Octavia Butler Wanted to Prevent Disaster in Los Angeles. Instead, She Predicted It
When Octavia Butler published 1993’s Parable of the Sower — a sci-fi novel about California burning in 2024, following a presidential election of a candidate whose slogan is “Make America Great Again”— her intentions weren’t to prophesize, but rather make an observation backed by historical research and future optimism. “Parable of the Sower… isn’t prophecy, I hope,” she told an interviewer back in 2000. “The society I portray in [this] book is pretty much broken… Global warming is practically a character [and] lots of other things that are problems now become disasters because they are not attended to. I hope, of course, that we will be smarter than that.”
And yet, in the first weeks of 2025, it seems that we aren’t. Los Angeles is currently burning and areas of Pasadena — Butler’s hometown, place of burial, and muse for her literary works — have either crumbled to ash or been evacuated entirely. Nearby Altadena, a historically largely Black neighborhood, has essentially been erased from the map. In the wake of the fires, social media users have called back to Parable of the Sower — which takes an excerpt from the Bible’s story of the same name, where Jesus tells of a farmer who plants seeds in different types of soils, depicting human’s ability (or lack thereof) to receive divine messaging — claiming it as a prophecy. Others see her work as a long overdue call to rebuild and are heeding to it by spearheading community outreach in their fields of expertise.
Growing up, Butler was shy and dyslexic, spending many of her hours at the local library. When she began writing at the age of seven, she made up stories about horses despite knowing nothing about the animal and yet, her ability to imagine a lifestyle she never experienced for herself would sharpen her mind and land her in the realm of sci-fi. Her works were both seemingly personal and community forward, allowing her to reimagine herself and consequently the world in which live. She died in 2006, at the age of 58.
“People say Butler is prophetic because she sets Parable of the Sower in 2024. She’s only off by a few months,” says Briana Whiteside, a college professor-turned-public intellectual and content creator who recently went viral for her analysis of Butler’s work. “People may refer to Butler’s story as this dystopian novel and it is, because it’s contemplating this incoming president named Donner, who people believe will ‘Make America Great Again.’ They believe his vision and that he would take them back to the good old days but that doesn’t happen.”
Within the novel, “Make America Great Again” is a callback to Reagan’s presidential slogan in the 1980s, but it has shown itself to be timeless in this moment. “In the early 1990s, when she’s writing, she’s contemplating this moment saying this can happen again if you’re not careful,” Whiteside says.
The fires within Parable of the Sower stem from a combination of climate change and arson taking place in the fictional L.A. suburb of Robledo. Lauren, a 15-year old girl, who comes from a religious family, is trying to create a new system of living after privileged, rich youngsters set fires to communities to cover up their crimes, get back at their enemies, and devastate marginalized communities. And yet the story feels hopeful to Whiteside. “People have to learn how to survive, so while there are horrible things happening, that is not the ultimate focus of the text,” she says. “It’s more so, ‘How do you survive when the world is going to hell?’”
“People say Butler is prophetic because she sets Parable of the Sower in 2024. She’s only off by a few months.”
Before the fire, Pasadena — where Butler grew up — was a beautiful mountain area made up of working class hikers, horses and cowboys, and small businesses like Octavia’s Bookshelf, a Black-owned bookstore. Its owner, Nikki High, opened the store in 2023 as a way to honor Butler. “When I decided to open the bookstore I knew it was going to be in Pasadena because this is the city that raised me,” says High, “but I wanted to honor Butler who is often overlooked,”
High first encountered Butler’s work in the Eighties when she read Kindred, Butler’s breakout book from 1979, for the first time. “I was hooked,” she says. “That was my gateway book and it felt so special to me because we both lived in the same city.” Reading Butler became an obsession, but as her love for the author’s prose grew, she found it hard to find like-minded fans of the work. “It wasn’t until the first lockdown when people got a hold of Parable of the Sower that people were like ‘Oh, Shit, who is this person?’”
The inspiration behind Octavia’s Bookshelf stemmed from selling books that High felt Butler would have had in her own home. There was the wall of classics, featuring Black writers from Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison. There were children’s books filled with illustrations of Black and brown characters and, of course, a science fiction area that sat next to a shelf dedicated strictly to Butler’s works.
Now, instead of books, Octavia’s Bookshelf — which miraculously survived the fire — is filled with free goods to help her native community. Once High was able to come back to the store, she discovered she had power and wi-fi and shared a note on Instagram for others in need. “Within three hours it turned organically into this marketplace where people were dropping off water and masks and then it moved to toiletries,” High says. “People needed stuff and I just started calling out to the community and before you knew it, I had to pack all the books off my shelf and into the attic and then fill the shelves with donated items.” Much of High’s caveat to her system is continuing to call upon community members all over for items needed amongst them, be it canes or diapers and wipes. “I could not do any of this without support, I’m only able to do this because people were touched by what we’re going through and allowed me to be a vessel and we can now get items and get them to people with dignity because it’s hard to ask for help,” she says.
Though it’s not intentional, High is living up to literary themes of community within Butler’s work, which many see to be a genre of Afro-Futurism and sci-fi. But both Whiteside and High acknowledge that Butler considered herself a “HistoFuturist,” who exposed problematic patterns of the past, while creating strong characters who championed change to inspire future progress and possibilities.
“A lot of folks are calling it a prophecy, but I think that takes away from the work and gives this ‘magical Black woman’ trope.”
“This was a woman who was very well researched and educated. It was her genius and her commitment to looking at the past, looking at what we were not doing to address certain issues and then telling us where we would be,” High says. “A lot of folks are calling it a prophecy, but I think that sort of takes away from the work and kind of gives this ‘magical Black woman’ trope.” Whiteside shares a similar sentiment. “It’s okay to look at Butler’s work as prophetic but we should also look at it as solution-based,” she says.
Since the fires broke out in Los Angeles, Whiteside has gone viral for her teachings on Butler. “I started scrolling TikTok and saw people talking about the fires and I was like, ‘This sounds like a Octavia Butler movie.’” As a result, Whiteside loaded up her camera phone and began creating content that was different from her usual lifestyle posts, ranging from faith to fashion. “It blew up and it was like, ‘This is my time to return to teaching.’ People didn’t know there was a Butler scholar and I just decided I’m going to tell all I know, I paid the student loans to get it.”
Instead of going back to the classroom as a professor, Whiteside is using social media to host free courses on Butler’s work. “I’ve always wanted to share my scholarship but I was always told I needed to be a professor,” she says. “Although I like teaching, I think my approach is more for the community. I’m from the hood. I’m not for the privileged or the ivory tower. I am for the people. Thinking about Butler’s work and education, you can be both and. You don’t have to choose.”
“Let’s get into this Butler series,” Whiteside says to her Tik Tok class of nearly 30,000. The first lesson is the order in which to read Butler’s canon, the first being her renowned Kindred and a couple of one off books, then The Patternist series. “First and foremost, you want to get Wild Seed, that book is set in 1680 in West Africa. This series expands in four centuries,” Whiteside says. The Parable series comes after.
In this moment where Whiteside has formed an organic community of students, she wants them to take away more than just the awe of Butler’s unintentional prophecy. “Butler was interested in allowing the past to teach us, inspire us, and give us strength,” Whiteside says. “But after we understand those lessons, she then wants us to let go of the past and move forward and think, ‘How can we not create this problem again and how can we use these books as wisdom to embolden other people to rise up and be the leaders of their generations?’”
