The wisdom of Earthseed

The dystopian America Octavia Butler imagines in her novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, both written in the 1990s, is eerily familiar—a failing education system, the dissolving of public trust, rising Christian nationalism, fires raging across California, all of it overseen by a president who wants to “make America great again.”

In “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” originally published in Essence in 2000, Butler reflects on an encounter with a student at one of her book signings. The young man asked her if she believed that her troubled visions of the United States would someday come true. She responded, “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” Butler observed the mishandling of climate change, rising socioeconomic disparity, and heightened racial and political tensions, and she imagined a future that followed the natural consequences of neglecting these issues. Drawing on her knowledge of historical patterns, she predicted America’s slide into fascism, down to the exact words of the regime’s slogan.

In preparation to write the second book of the Parable series, Butler researched pre–World War II Germany’s transformation into a fascist country. She pored over the way “Hitler and others bludgeoned and seduced,” along with the way the “Germans responded to the bludgeoning and the seduction.” Her goal was to understand how a government could manipulate normal people to “either quietly or joyfully watch their neighbors ruined, spirited away, [or] killed.”