How Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Sex and Survival

In Octavia E. Butler's novel "Parable of the Sower" (1993), a climate-change Book of Exodus set in a scorched mid-twenty-twenties California, a preacher's daughter named Lauren Oya Olamina tries to convince a friend that their world has veered off course. Disaster surrounds their fortified suburb of Los Angeles: water shortages, a measles epidemic, fires set by drug-addicted pyromaniacs, and bandits who prey on the unhoused multitudes that roam the lawless highways. Outsiders throw severed limbs over the walls of their neighborhood, "gifts of envy and hate." Lauren knows it's time to get out: I'm talking about the day a big gang of those hungry, desperate, crazy people outside decide to come in. I'm talking about what we've got to do before that happens so that we can survive and rebuild--or at least survive and escape to be something other than beggars. . . .