HISTOFUTURISM.....HAS ARRIVED,OCTIVIA BUTLER'S VIEW

www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/oct...ewsletter-08-29-2025


expect that things will change, surprise, and collapse. Know that you can survive it, but you need to be more communal in the way that you approach it.”






When the Los Angeles fires began last January, the designer and futurist Tracee Worley was re-reading Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler’s chillingly prescient novel, written in 1993 but set in the 2020s. In the book, climate change has devastated the world, an increasingly dangerous and inequitable society has resulted in many people living in private, heavily armed compounds, and Los Angeles is ablaze, burned up by people addicted to a drug called “pyro.” In the book’s sequel, Parable of the Talents, a hyper-conservative Christian fundamentalist candidate rises to power under the now-familiar slogan “Make America Great Again.”

As with many people who have recently re-read Butler’s work—and a new literary biography of Butler, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler by Susana M. Morris was published this month—Worley was disquieted by the unsettling accuracy of the series. Butler was a science fiction writer born in Altadena—one of the Los Angeles county communities devastated by the fires— and her Parable series has aged almost too well, with vivid scenes from the books leaping off the page and into reality with terrifying speed.

“Butler’s vision fits our disorienting moment of flashbacks and fast-forwards,” wrote professor Tiya Miles in a 2024 analysis of Butler’s work for the Atlantic. “Russia’s corrupt designs on a reconstituted Soviet empire, devastating war in the Middle East, the resurgent appeal of white ethnonationalism—it’s as though 20th-century scenes are replaying before us, reconfigured for maximal 21st-century damage.”


A NEW WORD,AN OLD VIEW AND VISIONS THAT R VERIFIABLE......WAIT AND WATCH

Words of wisdom from a Mother Jones writer? Don’t make me laugh. They are feeding you want you want to consume, which doesn’t mean they are right… it only means you are willing to swallow whatever they feed you.

Wait and watch for the world not to end.

OH, SORRY U MISSED THE POINT...IT IS ABOUT AN AUDACIOUS AUTHOR ...OCTIVIA BUTLER,U SHOULD REALLY EXPAND YOUR READING LIBRARY.


Once more, Butler’s essay is not about the act of prediction, but what to do with what is discovered. “Unintended consequences and human reactions,” she warns, can create futures that seem to “defy any obvious trend,” leading her to ask, “So why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible?” She then answers a question that she and many of her fans share. “Because making predictions is one way to give warnings when we see ourselves drifting in dangerous directions. Because prediction is a useful way of pointing out safer, wiser courses. Because, most of all, our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even if we can’t control it absolutely.”

I have read Octavia Butler, she is okay.

I can dream up crazy futures for America too.

LA fires? Sounds like Robocop.

A government arsonist burns down expensive beachfront homes. The government deliberately refuses to provide rebuilding permits, but the owners still have huge mortgages to pay every month. So they have to sell out to a unknown foreign investor. Will he replace these charming homes with a huge, long 50 story luxury apartment building.

And who much will corrupt city managers earn for delaying those rebuilding permits?

FredHayek wrote: I have read Octavia Butler, she is okay.

I can dream up crazy futures for America too.

LA fires? Sounds like Robocop.

A government arsonist burns down expensive beachfront homes. The government deliberately refuses to provide rebuilding permits, but the owners still have huge mortgages to pay every month. So they have to sell out to a unknown foreign investor. Will he replace these charming homes with a huge, long 50 story luxury apartment building.

And who much will corrupt city managers earn for delaying those rebuilding permits?

GOOD ON U FOR STRETCHING YOUR SAND BOX.