Month: December 2024

Plot:

I’ve gotten so old that I can remember a time when “the year 2024” sounded profoundly futuristic and an average person would have claimed with a straight face that we’d have flying cars and laser guns by then, or alternatively that the human race would be near extinction due to a global calamity. As with so many things in life, reality has fallen short of the extremes and we’re actually muddling through a middle path, and 2024 has proven not so good or bad as people predicted.

One of those people was famed black author Octavia Butler. In 1993, she published The Parable of the Sower, which still ranks on many all-time best sci-fi book lists. While it’s well-written, engrossing, and rich in symbolism, its depiction of our present is off-base. I’m going to show you exactly how inaccurate it is, not to trash Octavia Butler, but to demonstrate how unreliable the vast majority of science fiction works turn out to be. Keep this in mind whenever you read a review of some other apocalypse book set in the future.

The story is told from the perspective of a black teenaged girl named “Lauren.” She lives in an exurb of Los Angeles with her father, Latina stepmother, and siblings of mixed origins. Her short lifetime has witnessed the steady and serious decline of America thanks to climate change, a breakdown of law and order, new kinds of dangerous drugs, and incompetent governance. Nothing is stopping the ill trends, and anarchy looks inevitable.

As conditions in her community and family deteriorate, Lauren is forced to mature, summon more courage than she knew possible, and make sense of the world and her place in it. She’s also gifted with a form of telepathy that lets her sense the feelings of the people and animals around her. It gives her deeper insights into reality and the future, and inspires her to create her own religion she names “Earthseed.”

The Parable of the Sower is really an allegory for the African-American experience, but in a fictitious setting. There is crushing poverty and violence in the protagonist’s community, havoc wreaked by drugs (the crack epidemic), a steady decline of the neighborhood as people are murdered or move away, practical slavery where rich white people give black and Hispanic people menial jobs in their households, and a widespread desire to make the dangerous trek north to escape all the problems. The book’s futuristic elements are given less thought and, as I’ll show, were mostly inaccurate.

The book’s events start on July 20, 2024 and end on October 10, 2027, but though it’s just the end of 2024 now, I think this review is still appropriate since the book’s events up to this point describe conditions that persist until the end.

Analysis:

There is a cataclysmic energy crisis. Lauren reveals that electricity has been so expensive since 2016 (or earlier) that almost no lights are on at night, and that the upside of the lack of light pollution is that all the stars of the Milky Way are visible. The scope of the problem is clear when she also reveals she’s been living the whole time in a town that is only 20 miles from Los Angeles. Under ordinary conditions, few stars would be visible thanks to the city’s light pollution. Gasoline is also so expensive that only the rich can afford it, so bicycles are the standard means of transportation.

This was completely wrong. Adjusted for inflation, average electricity prices in the U.S. are actually slightly lower than they were when the book was published in 1993, and gasoline is only slightly more expensive. Los Angeles and its suburbs still glow bright at night and the city pulses with life.

Violent crime is killing about as many Americans as a medium-intensity war. Violent criminals, gangs, and homeless people became so numerous and the authorities so inept at dealing with them, that average people had to take their security in their own hands by building walls around their neighborhoods and patrolling them with guns. Lauren says walls started becoming common in her area in 2010, and that the height and construction quality of each neighborhood’s wall reflects its wealth (her upper middle-class neighborhood’s wall is concrete and very tall). The unprotected expanses between the walled compounds are extremely dangerous wastelands where it’s common to see corpses and destroyed buildings. Arson has become a national pastime.

Around the same time, all the parents in her neighborhood removed Lauren and all the other children from the public schools due to fears of violent crime. They are homeschooled and are discouraged from going outside at all. In spite of these precautions, several of Lauren’s family members and neighbors are murdered over the course of the story and the neighborhood is destroyed by a gang attack.

Very fortunately, this is not the 2024 we ended up with. Rates of homicides and all other violent crimes are much lower now than they were when the book was published (1993).

America is in the grips of a drug addiction and homelessness crisis. While violent criminals are the biggest problem facing society in 2024, drug addicts and homeless people are also practically everywhere, and the walls are meant to keep them out of the functional pockets of life, too. Lauren doesn’t provide enough information to conclude how numerous these kinds of people are, but they might be the majority of the population outside of the enclaves. This depiction of 2024 is wrong.

While the problem of drug addiction in America might be worse than it was in 1993, it hasn’t reached the near-apocalyptic levels depicted in the book. I couldn’t find an exact trend in the data, but addiction rates to hard drugs that turn users violent or into “zombies” seem only slightly higher than they were in 1993. At that time the U.S. was still in the grips of the crack epidemic, which had ravaged the black community in particular. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl are the dominant hard drugs of 2024, and have created a surge in overdose deaths given their potency. However, it’s unclear whether the share of the U.S. population that is chronically strung out on hard drugs today like the masses of people in The Parable of the Sower is much higher than it was in 1993. Aside from in cursed places like the San Francisco Tenderloin district or Kensington, Philadelphia, reality thankfully fell short of the book’s expectations.

While counting the chronically homeless population is difficult, there’s no reason to believe they are a bigger share of the Los Angeles area’s population in 2024 than they were in 1993. This report estimated there were 77,000 homeless people in Los Angeles county in mid-1992, and The Greater Los Angeles Point-in-time Count estimated there were 75,312 of them in the county in 2024. In other words, the prevalence of homeless people in the L.A. area overall is not noticeably different than it was when the book was published.

And while it’s an imperfect proxy for homelessness, it’s worth mentioning that the unemployment rate is actually lower in 2024 than it was in 1993.

A hurricane killed 700 people. In passing, Lauren mentions in July that a hurricane killed over 700 Americans throughout the Gulf Coast region. In real life, hurricane “Beryl,” DID hit the Gulf Coast that month, but it only killed ten people (does that mean Octavia Butler thought 2024 would be 70 times worse than it really is?).

During the 2024 Hurricane Season, five hurricanes made landfall in the U.S., killing a total of 335 people. Hurricane Helene killed most of those. All the hurricanes of 2024 combined only killed half as many people as the one that Octavia Butler predicted would hit us.

Telepathy has been proven to exist. Lauren has “hyperempathy syndrome,” a congenital disorder that arises in fetuses if their mothers abuse some kind of futuristic drug while pregnant. People afflicted with hyperempathy have the psychic ability to sense the emotions and sensations of people and of some animals around them. This is a medically documented condition, and is a form of telepathy, which means the scientific community has recognized the existence of telepathy. This has not happened, and telepathy is still relegated to pseudoscience in 2024.

Climate change has caused severe desertification in the southwest U.S. Lauren mentions that it hasn’t rained in her town for years, and that water is even more expensive than gasoline, making baths a luxury. Early in the book, she is baptized in a joint event with several other neighborhood kids so their parents can share the high costs of the water used in the ceremony. Arson fires rage across Los Angeles unchecked because the municipal water pipes are empty, leaving firefighters with nothing to quash the flames.

Thankfully, this was also inaccurate. 2024 was actually one of the wettest years in the L.A. area’s recorded meteorological history, and since 1993, there has been no detectable decline in yearly rainfall levels.

The U.S. has a space station, a manned Moon base, and a manned Mars base. In spite of its long-running decline, the country has managed to establish three off-world bases. This proved completely wrong. Even the sole space station with an American presence is not fully American–it is shared with 14 other countries, including Russia, hence its name of “the International Space Station.” The only country with a solely owned and operated space station in 2024 is China.

A human died on Mars. One of the astronauts–a Hispanic female–died on Mars after tearing her space suit. This of course didn’t happen.

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election was between two men, and the conservative won. The incumbent was “William Turner Smith” and his challenger was “Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner.” Though their party affiliations were unmentioned, Donner’s promises to eliminate federal agencies, privatize the space program, and cut some federal labor and environmental laws to stimulate the economy make it clear he was Republican. He won.

This prediction was half right, and has some eerie parallels with reality. Until three months before the election, the race was between a Democrat incumbent and a Republican challenger. Both were male. Joe Biden then dropped out, so the final contest was between a woman and a man.

The winner, Donald Trump, has campaigned on unusually extreme (even for a Republican) promises to cut the federal bureaucracy and regulations, and one of his most powerful allies is Elon Musk–the head of the most successful private space company who is also an outspoken advocate of sending humans to Mars. If their relationship perseveres, it’s conceivable that the Trump administration could privatize facets of the American space program to Musk’s benefit and give him a major boost launching the first manned Mars mission.

Richer people have wall-sized, paper-thin TVs in their houses. Lauren says that these have existed since about 2009, are appropriately called “Window Walls,” and that one of the richer and more enterprising families in the neighborhood had one in their house and let other people watch it in exchange for food. This prediction was wrong, though there are important caveats.

Paper-thin displays that can be attached to walls have existed for several years, but haven’t become commercially successful. Wall-sized TVs, which I’ll define as those at least seven feet high (the ceiling height in a typical American house) and 9′-4″ wide (for an aspect ratio of 4:3) exist, but are incredibly expensive, custom-made items that people living in neighborhoods like Lauren’s couldn’t afford.

However, an upper middle-class family that prioritized home entertainment could be expected to buy this 115″ QM-8 TV made by TCL. It costs $17,000, which would be within their means, and is five feet high and two inches thick. The TV would be incredibly large and thin by 1993 standards.

Alternatively, the family could buy a 4K laser projector for less money. Depending on the model and its distance from the surface onto which it beams images, such a laser projector could create a truly wall-sized display. A major downside is the loss of picture quality if the room is too brightly lit.

Strictly speaking, the book’s prediction that “Window Walls” would be relatively common in America by 2024 was wrong, but in spirit, it was right. TVs that are very large but thin by 1993 standards are widespread, as are home theater projectors that can cover entire walls with moving images.

Emergency response services have failed in the U.S. In the book, the police are useless in addressing the rampant crime and make people pay them bribes to respond to calls, and firefighters can’t quash the arsons due to a lack of water. Fortunately, things are different in the real 2024, and though Americans level much criticism at their police, they are overwhelmingly prompt, professional, and helpful, especially since the use of bodycams became common. Having to promise an officer a payment to have him investigate a crime that affected you is unheard of.

While 2024 America mercifully failed to live up to The Parable of the Sower’s dark vision of what it would be, there’s one place that made the cut: Haiti. That cursed country matches the book’s near-apocalyptic setting with striking accuracy–there is a failed government, lawlessness, war-levels of killing, severe environmental degradation, food and resource shortages of every kind, and high levels of homelessness and unemployment.

Links:

1. In 1992, there were an estimated 77,000 homeless people in L.A. County.
   https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-06-30-me-8538-story.html
2. In 2024, there were an estimated 75,312.
   https://www.lahsa.org/data-refresh/home/datadashboard?id=57
3. Hurricanes killed 335 Americans in 2024.
   https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/11/30/2024-atlantic-hurricane-season-ends-with-at-least-335-us-deaths/76619181007
4. You CAN buy a wall-sized TV in 2024…for $220,000.
   https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1757890-REG/samsung_iab_146_4k_iab_series_the_wall.html
5. Paper-thin TVs have existed since 2017 at the latest.
   https://www.fastcompany.com/3066882/this-ultrathin-oled-tv-hangs-on-the-wall-like-a-poster