Canon Fodder: Octavia the Prescient

As wonderful as summer in this great city is, the Cubs’ and Sox’ habit of producing more losses than wins require strategic avoidance of sports radio from June until autumn. Sports radio-style griping is already taxing upon the ears. But, eloquent or not, curmudgeonly nostalgia for (nineteen)aught-eight—if you’re a Northsider—or (twenty)aught-five—if your Red Line stop is 35^th street, in the nasally Chi-caw-guh accent offers even less aural pleasure. And as such, one either hits her Dougie while sitting in rush-hour traffic, or perhaps chooses the more dulcet tones of NPR anchors who have names the most literary of us get giddy over (Quil Lawrence!), with only sporadic interventions from ESPN Radio for the requisite NBA lockout and NFL updates.

Michele (say it with me: Meeee-chele) Norris reads news items as if they were bedtime stories. And if one is not careful, one may drowsily ingest news of debt ceilings and immigration reform with stalling on the Kennedy the only reality jerking one from dreamily rolling into the back of the Prius ahead. Such leisurely listening may also lull one into forgetting that so much of what Robert Siegel is saying sounds eerily familiar of futures unseen—or are they?

Where have I heard about the end of the space shuttle program before?

Last month, on July 20^th, little Lauren Olamina turned two. Yes, knowing the birthday of a literary character is a nugget of useless knowledge only appropriate for cocktail parties and Twitter updates. But it’s also what makes today’s news that much more interesting. As the center of Octavia Butler’s Parable series, the world Lauren Olamina inhabits is revealed to the reader through her diary entries. Her world is a United States on the brink of utter collapse. An apocalyptic event called The Pox caused seemingly irreparable damage to the Union. We meet Lauren in July of 2024, when she is fifteen and living in a fortified community just outside of Los Angeles. The paucity of resources such as jobs, food, water, and other civil services has resulted in near anarchy for those living outside of the neighborhood’s fences.  Of course, as the introduction to The Real Housewives of Orange County reminds us, the southern California landscape is already peppered with gated communities, and before that real estate bubble detonated, such subdivisions garnered even more popularity amongst strata who could hardly regard themselves as nouveau riche—even if that bogus home loan copped a McMansion. If Robledo, Lauren’s fictional home, has not been built yet, it will be. After all, something similar already exists. Surely we should understand that the gates Lauren and her community rely upon to keep them “safe,” once made their neighborhood relatively exclusive. The world Butler’s most compelling heroine inhabits—especially the environment she describes before her neighborhood is destroyed—is delineated as a future, fictional world that our current, real world seems unequivocally committed to seeing come to actual fruition. Don’t believe me? Just listen closely to Robert and Michele.

Butler’s ostensible prescience, as seen through the environment she constructs for Lauren, becomes increasingly evident with each news item I hear while stuck in Chicago traffic. Butler’s foresight goes beyond the evolution of televisions into flatscreens, which Lauren calls “windows.” Consider, for example, that Atlantis’ return to our atmosphere last month marked the end of the space shuttle program—and the jobs of 1500 employees—for N.A.S.A. How can one not recall Lauren’s concern about the government’s desire to end the space program altogether, and the effects such decisions might have on one of her invented religion’s, Earthseed, core tenets: The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars?

Daytime reruns of Cheaters and Maury Povich (judge not) are brought to us by a slew of bankruptcy law firms and vocational schools looking for our student loan dollars. You can obtain degree without leaving the couch, by “going” to school in pajamas. How? By attending school online, of course. And what was Lauren’s father but a professor teaching courses via computer? Surely I am not the only one who, upon first hearing of the University of Phoenix, immediately remembered Reverend Olamina’s weekly bicycle trips to campus. Of course, one must qualify for admission to college in order to attend. Local governments continually turn to charter schools, often funded and run by private institutions, to educate its children, resulting in the increased privatization of the public school system. Too often, these charter school systems have far fewer spaces than they have applicants, making winning a seat in these schools somewhat analogous to winning the little lotto. The unlucky are left to fend for themselves in under-funded and often underperforming public schools. In Lauren’s world, those living outside the gates—and even some folks living inside of them—are undereducated, barely, if at all able to read and write. Why? Because the government has no resources to fund them. Citizens are left, then, to form small schools within their gated communities, like the one Lauren’s stepmother runs from their home. That is, if they are educated enough to teach others, and fortunate enough to have had enough money at some point to purchase a home.

Parable of the Sower, the first installment of the series, was published in 1993. Octavia Butler claims she simply looked at history and tracked the cyclical nature of its epochs to describe Parable’s dystopic, not-so-distant future. Dyslexia kept Butler from driving. Yet just a few pages into Parable, and one cannot help but wonder if she took the DeLorean out for a spin, set the date for 2008, and hung around for a few years. For within the pages of Parable is a world eerily similar to our own.

Indeed, Butler is not the first science fiction writer to describe to readers what future may come. Nor will she be the last. Yet as highly regarded and respected as she is in some circles, I find Butler, still, to be frighteningly under-read, especially in times like this when her prognostications (or her assessments of history, take your pick) seem alarmingly accurate. As we approach the dog days of summer and decide to honor these seemingly sempiternal heatwaves by tanning and swimming, perhaps we will also turn the pages of Butler’s most remarkable duo of books. For through Lauren, Butler has already shown us what may happen should we continue down this path. The age of Lauren Olamina is upon us and will transpire as described should we choose not to heed the warnings Octavia gave us. Or we could take the lessons of Earthseed seriously, and allow all that touches us—in this case, Butler’s words—to change us. Otherwise, these days that we live now, as told to us by Robert and Michele and the evening news, are mere foreshadowings of what Octavia warned us would come.

Summer McDonald might be described as an explicitly queer black Daria–but with better clothes.  She’s a graduate student living in Chicago.