Dystopian novel from 1993 foreshadows California burning

Did Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower predict the Los Angeles fires? That’s the question Rolling Stone posed on January 15.

When Parable of the Sower came out in 1993, few could have guessed how prophetic Butler’s vision of a fire-scarred California would feel decades later. Set in the 2020s, her dystopian masterpiece paints a grim picture of a society unravelled by climate change, economic inequality and, most hauntingly, relentless wildfires. Decades later, this narrative is less fiction, more unsettling forecast.

Severe and widespread wildfires continue to reshape parts of our world. Last year, the Amazon had its worst drought since 2005, with Brazil and Bolivia experiencing record-breaking fires that destroyed millions of hectares. Greece suffered its highest number of forest fires on record, burning more than 44,500hadue to extreme heat and dryness. In Canada, the 2023 wildfire season was the worst in modern history, and Australia’s 2023/24 bushfire season burnt about 144.5-million hectares, making it one of the largest this century.

In Bulter’s fictional Los Angeles suburb of Robledo, fires flicker on distant hills, a constant reminder of a world unravelling from human negligence and systemic failure. Now huge, uncontainable wildfires are part of life in California, with the recent one in Altadena a stark reminder of how close her imagined future is to reality.

In Parable of the Sower, worsening droughts and intense heatwaves fan the flames of societal collapse. Gated communities — isolated bubbles of security for the privileged — signal the equally immense divide between those who can insulate themselves from disaster and those forced to face it head-on. As she writes: “Embrace diversity; Unite — Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed; By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity; Or be destroyed.”

Butler herself was quick to dismiss the notion of prophecy, calling her work a “cautionary tale” rather than a prediction. Yet the chilling accuracy of her observations suggests a writer who meticulously studied the intersection of environmental decline and human apathy.

She describes how invasive plants worsen wildfires, a scenario now mirrored by real-world accounts of non-native species fuelling fire spread. Water scarcity, a central issue in the novel, speaks to California’s struggles with prolonged droughts.

In Butler’s fine detailing of California’s ecological and social fragility, invasive plants worsening wildfires echoes real-life accounts of how non-native species, along with water scarcity, have compounded fire spread in the region.

She’s certainly not the first writer to frame fire as a harbinger of dystopia. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), fire is a tool of censorship, a means of destroying knowledge in a tightly controlled society. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) is set in a postapocalyptic world reduced to ash and smouldering remains, the result of unchecked environmental collapse. Joe Hill’s The Fireman (2016) imagines a world where a mysterious spore causes people to spontaneously combust — a literalisation of how greed and unchecked societal inequalities can ignite unimagined horrors. The Book of M by Peng Shepherd (2020) is about a crumbling world where losing your shadow means losing your memories. Fire is a powerful presence throughout the story; it’s a source of light and warmth for some, a weapon for others, and an inescapable force of reckoning when humanity turns its back on sustainability and equity.

But Butler’s take differs in key ways. Bradbury and McCarthy leave readers with a sense of hopelessness. For Lauren Olamina, Butler’s young protagonist, the creation of a new belief system called Earthseed is a framework for rebuilding even as society burns to the ground. The title of the novel comes from the Biblical parable in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. In the story, a sower scatters seeds on diverse types of soil, with varying results: some are eaten by birds, some wither on rocky ground, others are choked by thorns, and only those that land on good soil thrive. It’s seen as a lesson about how people receive and act on spiritual teachings. 

Like the Biblical sower, Lauren shares her ideas in a world where many dismiss or reject them, yet her persistence leads to small but meaningful successes as she gradually builds a community of followers. Butler reimagines the parable by focusing on human agency rather than divine salvation: “Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change — Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving — forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.”

“God is Change” calls for adaptability and action over waiting for intervention. Lauren’s mantra — “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you’ — captures this philosophy. Adding complexity to her character is her hyper-empathy, a condition that causes her to feel others’ pain as if it were her own — a trait that’s both a burden and a strength. 

Butler’s work reminds us that survival depends on confronting uncomfortable truths about our relationship with the environment and each other. “These things frighten people. It’s best not to talk about them,” Lauren’s father tells her. “But, Dad, that’s like … like ignoring a fire in the living room because we’re all in the kitchen, and, besides, house fires are too scary to talk about.”

The study “The Social Anatomy of Climate Change Denial in the United States” found that about 14.8% of Americans deny climate change. Social media plays a big role in amplifying these beliefs, creating echo chambers where science deniers and conservative media spread misinformation. And now denialism commander-in-chief Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement on day one of his presidency. Growing pockets of denial and scepticism closer to home are leaving  communities scarily unprepared for the realities of climate change and less likely to adapt.

That’s what makes Butler’s now decades-old message more poignant than ever:  “There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.”