The main character of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series, Lauren Oya Olamina, is stricken by an abundance of empathy. In a world where the president of the United States has explicitly named empathy as a weakness and an enemy, this feels like the hero we need. The first time Trump was elected, there were many headlines citing the prescience of Butler’s works, but in his second term, our real life demagogue (who does indeed have much in common, including their slogans, with Butler’s antagonist President Jarret) seems intent on driving the country towards a Butlerian dystopia.
Climate Change & Its Consequences
Butler started researching climate change in 1965 (Jamieson), and many of her creative works imagine a world in which humanity has failed to deal with the consequences of our meddling. In Butler’s 2020s, the United States is plagued by fires and rising tides; houses are slipping off hills into the ocean, and fires rage untreated by privatized fire departments. Meanwhile, in our 2025, the fires rage and we send prisoners to extinguish them.
Economic Inequality (The Juxtaposition of Normalcy & the Post-Apocalyptic)
In Butler’s 2020s, the economy of the United States has become even more out of whack than what we’ve experienced since the 2008 financial crisis. Housing and basic necessities are not only overpriced, but are out of reach for a majority of Americans, at least on the west coast where Olamina lives. The juxtaposition of normalcy (at the beginning of the first novel, Lauren’s father still has a job as a tenured professor) and utter despair mimics and magnifies what we see on the street corners of most contemporary American cities.
Walled Cities & Drug-Fueled Destruction
Those who have held onto their houses have built walls surrounding their neighborhoods to protect them from the desperate and the drug-addled, returning to a Feudalistic form of community safety. This, of course, only exacerbated the inequality, giving the street poor even more reason to try to take from those behind the walls.
The residents of Lauren’s neighborhood are plagued by—and ultimately run out of their homes and/or killed by—a mob of pyromaniac drug users. Not only does this mirror the mythology of the “war on drugs,” Reagan-era paranoias and fear mongering, and every zombification narrative ever, but there are also parallels to be drawn between the “bath salts” hysteria of 2010s and even the COVID-19 pandemic.
Space as the Last Hope for Positive Change
Ultimately, Lauren’s dream of leaving the planet and seeding humanity throughout the universe remains unfulfilled; however, ephemera found in the Octavia E. Butler archives at The Huntington in San Marino, CA suggest that the next book in the series was intended to take place on an exoplanet and follow the life of a distant relative of Lauren’s.