Concerns about topics including climate change and the pharmaceutical industry resonate even more powerfully now than when she wove them into her work.Īnd of course, by virtue of her gender and ethnicity, she was striving to smash genre assumptions about writers – and readers – so ingrained that in 1987, her publisher still insisted on putting two white women on the jacket of her novel Dawn, whose main character is black. Her interest in hybridity and the adaptation of the human race, which she explored in her Xenogenesis trilogy, anticipated non-fiction works by the likes of Yuval Noah Harari. She challenged traditional gender identity, telling a story about a pregnant man in Bloodchild and envisaging shape-shifting, sex-changing characters in Wild Seed. Her predictions about the direction that US politics would take, and the slogan that would help speed it there, are certainly uncanny. The novel’s protagonist, a black woman like the author herself, fears that Jarret’s authoritarianism will only worsen matters.įourteen years after her early death, Butler’s reputation is soaring. While its vision is extreme, there is plenty that feels within the bounds of possibility: resources are increasingly scarce, the planet is boiling, religious fundamentalism is rife, the middle classes live in walled-off enclaves. In some respects, we’ve beaten her to it: a sequel to 1993’s Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents is set in what is still the future, 2032. Like much of her writing, Butler’s book was a warning about where the US and humanity in general might be heading. Written by Octavia E Butler, it was published in 1998, two decades before the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States. You might think he sounds familiar – but the character in question is Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret, the fictional presidential candidate who storms to victory in a dystopian science-fiction novel titled Parable of the Talents. The story of cannibalism that came true The fiction that predicted space travel How much of this rhetoric he actually believes and how much he spouts “just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule” is at once debatable, and increasingly beside the point, as he strives to return the country to a “simpler” bygone era that never actually existed. He accuses, without grounds, whole groups of people of being rapists and drug dealers. When his supporters form mobs and burn people to death, he condemns their violence “in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear”. According to his opponent, he’s a demagogue a rabble-rouser a hypocrite.

It’s campaign season in the US, and a charismatic dark horse is running with the slogan ‘make America great again’.

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