Image by Malachi Brooks.
The West Coast is on fire. Sea level rise is slowly eating away at our shores, and record-breaking floods have come for the Midwestern states. Wealth inequality is at an all-time high, and while more and more Americans become homeless, the wealthiest Americans are buying ever more means of security. A new president aims to “make America great again” and is supported by violent Christian nationalists. Sound familiar?
Before this described Real-Life 2025, it was the setting of Octavia Butler’s Parable books: two books written in the 1990s by a Black science fiction writer who imagined a dystopic U.S. without any magical or alien intervention.
The first book, Parable of the Sower, begins in July 2024 in a fictional suburb of Los Angeles based on the real city of Altadena (a historic Black community which recently burned down in the January 2025 wildfires). Narrator Lauren Olamina is a Black teenager surrounded by the threats of wildfires, high food prices, street violence fueled by desperation, and corrupt police. Since last summer, when Butler’s books seemed to leap from the page and become the real world, the Internet has been awash with comments about how the author predicted the future:
It’s easy to ooh and ahh about how prescient Butler was as a Black woman who saw the modern United States for what it is. But her books have much more to offer than eerie predictions of the future. They contain information about how to survive it.
In the Parable books, narrator Lauren Olamina creates her own religion called Earthseed. The premise of Earthseed is that God, rather than any sort of mighty anthropomorphic entity, is Change. Living in an unpredictable country tilting into fascism, Olamina recognizes that the only thing she can rely upon on the world is change. And if God is Change, then everyone is able to affect God and shape God to see the world they want to live in.
“[Olamina] believes that our only dependable help must come from ourselves and from one another,” Butler said in the 1999 reading guide. “She never develops a ‘things will work themselves out somehow’ attitude. She learns to be an activist.”
Parable of the Sower was one of the books that first inspired me to become a climate activist at age 18, alongside David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, which paints a worse-case scenario of climate science. I was a senior at an elite New England boarding school, and I suddenly Needed to Solve Climate Change to prevent my world from becoming Olamina’s (at the time, I was ignorant to how many people already lived her life or something akin to it). I would go on to become a climate organizer and learn a great deal about effective organizing along the way, but I missed how many lessons are already there in Parable.
“There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers – at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be” Butler wrote in a 2000 essay for Essence.
The greatest (and most oft-discussed) lesson from the Parable books is that we need community. A core principle of Olamina’s Earthseed religion is that people must learn to work together and craft a sustainable relationship with their environment. When her community is attacked by Christian nationalists in Parable of the Talents, the strength of her community is what enables them all to survive their subsequent enslavement.
But within this need for community, Butler’s books also give new meaning to individual action. One of the things you quickly learn as a climate activist is that we cannot solve the climate crisis as individuals. Corporations and billionaires are responsible for the crisis; the latter emit more carbon emissions in 90 minutes than the average person’s lifetime.
But while the climate crisis is not the average person’s fault, we do have much more power to change it than we think. The second book in the series, Parable of the Talents is named after the Bible’s “parable of the talents” – a cautionary tale about the need to use our talents or risk losing them. Throughout the books, Olamina encourages people to acquire survival skills and teach them to one another. She encourages her community to believe in Change, for that belief shapes their actions.
Under the current Trump administration, the Earthseed principle of God being Change feels more relevant than ever. When we are bombarded with terrible news, it’s hard to know where to start. But I’ve felt optimistic in this world on fire knowing that we all have the power to shape change. People are organizing to protect migrants in their communities. Friends who never considered organizing are asking me how they can take action.
Social movement facilitator adrienne maree brown wrote an entire book on organizing strategy inspired by Butler. Now more than ever do I see understand her vision of how “small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies.” We are all individuals with the agency to build connections and develop skills that embody the world we want to live in.
Humans will endure in this future Butler predicted, and the future to come. If you feel lost right now, Octavia Butler’s books are an apt recommendation. But they are indeed parables, and only as effective as the lessons you choose to take from them.
