“The one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope,” she writes. But in order to fully understand Butler’s project, it is essential never to despair. You can read the full essay here and get to work on your own forecasting abilities. ![]() Thom Dunn at Boing Boing has helpfully broken down her essay’s main points into four concise rules: And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.īutler goes on to discuss her method for predicting the future-so to speak-which anyone can learn to do with enough study and insight (that’s the hard part). ![]() The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. Writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. A perspective that doesn’t also include the whole of human history is bound to miss the mark, she suggested: “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters,” said Butler. Science fiction writers aren’t clairvoyant, they’re just better at making observations and speculations. Butler may have invented the plots of her post-apocalyptic future, but “I didn’t make up the problems,” she once told a student. But these are also novels about hope: about survival and adaptation and empathy. These problems include the return of debt slavery, a particularly nasty strain of Christian nationalism, and a vague but devastating environmental collapse from which there is no return. ![]() Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are, as Butler described them, “novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.”
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