Octavia Butler’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse
Somehow she knew this time would come. The smoke-choked air from fire gone wild, the cresting rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the melting away of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence—Octavia Butler foresaw them all.
Butler was not a climate scientist, a political pundit, or a Silicon Valley technologist. The author of imaginative and often disturbing speculative fiction such as Parable of the Sower (1993), she was a Black woman descended from enslaved people in Louisiana, raised by a strictly religious mother in Los Angeles, educated at community and regional colleges, and besieged by feelings of professional marginalization for most of her too-short life. Out of these challenging circumstances (which included watching her grandparents’ chicken farm burn to the ground), and through the noise of late-20th-century America, Butler heard a clear signal: The future would not be like the present; it would, instead, be a techno-juiced doppelgänger of the past.
Butler’s vision fits our disorienting moment of flashbacks and fast-forwards. 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.
I am an academic historian, and for years I taught Butler’s historical fiction in my classes (particularly 1979’s Kindred, which follows a Black woman wrenched back in time to live with her enslaved ancestors). But I avoided her futuristic novels, which I found too harrowing to read.
When Parable came out, I was a graduate student working part-time in a collectively owned feminist bookshop in Minneapolis called Amazon Bookstore. (Even this detail smacks of the strangeness of past-future collisions—a few years later, that cozy shop would reluctantly relinquish its name to Amazon Books, which was not yet the behemoth we know as Amazon.com.) Our book club selected Parable, but I could not bear the violence and desolation of Butler’s fallen world. So I put the novel down and did not pick it up again for more than two decades. When I finally did, it was because of its resonance with a historical artifact I was studying—a cotton sack packed by an enslaved mother for her daughter right before they were separated by sale. The daughter used this sack as a lifeline. In Parable, the teenage protagonist packs a similar survival sack, which she uses to flee a deadly attack on her neighborhood. I was hooked. And I saw that it was this overlap between Butler’s two modes—past and future—that makes her canon so special.
Butler is heralded as a progenitor of the intellectual and artistic movement known as Afro-futurism, which imagines Black people surviving into the future to shape cultures not yet in existence. This cultural vein is politically and psychologically meaningful, exploring the potential of Black resilience and regeneration beyond the historical ravages of slavery and racism while not denying their brutal legacies.
We don’t often hear, though, about Butler’s process—how she arrived at her startling visions of American, global, and interplanetary futures. Last April, I spent three days sneaking out of a symposium on material culture that I had co-organized to flip through hundreds of pages of Butler’s notes at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. What I found in her archives was a particular historical method. She was a transtemporal thinker, looking backwards and forward at the same time, and recognizing that key features of the future lay just out of view in the past. Through what she called this “histofuturist” approach, Butler predicted that America could slide into autocracy, a decline quickened and deepened by environmental degradation and technological advancement.
This was my second visit to that eerie archive, with its boxes of manuscripts, three-ring binders, photographs, grocery lists, scraps, and other ephemera. Many scholars and writers who wade into those waters marvel at their depths and distant beachheads. Reading intently, I kept glancing over my shoulder because Butler felt almost too near. Her notes—scrawled into page after page of colorful notebooks, in words that were often misspelled because of her dyslexia—sparked a sense of Freud’s uncanny, a sudden awareness of a familiar thing long avoided or denied.
The academic Shelley Streeby has described Butler’s archiving as “a central focus of her life,” alongside her writing. Butler, Streeby wrote, was invested in “rethinking historiography and knowledge production.” She saved news clippings on global warming, modern-day slave labor, and the gap between the rich and the poor. She jotted her scathing impressions of Republican and Democratic politicians. She noted incidents of extreme weather, such as tornadoes and floods—“ecological craziness of all kinds.” She recorded details about plant species in and around L.A., noting where orange groves were located and where trees were dying. One page of a small goldenrod-colored notebook contains only two words: “Water Reclamation.” In a small notebook from 1994, she scribbled: “Car numbers are rising rapidly. Human populations are rising. Global climate is changing[.] Crash coming.” Several pages later, she wrote: “People electing a leader, will cho[o]se a pretty lie especially from a pretty liar, especially from a pretty, white, male liar.” I read those words while Donald Trump was facing indictments that served only to rally his supporters. Time collapsed around me.
Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, are classics of climate fiction. They take place after environmental and social collapse in California, where fresh water is a luxury and fires devour the gated communities that used to represent safety and security. Butler stocks this harrowing series with a Christian-fundamentalist demagogue, Christopher Donner, who rises to the presidency in 2024–25, adopting the slogan: “Help us make America great again.” This creepy slogan (which Butler surely borrowed from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign) and the gangs who roam the country to reinforce an extremist version of Donner’s policies make the series feel all too real today.
In her books, Butler saw the tendency toward enforcing hierarchy through abuses of power as the root weakness of human character. “Any change generates inequality,” she wrote. She predicted that a change in climate patterns affecting Earth’s livability would inevitably foment social conflict and exploitation.
[Lily Meyer: The perfect antidote to an age of angsty literature]
Butler described environmental injustice in a way that differs slightly from our common understanding of the term. It was not only the case that environmental risks and hazards would fall disproportionately on communities already marginalized by geographical location, lesser political power, and stigmatizing identity markers such as race. It was also true, Butler reasoned, that climate change would further inequality as human beings did what human beings always do: compete over “who’s got the biggest or the best or the most.” This was an “old,” “entrenched” tendency, which meant that it was historical.
It is not widely known that, while working on Kindred in her late 20s and early 30s, Butler was considering becoming a professional historian. The year it was published, she wrote in her notebook: “I’ve thought of becoming an historian. I don’t really want to be an academic. I will not teach in a classroom … Fiction is my love and my life … But history can be a companion love, a contributing love.” In 1981, she wrote with greater definition: “I want a Bachelor’s degree, a Masters, and a Ph.D. in history, and I want it to mean what it should mean: That I have become an historian.”
During this time, she was working out her innovative method, an approach to analyzing human relations based on history that would shape her unnervingly predictive fiction: “Histofuturist is my invention. An historian who extrapolates from the Human past and present as well as the technological past and present.” Ultimately, Butler did not enroll in a history program, but she did ask historical questions about her fictional subject matter, conduct original research, and project historical patterns of social relations onto her futuristic fiction.
As a scholar reading Butler’s admission of intellectual desire and her formulation of a theory out of the inability to fully satisfy it, I felt I was seeing a mirror image of my own mind. This is a weird aspect of engaging with her intimate archive that I would wager many researchers, especially Black women, have also experienced. There is so much of Butler in those boxes that you inevitably see yourself in her.
For Butler, story emerged from the inner and outer drama of her characters, a drama steeped in the collective past of humanity. In order to understand her characters, and the human character writ large, she needed to understand social history. That “companion love” buttressed her fictional efforts. My path has been the inverse. Although I have always loved reading novels and tried my hand in writing workshops, I chose academic history largely because the discipline is disciplining: It has guidelines, rules, and expectations that structure the work and career track in fairly predictable ways.
In other words, I sought safety. But I have learned, after 23 years on the job, that academic history can feel too restrictive, disallowing the kind of experimental, ad hoc, responsive expressivity that may be better fitted to societal states of emergency. (Perhaps ironically, job security has also plummeted for academics since I completed my degree in 2000.) My turn toward Butler’s work as a model, and toward fiction and creative nonfiction as additional forms, is an attempt at finding new ways to meet our current predicament. I have found Butler’s work and, just as crucially, her method to be instructive in thinking of history more as a resource than as a discipline—a trove in which we can gather tools to help us face our crises.
[Hanna Rosin: What scares Jordan Peele?]
We need Butler’s historical insight, her way of imagining characters into disastrous moments where past and future touch, as we try to interpret the present and contend with what is to come. With this goal in mind, it is possible to read Butler’s novels as guidebooks, or how-to survival tales. Her stories are complex, but her tenets can be distilled:
A protagonist (typically a woman of color) is forced to move beyond her home and comfort zone into the treacherous unknown. On the road (across time and space), she must learn how to depend on the natural world also under assault and form a new tribe of allies (multiracial, multiethnic, occasionally cross-species). The gravest dangers are the lack of essential supplies, the corruption of law and policing, the revival of human slavery and authoritarianism, the reassertion of patriarchal control over women’s bodies in the form of sexual violence and coerced reproduction, and the reduction of social relations to brute force and violence.
Technological and biomedical advances worsen each of these threats. Rather than rescuing us from our excesses and failings, technology mainly aggravates them. Addictive synthetic drugs hold sway over much of the population and result in novel disabilities as well as chaos in the streets. Ultrarealistic virtual reality and neurological appendages give the powerful greater control over slaves. While Butler’s characters fantasize about rocketing to Mars, the preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that technology will not save them. Their greatest refuge is, instead, a community of flawed, feeling people bound to the planet Earth.
Butler’s characters survive collapse by acknowledging that the worst-case scenario can actually happen. They buy land and grow their own food. They take to the road as refugees. They form new kinship circles and defend themselves (with guns if necessary). They accept the dictum that change is unavoidable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable.
[Malcolm Ferguson: The case for Kwanzaa]
Butler died in 2006, at only 58. But her work becomes more relevant with each passing year. Perhaps that’s because she upends illusions about a historically pure or inevitably stable United States. If history seemed frozen following the Cold War, with the U.S. standing as an unrivaled global superpower and democracy heralded as the winning political system modeled by a functional American state, the strength of those appearances has lately faltered. As many as 52 percent of young people surveyed by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics in 2021 said democracy was in trouble or had failed. In October, a Public Religion Research Institute American Values poll showed an increase not only in the number of Americans who see democracy as vulnerable, but also in those who find political violence acceptable.
Meanwhile, in 2020, Parable of the Sower made the New York Times best-seller list for the first time, a dream of Butler’s never achieved during her life. Butler’s fiction has recently inspired graphic novels, children’s books, a Netflix limited series, and a highly anticipated opera. Also in 2020, NASA announced the Octavia E. Butler Landing on Mars to mark the touchdown site of the rover Perseverance. Butler, who wrote passionately yet skeptically about the potential for security and survival beyond her own century, is receiving her due as a futurist in ours.
Although her histofuturist novels depict the horrors of neo-slavery, eco-wreckage, and political (as well as literal) cannibalism, they are ultimately about a humanity worth saving, and about individual characters who embrace the will to live and love. They come to us now like swatches of wisdom cut from the whole cloth of time.