist Lauren Olamina. The story’s narration by the teenage girl remains a key driver of the plot and resonates with Gen Z readers.

Within the first few pages of the novel, Lauren pulls readers into a bleak futuristic version of L.A.:

None of us goes out to school any more. …All the adults were armed. That’s the rule. Go out in a bunch, and go armed. …To us kids—most of us—the trip was just an adventure, an excuse to go outside the wall. …We rode past people stretched out, sleeping on the sidewalks, and a few just waking up. …I saw at least three people who weren’t going to wake up again, ever.

These scenarios hit a little too close to home for Jordan Yanowitz, a 24-year-old from L.A. “It resonates deeply with my appraisal of Los Angeles culture: reading this book in 2024 in this strange city…seeing a time and place where people have so much anger and angst… and an environment where everyone feels so fundamentally unsafe in public that we isolate ourselves into insular communities and neighborhoods,” he says in an email interview. Yanowitz, who graduated from UCLA with a degree in ecology and now works as a teacher’s assistant at the university, worries about “the dog-eat-dog culture in which we live; it all feels very real for the contemporary cultural feeling of this town.”

During a bike ride from the walled neighborhoods of Robledo into L.A., a rare occurrence for Lauren, readers learn about her unique condition. Lauren possesses the gift and curse of “hyperempathy,” which allows her to feel, experience, and understand her surroundings more vividly than others. Hyperempathy guides Lauren’s choices, and she functions as a juxtaposition to her surroundings, seen most clearly in the way that she deals with grief and her ability to do so in a society that has normalized suffering.

Lauren decides early on that she does not follow the same faith as her family, and she spends a large part of the book building upon her spiritual system, which she calls “Earthseed” (hence the biblical word “Parable” in the book’s title). Maybe this is Lauren acting as a typically rebellious teenage girl, or perhaps Butler imagined Earthseed as an applicable manifesto to current society, with change at its forefront.

“I felt an immense kinship with Lauren Olamina,” says 26-year-old Kathleen Gekiere from Oregon. “These books have spoken to me at difficult times in my life when I was questioning things that were very foundational to me.” Gekiere, who is a Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon studying English and environment, adds that “modern dystopian literature really became popular when I was an early teen, [and] so much of my experience with dystopian literature is shaped by the cultural moment I grew up [in].”

For some, Butler’s work is a direct commentary on social issues Gen Z is starting to experience for themselves.

“All of Butler’s work focuses very specifically on hierarchical power and how it affects us. She shows its effects on our jobs, households, and relationships, and how we can cope with these unequal power relations,” says Killian, a 22-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia, who first learned about Butler in a high school English class. “Many of us living in this year are intimately familiar with the coming of climate change, the perils of deregulation, the dehumanization of the homeless, and drug abuse,” he says in an email interview, all problems that have grown in prominence since the novel’s publication.

Butler makes clear that accepting doomsday is not the novel’s intention. “Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all,” Butler writes on the first page of the book right below the year, 2024.

Tied to the corporate damage of the suburban west, Butler alludes to the L.A. tech boom of the ’90s when writing about Olivar, a city comprised entirely of workers who live in subsidized housing owned by corporations as payment for working in their respective industries. Lauren’s best friend’s family leaves Robledo to work in Olivar in exchange for corporate safety and to escape persecution. Lauren describes this “working model”:

Anyone KSF hired would have a hard time living on the salary offered. …The new hires would be in debt to the company. That’s an old company-town trick–get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder.

Butler imagines a society in which everything is privatized, and while America doesn’t yet have corporate-owned cities, one can imagine such a result from late-stage capitalism.

For 27-year-old Zachari Brumaire from California, Butler’s work resonates as “literature about dealing with exploitation and having one’s labor used to further the ill effects of capitalism and colonialism and patriarchy against [one’s] will, and how to survive and resist that.” Brumaire is studying political philosophy and religion and runs the Butler-inspired blog , where he publishes fiction and essays.

“As a young person—becoming politically aware during the Great Recession, stuck in a world with awful work and a collapsing climate and rising food prices and health care prices, and no real institutional resistance to COVID and genocide—everything is so incredibly bleak,” he adds.

Lauren often critiques her association as a political pawn of those in power, categorizing the acts of the arsonists as “political statements,” while she struggles to find a spot in the vanishing middle class.

Some kind of insane burn-the-rich movement. …We’ve never been rich, but to the desperate, we looked rich. We were surviving and we had our wall. Did our community die so that addicts could make a help-the-poor political statement?

A larger part of Parable of the Sower is when the characters walk on Highway 101 and I-5 North to Oregon and Washington, where more water and stability are found. Butler outlines a larger class divide that stems from climate change ravaging the community.

“Octavia Butler intentionally never drove a car. This moment, where the infrastructure we have today fails the people of the future (and people of the present) because of environmental and socioeconomic changes, challenges how we build our world now. In the context of a carless society, this road becomes a wasteland, filled with paranoid groups walking the asphalt with no shade,” says Gekiere.

Parable of the Sower nails the coffin on the climate crisis. Early in the book, Lauren argues with her father on the privilege of being able to ignore something. “But Dad, that’s like …ignoring a fire in the living room because we’re all in the kitchen,” she points out.

Readers soon learn that the fire is also in the kitchen. In a water-scarce community, water takes the form of modern-day currency, costing “several times as much as gasoline” and being “as good as money,” according to Lauren. In Chapter 16, Butler’s protagonist says:

But … I thought something would happen someday. I didn’t know how bad it would be or when it would come. But everything was getting worse: the climate, the economy, crime, drugs, you know. I didn’t believe we would be allowed to sit behind our walls, looking clean and fat and rich to the hungry, thirsty, homeless, jobless, filthy people outside.

Self-described by Butler as a “cautionary tale,” Parable is a harrowing model of what lies in the future and is already, to an extent, being realized in the present.

To Brumaire, the book is “not so much a cautionary tale as a warped mirror of where we already are.” He adds, “It probably was a cautionary tale when it was written, but the authoritarianism and exponential climate collapse and fortress society aspects are, I think, already largely in place.”

Lauren knows her belief system is incompatible with that of her family, and combined with the drug-related attacks and climate catastrophes that await her in L.A., she decides to escape.

“The Quest of the North,” or in Lauren’s case, Canada, is a recurring motif in the novel, alluding to migration from South to North America. The North has always represented a sort of progress, for migrants on the southern border of the United States; for Lauren, who escapes to Canada, it represents change.

While Butler uses the walled communities and Robledo’s class divide as recurring themes throughout the book, she doesn’t present these ideas without solutions. Instead, she relies on Earthseed, a push for change. This aspect is often left out of reviews that point out the comparisons between Butler’s 2024 and the 2024 we live in today.

The opening of Chapter 9 reads, “All struggles Are essentially power struggles,” and in Chapter 14, Butler writes, “To rise. From its ashes A phoenix. First. Must Burn.” Earthseed is about oppression and how to fight it.

For readers making these connections and wondering whether they can be translated into systems that work, the question arises, is it easier to imagine the end of the world than to build a socialist framework?

“I find that the way Butler was thinking about the extinction of humanity in Dawn [another book by Butler] resonates immensely with our current ecological and sociopolitical state,” says Gen Witter, a 25-year-old from Oregon who first read Butler in a college class at Arizona State University. After being “unable to put it down” while pursuing their master’s degree, Witter explained how Butler inspired them to pursue a Ph.D. “For me, Butler’s writing is not only trying to build worlds on the page but actively deconstructing the real world and the oppressive systems that exist within it through the stories she created.”

For Witter and other readers of Butler’s work, Parable of the Sower is an awakening. “Even though I want to look on the bright side, I refuse to be blindly complicit in systems that keep leading the most vulnerable members of our communities (and humanity, at large) toward death,” Witter says.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 9:48 a.m. PT on July 22, 2024, to correct Jordan Yanowitz’s name. Read our corrections policy here.

Aina Marzia is a journalist from El Paso, Texas, covering intersectional politics and a freshman at Princeton University studying politics and diplomacy. Her work has been seen in Al Jazeera The Nation, Teen Vogue, Business Insider, The New Republic, The New Arab, The Daily Beast, The American Prospect, Grist, and on NPR and elsewhere.

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