Octavia Butler’s Predictions for 2027 from Parable of the Sower

I recently reread the second half of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which was published in 1993. I scrutinized this part of her book since I’m writing my own near-future novel set in Northern California. I thought it’d be worthwhile to share some thoughts I have on what she predicted.

*SPOILER ALERT: Do not continue if you haven’t read her novel and plan to read it!

This part of Butler’s novel takes place in the summer of 2027. Her protagonist, Lauren Olamina, flees Southern California and migrates north “where it still rains every year.” Lauren and two folks from her decimated neighborhood eventually wind their way up Highway 101 toward Oregon. “We became part of a broad river of people walking west on the freeway,” Lauren writes in her journal. “Freeways provide the most direct routes between cities and parts of cities.” In Butler’s novel, people live along the freeways. Trucks mostly run at night because groups of people attempt to hijack those suspected of carrying food. Swarms of bikes, electric cycles, and an occasional car use the right lanes. Walking the freeway reminds Lauren of “an old film I saw once of a street in the mid-twentieth-century China—walkers, bicyclers, people carrying, pulling, pushing loads of all kinds.”

Before they head off on their perilous journey north, Lauren and her companions buy much-needed supplies from a “secure store complex.” The store has “sniffers, metal detectors, package restrictions, armed guards, and willingness to strip-search anyone they thought was suspicious on the way in or out.”

In 2027, Butler—who was versed on climate change and its potential impacts—anticipated that commercial water stations would exist in drought-prone states like California. These stations would “let you draw whatever you pay for—and not a drop more.” They are dangerous places. “Beggars and thieves hang around such places,” Lauren writes in her journal. “Three is the smallest comfortable number at a water station. Two to watch and one to fill up. And it’s good to have three ready for trouble on the way to and from the station.”

Along their way north, Lauren and her band of survivors discover that California’s beaches are filled with climate migrants. Parks are homes for squatters. In the state’s agricultural Central Valley, they “passed through nothing for days except small, dying towns, withering roadside communities and farms, some working, some abandoned and growing weeds.”

Some desperate, hungry people become scavengers and cannibals. “If you get hurt or if you look sick, they come after you,” a character named Emery tells Lauren.
 

 

“Cities are dangerous,” Lauren writes in her journal, as her band of fellow climate migrants try to avoid the metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area after an earthquake ravages the region and “scavengers, predators, cops, and private armies of security guards seem bent on destroying what’s left.” Cities are teeming with “More gangs, more cops, more suspicious, nervous people with guns. You tiptoe through cities.”

Of course, it’s impossible to foresee what state California will be in three years from now. Over the past two years, climate disruption has brought abnormal quantities of precipitation to the state. As of June 30, 2024, fifteen of California’s seventeen major water supply reservoirs are at 84% or above of capacity; thirteen of the seventeen reservoirs are at 90% or above of capacity.

However, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection recently reported that 89,784 acres have already burned in the state through June 19, 2024. The “acres burned have skyrocketed by 1,462% - from 5,747 acres to 89,784 acres over the same period (Jan. 1 – June 19), which is well above normal for this time of year,” they wrote in an Instagram post. With abundant precipitation happening earlier in the year, our state’s biomes have more grasses and brushes that can spawn wildfires. In recent years, wildfire seasons have already extended.

In the coming years, if a megadrought descends upon the state, particularly over Central and Southern California—where two-thirds of the state’s residents live—we could witness a mass migration of people fleeing northward; Northern California typically receives over two-thirds of the state’s annual precipitation, and Colorado River reservoirs sustain too many people across the arid southwestern United States—nearly 40 million people. California’s mass population in Southern California is already unnaturally sustained through the 400-mile California Aqueduct that diverts water collected in Northern and Central California to Southern California

Potable drinking water will inevitably become more expensive in the future. From the Sacramento Valley to the Central Valley, California has some of the fastest declining aquifer levels in the world. And, as my former colleague, Robert Findling, the Director of Conservation Projects at the New Mexico chapter of The Nature Conservancy once told me, “Liquor is for drinking. Water is for fighting.”

As our industrial civilizations continue to collapse and land on Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable due to rising temperatures and erratic extreme weather events which will inevitably contribute to crop failure and famine, we will witness a mass of climate migrants across the planet. It may not happen by 2027, but I believe these elements I’ve highlighted from Butler’s Parable of the Sower are plausible.