Living Octavia Butler's Vision of the Future
The uncanniness of the LA Fires and the world of Octavia Butler
Dear friends,
I write this as fires still rage in LA. I’ve seen countless person-on-the-street interviews with people who have lost their entire homes and escaped with just the clothes on their backs. So many of these folks are parents. Yes many are wealthy celebrities, but especially in places like Altadena, a historically Black city, there are a whole lot of regular people who are victims to this climate change-fueled wildfire.
If this was a wakeup call for many of you, I urge you to check out the post
and I did on making Evacuation plans—it also includes a list of what to include in your Go Bag. You can read that here (the paywall has been removed from that post, so it’s free for anyone to view and share!).Additionally, if you live far away and have the resources to help out, donating to mutual aid organizations is the best way to help. You can find those mutual aid networks here as well as this GoFundMe campaign that is supporting underserved Black communities in Altadena and Pasadena.
Please also take care of each other and yourselves. Amidst the devastation, I’m always heartened to see the community care that comes out of disaster. It’s the one bright light that gives us all hope for the future
The fact that Octavia Butler was raised in and is burried (sic) in #Altadena in a cemetery surrounded by blocks of burnt out rubble has really got my head spinning. I know I am not alone in this.
—Michele Norris (posted on IG stories)
In Parable of the Sower, the Octavia Butler classic that has experienced a renaissance in these inching-toward-apocalypse days, takes place in a suburb of Los Angeles called Robledo. In an apocalyptic wasteland of the city, a neighborhood of people thrown together by way of circumstance and geography band together to protect their streets by surrounding their community in barbed-wire clad walls and keeping watch for outsiders (namely drug-addled pyromaniacs) that essentially rule the lawless city post democratic and national collapse.
The vision I had of the city beyond the walls of the Robledo neighborhood always seemed cast in red. A red sky amidst the ashes of a destroyed post-apocalyptic city. Part of this could be influenced by the vision of bright orange-red throughout the graphic novel version of the book (see above). It’s a vision not unlike the ones that we’ve been seeing over the last week in the Santa-Ana-wind-climate-change-drought-fueled fires that have destroyed large swaths of Los Angeles-area communities and choked the sky with smoke. I have not stopped thinking about Octavia Butler and Parable as I watch the mounting devastation on my phone screen.
The connection to Butler becomes even clearer, though, when you realize that the real life Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, lived in and based part of her book Kindred in Altadena, and is now buried in Altadena. Altadena is one of those communities where so many houses were burnt to ashes. And like journalist Michele Norris posted in her Instagram story, there’s something uncanny about the fact that Butler’s remains are now surrounded by devastation in communities about whose future she envisioned in the pages of her books.
I didn’t know this area was Butler’s roots until the fire happened (this LitHub story shows you Butler’s Pasadena). I also didn’t know much about Altadena (or even had heard of it) until the fires took so many of the residents. As writer Frederick Joseph wrote about in his Substack the other day, he discovered, like I did, the rich Black history of Altadena. A rich history that Octavia Butler is emblematic of. A rich Black history that has been destroyed by apocalyptic-level fires and seemingly overlooked when devastating fires also swept through the affluent community of The Palisades and thereabouts.
And so, with these fires happening at the beginning of 2025, the same time Parable of the Sower begins telling the story of 15 year-old Lauren Olamina, a young Black woman, who is determined not just to survive the apocalypse that her elders are refusing to see as anything more than just an awful blip before things go back to normal, but to thrive amidst the change. And in doing so, she develops a religion, Earth Seed, that is a response to the transformation that is happening in the world.
This eerie connection between the uncannily prescient Butler’s world of Parable and what is happening as I write these words goes beyond a sense of foreboding. It also poses an opportunity to look beyond the disaster. To look for potential transformation.
“You cannot call Octavia Butler a prophet and say the world is ending,” wrote Aisha Alexander in a social media post (which I came across on the @witchesforhope IG page). “Parable of the Sower was not post-apocalyptic. It’s a parable of restoration, a blueprint for transforming a crumbling society into a sustainable future.”
It’s in this vein that I’m revisiting Butler and Parable anew. Admittedly, this work around apocalypse makes me think of Butler and her work often, but never more so than now. And it’s Lauren’s determination to not only restore, but to transform the world around her is one we should keep in mind.
I admit that when I first read Parable of the Sower in 2020 in the midst of a plague in the middle of an awful election, the book filled me with dread. It felt too close to reality. While the world of Parable was farther gone than the one we see in the 2025 of reality, it feels all too real. And with this uncanny connection to the LA fires, it feels eerily closer to the world than it did in 2020 and yet I feel differently about the story than I did then because I’ve been starting down apocalypse these last few years and see the potential within it.
I’m eager to return to Parable, particularly Lauren’s Earth Seed writings that Butler sprinkles throughout the book. When I first read it I was so much more focused on the plot itself that I kind of glossed over the philosophical nuggets throughout.
So I’ll leave you with the quotes that Butler had written as words by the main character Lauren Oya Olamina — you can take them as you would like. But I’m appreciating the new meaning in them given this present day reality.
“Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.”
“All that you touch/You Change. All that you Change/Changes you. The only lasting truth/Is Change. God/Is Change.”
Also to help out Black communities in Altadena and Pasadena, consider giving to this GoFundMe that is specifically working to help underserved Black community members affected by the fire.
I too found Parable of the Sower (and its sequel, Parable of the Talents) excruciatingly painful to read. Thank you for reminding me of the improbably hopeful message within them.