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Last June, Pasadena, California — about 11 miles from downtown Los Angeles — decreed that June 22 was Octavia E. Butler Day, in honor of the science fiction writer born in the city on that date in 1947. The Pasadena middle school Butler attended was renamed for her in 2022.
Butler, who died in 2006, has in the past few years been celebrated nationally, including posthumous profiles in the New York Times, New York magazine, and more. Particular attention has been paid to the prescience of her Parable series of books. Organizers and artists, like adrienne maree brown, spent the 2010s calling attention to Butler’s work — and her warnings.
The first book in the series, Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, begins on July 20, 2024, the 15th birthday of Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina. Olamina grew up in the fictional LA suburb of Robledo, described by Los Angeles journalist, essayist, and author Lynell George as “a struggling walled suburb… besieged by severe drought; class wars; violent, fire-setting scavengers; and a long-embattled population seized by political apathy.” In the second book, Parable of the Talents, published in 1998, a candidate runs using the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Now in 2025, fires are raging in Los Angeles County. As the Eaton fire continues to burn, at least five Pasadena district schools in Altadena – where people of color make up over half of the population – have been “substantially damaged,” according to the school district’s superintendent, and at least five people in the area have been killed, according to the LA County fire chief. As of Friday, January 10, more than 35,000 acres have burned across the Los Angeles area, and at least 10 have died, according to the LA County medical examiner, with the death toll expected to rise.
The Palisades and Eaton fires have already become among the five most destructive blazes on record in California, the New York Times reported. Firefighters ran out of water trying to fight them, and a headline from the New York Times homepage — as the fires continue to blaze — reads “Wildfires Will Deepen Housing Shortage in Los Angeles.”
The US's climate change-denying incoming president Donald Trump, propped up by Christian nationalists, is fighting with the governor of California about parceling out disaster relief, while some clueless celebs and tech billionaires have blamed the fires on conspiracy theories and “diversity initiatives.” Those conspiracy theories are spreading on X, formerly Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, one of those tech billionaires, and have seemingly influenced another billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, into abdicating responsibility for fact-checking on Meta platforms such as Instagram. Singer Chris Brown’s conspiratorial Instagram Story about the origins of the fire was reposted to the Shade Room and garnered tens of thousands of likes in less than an hour.
In 1993, Butler wrote an op-ed “sounding the alarm about the shrinking access to public literary spaces,” specifically, public libraries. “I'm a writer at least partly because I had access to public libraries,” the author wrote. “I'm Black, female, the child of a shoeshine man who died young and a maid who was uneducated but who knew her way to the library…. At the library, I read books my mother could never have afforded on topics that would never have occurred to her.”
Reading Butler's words amid the conservative onslaught against public libraries and education that deviates from the white, cisheteropatriarchal norm is an experience that’s, well, hard to put into words — particularly as online platforms expected to take the space of these places are owned by people like Musk and Zuckerberg.
Any indifference to the truth ignores the fact that, in Butler’s words, “ignorance is expensive.” California is already looking at projected damages of up to $57 billion from the fires this week, according to estimates from AccuWeather.
Not for the first time, and surely not for the last, the internet has been full of the phrase “Octavia knew.” It’s a concept Butler resisted, even before reality hewed ever closer to her expectations. She wasn’t clairvoyant; she was a student of history, like the late Marxist historian and Los Angeleno Mike Davis.
In the past few days, literally thousands of people have posted or re-posted about Davis’s work and, more specifically, his 1995 essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” In an X post, Debt Collective cofounder and writer Astra Taylor tied in Davis’s 20-year-old writings on avian flu as concerns about another potential pandemic swirl, five years after the COVID pandemic lockdown.
Butler and Davis, from their vantage points as novelist and historian, respectively, both studied history to, in the words of writer Hua Hsu, “[dig] through the ruins of the past to see the future.” So what do we know of even just the recent past?
The year 2024 was the hottest on record. An October study published in the journal Science found that the fastest fires in the western United States are seeing a maximum growth rate that's 250% higher, on average, than they did 20 years ago. According to Dr. Crystal A. Kolden, director of the University of California Merced Fire Resilience Center, our processes of fire-fuel management in the environment are a major part of the problem, as they ignore long-standing Indigenous wisdom and practice with controlled burns, and are now combined with powerful Santa Ana winds and eight months of little rain.
Before this period, though, there was a span of intense rain. In fact, the fourth-wettest February in California history was last year, which led to more fuel for the fire in the form of growing vegetation.
Had someone taken the time to look around them, it seems, they might’ve seen what was approaching. Perhaps the Indigenous people who were stewards of the land before colonialism and capitalism converged into our modern climate crisis might have seen this coming. “Diversity programs” to blame, indeed.
In early October, after the “once-in-a-lifetime” Hurricane Helene devastated the “climate refuge” of Asheville, North Carolina, there was social chatter about a phrase I saw come up more than once this week: Essentially, the climate crisis is something you’ll see in videos on your phone until it’s on your doorstep. Asheville is still recovering from Helene. People feel like they’ve been left on their own, and mutual aid is yet again filling the spaces left by government mismanagement. On that note, my colleagues at Teen Vogue have compiled a list of places to drop off donations for people living through the LA wildfires.
Lauren Oya Olamina, Butler's 15-year-old protagonist, goes on to start a new way of living in the ashes of the world she was born into. She also “suffers” from a disease called “hyperempathy.” There is some deep-seated wisdom built into being able to feel and care about what happens to others.
