The year is 2024, climate change is wreaking havoc, inequality is increasing, the rich are deciding to abandon Earth and move to Mars, and a populist politician running for president of the United States disagrees with scientists and promises to return the country to its former glory. And no, this description is not meant to tell you for the umpteenth time what you read on the news almost every day. It is a synopsis of Octavia Butler's science fiction novel, Parable of the Sower, published in 1993. The fictional work that predicted the present reality in a really disturbing way is told with the help of Claude.
Butler's dystopian novel is set in the future United States. The main character in it writes in her diary about social collapse caused by increasing droughts, floods, storms intensified by climate change. Butler described extreme weather very reminiscent of recent hurricanes in the country and drought in the west. Her vision speaks of wealthy Americans entrenching themselves in secure luxury complexes—a change that has indeed happened since then, with entire neighborhoods surrounded by guard fences. As mentioned, the presidential candidate in the story promises to return America to the glory of the past, and rejects warnings from experts about climate change – which is reminiscent of Donald Trump.
In retrospect, in a 2006 interview, a few months before her death, Butler argued that her predictions were due to existing policies, and therefore inevitable without radical change. However, she expressed hope that exposing injustice would wake people up to fight for change that would prevent the catastrophe being used, just as the novel's protagonist does.
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