Octavia Butler Wrote 2024 in 1993 and It’s Unnerving

A teenage girl keeps a journal while the country falls apart

Here’s the setup. It’s the 2020s. Lauren Olamina is fifteen when the book opens, living behind a wall in a walled-off cul-de-sac neighborhood outside Los Angeles. Not a fancy wall. A desperate one. Inside the wall: a few families growing food, sharing guns, pretending things are stable. Outside: fire, drugs, water you have to buy by the gallon, people who will kill you for your shoes. The government still technically exists. It just doesn’t do anything for anyone Lauren knows.

Lauren has a condition she calls hyperempathy. She feels other people’s pain and pleasure in her own body. If she sees you bleed, she bleeds, sort of, in sensation. In a world this violent, that is not a superpower. It is a liability she has to hide, because it makes her exploitable. Butler is doing something sneaky here: she gives her narrator radical empathy and then drops her into a world that punishes empathy at every turn. The whole book is that tension, pulled tight.

And Lauren is building a religion. On the side. In her journal. She calls it Earthseed, and its first principle is that God is Change, that God is not a father who protects you but a force you shape by shaping yourself. I went in expecting the religion stuff to be the weak part, the eye-glaze part. It’s the spine.

What Butler nails, and the one thing that made me set the book down

What makes this book land is that the collapse is boring. I mean that as the highest compliment. There’s no single Event, no asteroid, no bomb, no zombie patient zero. It’s just slow attrition: prices creep, water gets scarcer, a job that used to feel safe stops feeling safe, and one day the wall comes down and it turns out the wall was always going to come down. Butler understood that the end of the world doesn’t announce itself. It arrives as a series of Tuesdays where each one is slightly worse than the last and you keep telling yourself this is the floor.

The wall coming down, when it happens, is genuinely one of the most upsetting things I’ve read. I won’t detail it. But the way Lauren has to become someone new in the space of a single night, the way the neighborhood she’s spent the whole book inside just stops existing, it flattened me. I read it on my back porch and then I went inside because I didn’t want to be outside anymore.

Now the criticism, because I promised honesty. The second half becomes a road narrative, Lauren and a growing band of survivors walking north along the highway, and Butler’s structure starts to strain. New characters arrive fast, some of them barely get more than a name and a wound before they’re part of the group, and because it’s all filtered through Lauren’s journal, the pacing goes a little flat and reportorial in places. This happened, then this happened, then we walked. I found myself skimming a couple of the road entries, and I don’t think it’s just me: the diary form that makes the first half so intimate becomes a slight drag when the cast balloons. It’s the price of the format. Butler mostly pays it gladly. I just want to be straight that it’s there.

Let me question my own taste for a second. Part of me wonders if I’m rating this so high because it’s prophetic rather than because it’s perfect, and those aren’t the same thing. If I’d read this in 1996 with no knowledge of what the actual 2020s would feel like, would it have hit as hard? Honestly, maybe not. Some of my four-and-a-half stars is being scored by the calendar. I’m choosing to keep it there anyway, because a book that gets the texture of the future this right earned its unfair advantage.

Small tangent. There’s a drug in this world, casually named, that makes fire beautiful to the people who take it, so they set fires to watch them. Arsonists on a chemical high. Butler doesn’t lecture about it. She just puts it in the world like weather. That’s the whole book in miniature: no villain gives a speech, the horror is structural and ambient, and the closest thing to a monster is a substance that turns destruction into a light show. I think about that drug constantly. It feels like an accurate metaphor for a lot of things I won’t get into here.

All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.

About Octavia E. Butler

Butler was a tall, shy, ferociously disciplined Black woman writing hard science fiction in a genre that, for most of her career, was not built to make room for her. She grew up in Pasadena, raised largely by her mother, who cleaned houses. She reportedly got up at two or three in the morning to write before work, for years, before it paid. She won the big genre awards and, later, a MacArthur “genius” grant, the first science fiction writer to get one. She was not sentimental about her characters and she was not sentimental about hope, which is exactly why the hope in her books means something. She died in 2006, far too early, at fifty-eight. The Parable series was meant to be longer than two books. She never finished it, and every time I think about that I get a little hollow, because I want to know where Earthseed was going.

If this got under your skin, read these next

• Parable of the Talents (Butler): the direct sequel, darker, angrier, with a political demagogue whose campaign slogan will make you drop the book. Read it. Just brace yourself.
• Kindred (Butler): her most famous novel, a Black woman in 1976 pulled back in time to a pre-Civil-War plantation. Not the same genre, same unflinching gaze.
• The Fifth Season (N.K. Jemisin): if you want the slow apocalypse plus a religion-and-power theme cranked to operatic scale, with structure so clever it should be illegal.
• Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel): gentler, more elegiac, for when you need collapse that also believes in beauty surviving.

For your book club

1. Lauren’s hyperempathy is framed as a disability in this world. Is it also her moral center, or is Butler saying empathy is a weakness that has to be managed to survive?
2. Earthseed says God is Change. Is that a genuinely comforting theology, or a cold one dressed up as comfort? Did it work on you?
3. The collapse here has no single cause. Does that make it more frightening or less than a standard disaster story, and why?
4. Lauren is a teenager founding a religion. How much did her age change how seriously you took Earthseed, and should it have?
5. Butler wrote this in 1993 about the 2020s. What did she get eerily right, what did she miss, and does the accuracy change how you read it as fiction?