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In 1993, she wrote about climate collapse, fascism, and a slogan she conjured "Make America Great Again.” The premise was these three things would destroy the 2020s.

 

And then she died in 2006, never knowing she'd predicted this entire train wreck we are living in.

 

Her name was Octavia E. Butler. And like the best science fiction stories, she didn't write science fiction to escape reality; she wrote it to warn us what our reality was becoming.

 

Ms. Butler was one of those kids who has the deck stacked against them. Her father died when she was only seven. Her mother was a maid. Octavia herself was painfully shy. Worse, she had dyslexia in an era when learning disabilities weren’t accommodated like they are now.

 

And she wanted a career in a field that was basically exclusively white men.

 

So she worked minimum wage jobs to put herself through community college. After a decade, she finally got her break with her book Kindred. Later her Xenogenesis trilogy a/k/a Lilith's Brood envisioned Earth after nuclear war, following which, aliens come to rescue us but the price is genetic merging. They'll save us, but we'll no longer be purely human.

 

Tough questions. What does it mean to be human? Is survival worth transformation? Who gets to decide? AI  is now on the cusp of having us confront these same questions.

 

Then came the Parable novels. Issues of economic collapse, resource wars, a two-tiered society in America where the rich live safely in gated communities while the poor suffer outside, and of course political fascism with the slogan "Make America Great Again.”

 

All in 1993.

 

Parable of the Sower, which I just recently finished, showed her genius. Octavia understood the seeds of the future are always planted in the present.

 

Always.