The year is 2024 and the place is a small suburb outside Los Angeles.  Lauren Olamina is the oldest of four children and responsible for helping her mother with the household and teaching in their local school and assisting her father in his weekly preaching at their church.  Both the school and the church service are held in their home because the local church and school have been burned and looted.  What???  The Olamina family lives in a walled cul-de-sac where each family is armed and committed to protecting their neighbors, a necessary approach since the police and fire departments rarely respond and when they do, it is to loot and steal.

Butler’s America of 2024 which she described nearly 30 years ago, is frighteningly evocative of today’s reality taken up just a few notches.  Water is scarce and more expensive than gas; fires rage, set by pyromaniacs on drugs that provide a high from the fires and worsened by drought; large populations of homeless and poverty-stricken prey upon those with slightly more; rich people live in enclaves with heavily armed security; guns are everywhere and necessary for self-protection; a recent election produces a candidate who favors private corporations enslaving debt ridden workers—-sound eerily familiar?  As Gloria Steinem says in her introduction to the 2016 reissued version I read, “If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it’s one written in the past that has already begun to come true.”

Amidst all this chaos, 13 year old Lauren begins to think about a long term solution to her world’s problems.  She rejects the traditional religions’ angry or beneficent God. Rather she sees God as ‘change’ and as something to be shaped by humans.  She begins to write in a journal which she entitles, Earthseed.  Her immediate plan is to move North to Oregon, Washington, Canada or Alaska despite their armed, closed borders, but her long term plan is Destiny, humankind’s leap to the planets of a distant star where with community and love, the Earthseed will find fertile soil and flourish.

Getting there is, however, harrowing.  I won’t ruin the book by revealing the details of the action, but when Lauren’s family is killed by marauding pyros, she strikes out for the North accumulating converts and community as she goes.  As one of them says, “The whole world has gone crazy”.  It’s a sobering tale, especially in our trumpian times, and it’s told in a masterful way.

Butler was the subject of a recent NYT article celebrating the rediscovery of this Black, gay science fiction writer who has largely been neglected by the literary world while garnering the Hugo Award from the World Science Fiction Society and the Nebula award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  Butler also received a MacArthur Award.  She’s definitely worth reading.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/17/arts/octavia-butler-vision-kindred.html?searchResultPosition=1