What We Can Learn From Octavia Butler in Times of Chaos

Written By: Aaron Foley

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re living in an Octavia Butler novel. The fires the queen of Afrofuturism predicted would ravage Los Angeles in 2025? They showed up. That political chaos she wrote about in “Parable of the Sower”? Currently trending. 

Indeed, “Sower,” Butler’s 1993 tale of a young Black woman navigating a collapsing society, feels less like fiction and more like a roadmap for survival. So it’s no wonder that, because of Butler’s now-apparent prescience of today’s doomscrolling climate, more people are calling attention to her work.

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“She was really paying attention,” bestselling author, TV writer, and creative writing professor Tananarive Due says in a Zoom interview. “So they say, to be a prophet, you just have to pay attention, and she…could not look away. And because she could not look away, she was often very frightened about our future, just to be frank about it.”

But Butler’s stories are more than just eerily accurate predictions — they’re a way to imagine alternate realities through a Black cultural lens. 

Due, who teaches a “Black Horror and Afrofuturism” class at UCLA, calls “Parable of the Sower,” an admittedly “difficult” book — and a hallmark in Afrofuturist study. 

She and her husband, fellow writer Steven Barnes, knew Butler personally and view her writing as a call to action to create a future based on community, healing, and liberation. 

“We’re forcing ourselves to create an island within which we can create in the midst of chaos,” said Barnes — and that is what Octavia did.

To that end, Barnes and Due are both taking pen to page in these chaotic times — and teaching others how to do it, too. The couple, who also podcasts and vlogs together, uses the work of Butler and other writers, including “Fahrenheit 451” author Ray Bradbury, as guides for their lessons.

“I want to teach you guys how to use, create, and consume art to save your hearts in the midst of stress,” Barnes told a class of more than 100 participants via Zoom recently.

Stress and racial trauma are everywhere for Black folks: a world-shifting election that disappointed supporters of Kamala Haris, and the subsequent inauguration of President Trump that resulted in a number of controversial executive orders.  Then there’s a number of world events — including actions toward a ceasefire in Gaza and devastating fires across greater Los Angeles that razed Altadena, a beloved Black community where Butler lived and is buried, to the ground.

RELATED: Finding Racial Healing in an HBCU Sanctuary

Butler herself battled depression while writing more than a dozen books about the future. “Sower” wasn’t a bestseller during her lifetime before she died in 2006, but it has seen jumps in sales as calamities and crises keep recurring. The novel debuted on the New York Times Best Sellers List in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the book takes place decades after its publication, and though the societies in Butler’s worldview technologically evolved, old attitudes regarding racism and sexism remained — or intensified.  

Butler’s work isn’t just about the horrors of dystopia, though. Many of her books talk about “standing up to power structures big and small,” Due says. 

One of the most quoted lines from “Parable of the Sower” is: “Everything you touch, you change; everything you change changes you; the only lasting truth is change; God changes you.” 

For Due, that line became a lifeline after the 2016 presidential election.

“It was literally those words that helped snap me out of disbelief,” Due said in the class. “I’ve heard it said that one of the aspects of grief that makes it harder to move on is that we keep rolling around this idea that ‘this can’t be happening. this can’t be real, this can’t be happening.’ And when I realize that the only lasting truth is change, as it pertains to this election, I could move to the next phase…to figure out, ‘OK, now what are we going to do?’” 

Answering that question is at the heart of Afrofuturism and critical to envisioning a future without the yoke of anti-Blackness. 

Although Barnes and Due’s advice during the workshop is geared toward writers looking to publish, it could also apply to those just trying to navigate violent deportations and push notifications about the end of DEI through journaling or other creative thought work. And, of course, there is just the appreciation of Butler’s foresight and using it as a compass — a reminder that liberation begins with healing and clarity.

“What we can learn from her work [is] naming the problem,” Due says. “You can’t solve a problem until you identify it. That’s the part where you have to move out of the disbelief….and that cognitive dissonance is frankly what chaos agents want us to feel.” 

When every headline is “more absurd than the last one,” Due says we “have to really identify what actually matters, what we really need to be enraged about,” rather than getting angry about everything we see on social media.

“Every nonsense thing we hear” distracts us from “a call to take action,” Due adds. “Actions can be big or small — whether it’s building families, neighborhoods, [or] community in the face of adversity.”

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