Fiction

SorellaLaBefana

(273 posts) Sat Jan 18, 2025, 08:49 AM Jan 18

Snopes Fact Checks recent discussion of Octavia Butler's Eerily Correct descriptions of Current America

Snopes found this claimed prescient true: Attributing the author’s remarkably specific foresight to her understanding and insightful analysis of the last century's prevailing socio-political trends.

...When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions...

But it's the fire that holds our attention. Maybe it was started by accident. Maybe not. But still, people are losing what they may not be able to replace. Even if they survive, insurance isn't worth much these days...

In 2032, Lauren Olamina has survived the destruction of her home and family, and realized her vision of a peaceful community in northern California based on her newly founded faith, Earthseed. The fledgling community provides refuge for outcasts facing persecution after the election of an ultra-conservative president who vows to "make America great again." In an increasingly divided and dangerous nation, Lauren's subversive colony--a minority religious faction led by a young black woman--becomes a target for President Jarret's reign of terror and oppression...

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/18/octavia-butler-parable-sower/

Snope also quotes a 2005 interview of Octavia Butler by Democracy Now!

I wrote the two "Parable" books, back in the '90s, they are books about, as I said, what happens because we don't trouble to correct some of the problems that we're brewing for ourselves right now. Global warming is one of those problems and I was aware of it back in the '80s. I was reading books about it and a lot of people were seeing it as politics, as something very iffy, as something they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow. That and the fact that I think I was paying a lot of attention to education because a lot of my friends were teachers and the politics of education was getting scarier, it seemed to me. We were getting to that point where we were thinking more about the building of prisons than of schools and libraries. Not everybody was going in the wrong direction, but a lot of the country still was. And what I wanted to write was a novel of someone who was coming up with solutions of a sort.

Before we plunge into the darkness of the future, let’s briefly consider some of the other novelists who attempted to awaken us with thought experiments—highlighting a fundamental reason why fiction has always been with us.

We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)
Critiques capitalist and communist ideologies, emphasizes dangers of conformity

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis (1935)
Cautionary tale inspired by Fascism of the fragility of democracy and potential for authoritarianism to arise in the United States

1984, George Orwell (1949)
Limns use of extreme surveillance, propaganda, and psychological manipulation for control. Influenced by Zamyatin.

The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick (1962)
Alternate history of America divided between Japanese and Nazi control. Looks at identity, reality, and authoritarianism.

And, of course: The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)
Theocracy comes to America. Told through the voice of Offred, a person forced into servitude as a reproductive vessel for a government that has stripped women of all autonomy and thus ceased to be a society.

Fundamental to all of the above, is a small amoral, power hungry group which alters the people’s perception of reality though repeated, blatant lies and manipulation of the means of spread of information.

Quis hic anulus campanis?—Does this ring any bells?

For a clear view of where we/'re headed, how we got here, read German author Hannah Arendt who experienced Hitler’s Germany firsthand. The best known of her works likely being The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Get a copy, before they're all burned.

Ah yes writing that sentence reminded me that Ray Bradbury's 1953 Fahrenheit 451 was yet another light in the darkness...