The Sci-Fi Novel That Predicted 2026

23:29Jeff:Butler predicts that homeless people will be seen as not just seen as disposable, but the government will actively be trying to kill homeless people. And just a month ago, two months ago, we had government officials on TV saying just kill them all. Butler was not wrong about a lot of these things that can develop, but that they tend to unfold over time rather than And just overnight, there's a big event and the world is completely different is one of the things I think that makes this scariest. Yeah. And the book itself is an inflection point for Butler's own career, even as Kindred has been the bestselling single book of hers, The Parable of the Sower when it came out of 1993, got all kinds of attention.

24:10It was a New York Times notable book in their 1994 list. And then she wins the MacArthur in 1995 and sets it just on a different kind of trajectory. It's interesting that we get this book and not the whole series. She had imagined these parable books to be a trilogy around the Earthsea trilogy is what it would have been called. She wrote a second book, The Parable of the Talents, which came out a few years later. That is told from the perspective of Lauren's daughter after Lauren has died. And she is disaffected to some degree. And then the third book that she was working on at the time of death was going to be called The Parable of the Trickster.

24:50And the Huntington Library has early manuscripts and things over there.

24:53Jeff:Oh, that's cool. Butler herself became pretty depressed and frustrated with this third book and turned to something else, fledgling, which was a little, it's a little more fun. It's a vampire novel. And then she died in 2006. Unfortunately, had a stroke and then a fall or a fall and then a stroke. It's not really clear, but she died young. She had a lot more in her. It was 58. 58. So there was a lot more there. And I think that's also part of the macabre fascination of this trilogy and this book specifically is even the author was wrestling with it. Even the author had not come to terms with this.

25:30And we're left in suspension and imagining what it could have been at that point. Yeah, I don't know. Anything else to say about the background before we get into the book?

25:38Jeff:There has been a lot in the last five years about like, what would Octavia Butler have written about if she were alive today to see how many of her predictions have come true? I do really want to highlight you mentioned that she won the MacArthur in 1995, popularly known as the Genius Grant. She was the first science fiction writer to get the Genius Grant. And she was the first Black woman to get wide recognition in writing science fiction at all. So just a hugely groundbreaking figure. N.K. Jemisin later wins a MacArthur Genius Grant. Other sci-fi writers have won. But this is one of those cases where you can draw pretty straight lines from a groundbreaker to the people that she opened doors for.

26:20Jeff:We don't get N.K. Jemisin if first there isn't Octavia Butler. And I think N.K. Jemisin would say that and comes kind of close to it in her afterward to the book. And since that win of the MacArthur, there's just a ton of awards. Like you go to the Wikipedia page for Octavia Butler. She's won the Hugo a bunch of times. She's won the Locus Award a bunch of times. Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Awards. And then after her death in 2006, she continues to be recognized for things. There's just a ton. But the coolest one, I think, is that in 2021, NASA named the Mars landing site of the Perseverance rover, the Octavia E.

26:58Jeff:Butler landing in her honor. And to my knowledge, this is the first author we've had on this show who's had a Mars rover or a landing site named after them. I was thinking that Octavia E. Butler, I wonder if she was tempted at the time to just use her initials, right? Oh, O.E. Butler. But being a woman was so important to her work that she wasn't interested in that, right? And for those of you who maybe don't know, that is a strategy that some writers have used to try to dodge a little of the bias that can go into a special genre. They still use it. And still using. Less so, but still. It's still out there for sure.

27:37But there's something about that. She uses it initial, but she just puts Octavia front and center, which I've always admired. And I think at this point, this is always a fun game to play. Authors that are recognizable only by their first name. So you either have to be so famous that you can be the one Kevin, and I'm just picking a name at random, and or, yeah, Tony's a good one, and or your name is distinctive enough that you can't, there's not a lot of namespace pollution for the Octavias, but you can reference Octavia to book people and they'll know who you're talking about, generally speaking.

28:11They're not going to be like, which Octavia you're talking about. And that is maybe the highest sort of, that's the last tier of fame to get to for writers. It's also so interesting. We were talking about the trajectory. In preparation for this pod, I was looking around for a copy to pick up. And I like to buy them used if I can. I kind of like to get an old copy of some of these books just to see. I could not find a used copy. And this gives me a chance to talk about Thrift Books, who's sponsoring the show this season. And one of the features you can do there is if there's an edition you like, you can set a little reminder that let me know when one of these comes in.

28:49And they'll tell you about how often they get something. So I looked in several used bookstores at Physical with my own two human meat hands. I looked and I couldn't find a used copy at multiple used bookstores over the last couple months. And even if I go on Thriftbooks right now, there are not, I mean, there are used copies to have, but you're not going to get a deal. The one I want to shout out here is the February 1995 paperback, mass market paperback. So this was after the initial hard to cover. This is from Aspect Press. An acceptable copy, which is kind of the lowest that Thrift Books makes available, is$19 for a mass market paperback.

29:29You can't get these, Rebecca. So if you ever find yourself at a library bookstore or a library book sale or a little free library situation, leave something for the little free library. But if you see a parable of the sower, pick that shiz up because you've got a market for it. And there weren't that many used copies and people continue to buy these. So it creates a very strange market for books, one of which I can't really think of an equivalent. I really can't. Even the mass market ones are available. But the one that you can buy, there's a really nice hardcover of the two parables, the Earthseed ones.

30:05That's like$38. It's a collector's edition. But the 30th edition, I read an e-book of this eventually. That's what I have. But you can get that for$16. But go to thriftbooks.com. Thanks for them to sponsoring the show. You can find all kinds of interesting other editions there. Yeah.

30:21Jeff:I wonder how the publisher is balancing the new demand for her and how they're handling it. Because the resurgence in 2020 was totally unexpected. Yes. As the Black Lives Matter movement gained traction after George Floyd's murder, the Octavia Butler books just appeared on a bunch of Black Lives Matter reading lists and other folks who were trying to educate themselves about Black authors and reading more diversely. There were just a lot of angles that people were coming to Octavia Butler from. And it makes a lot of sense. Her work is at the intersection of racial justice, economic inequality.

30:55Jeff:This book deals a lot with how those things can be tied to political polarization and to climate concerns, all of which feedback to, you know, major political ideas and, you know, discussions, battles, things that have really been in the water in the US, especially since 2016. But yeah, landed on the first landed for the first time on the New York Times bestseller list in 2020, 14 years after her death. And what's seven 27 years after the book was published really incredible. I do have a little inside information on this element, because I this is published the the current edition of Parable of the Sowers published by Grand Central Publishing, which is in print of a set.

31:34And I talked to them in the course of doing book ride stuff. And I remember talking to them about their, we're going to be releasing new editions of the butlers over time. And this one came out in April, 2019. So it was available to be picked up in 2020 and 2021. Like someone over there did a hell of a job of getting, I think they acquired all of the rights. It's a wonderful, but part of, part of something having a resurgence is having it available in a different kind kind of way. And maybe, probably, she would have been picked up, this book would have picked up in 2020, 2021. But having an edition that a publisher was behind that was available that was in print, Rebecca, that's not always the case either.

32:12Some of the literary legacy stuff is much more books on the shelves, publishing industry stuff.

32:19Jeff:It does matter more than a casual reader is probably aware of that when the list goes out, or when somebody says, Octavia Butler is my favorite on a big TV show or now a big like TikTok channel, it matters that readers can immediately go and get those books where they want them. And then that momentum begins. And once it's off, you're like, you're really going to the races, but very unpredictable. This is one of those things that I keep remembering as we record the show, how many books are near like, most books are forgotten. And how many of the books that we think of as classic or integral to our canon today, were very nearly forgotten or had been forgotten for a while.

32:58Jeff:And then somebody reads them at the right time, somebody stumbles on it, and that person has access to the kind of platform that just lets them say, maybe we should bring this one back out. And that these things that feel inevitable, like reading this book in 2025 feels like, of course, it was inevitable that Octavia Butler would become the kind of well known like scion of science fiction that we think of her us today, but it was anything but. There's so much randomness and so much unpredictability in it, and that just, I think, makes it even more magical when these things happen. Yeah, and that gives us a chance to talk about the story itself and the reading experience in our own relationship to the book.

33:36Rebecca, all you have in the notes here is it says you have a funny story about that. I have no idea what you're doing. Is this your first time?

33:42Jeff:So I thought I had read this book. And as I sat down and started, I got about 25 pages in, And I was like, this is new to me. This is all new to me. I don't recognize this voice or this story. And I, for the life of me, don't know what book I have been thinking of when I have been thinking that I have read The Parable of the Sower. It's totally possible that I read like an excerpt from it online when it was having the big resurgence in 2020. But it turns out this is my first time and I did not realize it was going to be my first time with Parable of the Sower. It was a great one, but here we are.

34:19My first time. I think it was in 2018 or so. It was post-BR. I heard about it through doing book-write stuff. A list or there's a lot of science fiction fans that this is canonical to them. I went through a pretty serious science fiction phase when I was like 14 or 15, which ironically is when this book was published. But I wasn't reading. I had no idea about new science fiction. I was doing Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert and all the people that Octavia Butler was reading, but also seeing that there wasn't people like her in that list. so I didn't get to it until quite a bit later.

34:51But even then, I got it, right? And I think that's one thing that both of us are having a reaction to and I'd be curious yours is I can see why in 1993 it was a big deal but this book is so influential that it feels like a version of things that we've read that were influenced by it since then, right? Or like it was ahead of its time But if you go back and read it now, it sets so much of the groundwork that there's parts of it that can feel familiar, I guess is what I'm trying to say, even though at the time it was not at all familiar. this was since it turned out i hadn't read this before it was it felt like an exercise in

35:34Jeff:understanding the roots of a like a trend or a trajectory in science fiction where i've read some of the things that came after i've read you know nk jemisin i've read other folks that i think had to have been influenced by octavia butler um angela florinoy draws on this book quite a bit in her new novel, The Wilderness, that came out earlier this year. And that book is mostly literary and just slightly speculative. But the places where it's speculative, they name check Octavia Butler and are drawn straight from Parable of the Sower. It's interesting to do that, to be familiar with the more recent versions of a story, the more recent things that were influenced, and then to go back to the origin and get it.

36:20Jeff:that to me was the most interesting part of the exercise. Like, some of it too, is that we live in a time where many of these predictions have come true. They're not scary and groundbreaking, because we don't have to imagine them like we are in them now and wondering what's going to come next. And it's tempered, or at least for me, it was tempered by there are all of these really grounded predictions about, you know, like water will become scarce and expensive food will become scarce and expensive, all the ways that that those that can lead into increased violence and danger for people. But for me, the like the more fantastical elements really sort of tempered the power of the grounded, relatable, earthbound stuff like that.

37:02Jeff:Lauren has sort of this magical power with the hyper empathy that little bits about like wanting humans to escape into space or that maybe that's where we're going to make the future. Like we have that conversation today, but it also still feels a little bit fantastical and felt to me a little bit unnecessary. And it's interesting that in the books that come after Octavia Butler, and the writers that come after her, I think that more grounded speculation about what happens here on Earth, it doesn't need magical elements at all, or surreal elements. Yeah, if you take Lauren's hyper empathy out of the book, it is still speculative into science fiction, but more in league with like 1984, like it's political alternate futures.

37:49Or The Handmaid's Tale. Or The Handmaid's Tale or something like that, where because Butler is a science fiction writer, she thinks in these terms, right? She's looking for these elements. She's thinking about this. I wonder if it occurred to her that the power, you could even keep, it would be alternate future, I guess, is what we're thinking about this. It's a kind of, it's not, it's dystopian, but not post-apocalyptic. And that's a distinction I care about and no one else does. I'm going to keep saying that. But it would have a different kind of prophetic resonance without the supernatural thing that, or they don't even, it's not even, in this book, it's not supernatural.

38:28It is, she got this ability because her mother was a drug addict. And she was addicted to this particular drug while she was pregnant with Lauren. and it gave her this hyper-empathy. Now, it's presented as a medical condition. She meets a doctor and says, oh, I've studied this. So it's not like Clark Kent or something like that, but it does strain the bounds of what we know. But we can talk about what that does add and maybe what it detracts from the story a little bit later. I want to focus for a minute on the reading experience, especially the first 50 to 100 pages for someone who's getting into it because I think there's some things that can orient a reading experience and also enrich it.

39:04it's organized as Lauren's journal entries and next to it at the head of each journal entry we get a piece of these these poetic verses that she has written that will she imagines that are going to be the source text for this new religion right the earth seed and so there's a couple as a reader to be aware of, and I think also careful of at the same time, especially when it comes to journal books, novels that are journals or novels that are letters. Do not let your guard down in journal and letter books. Right? It feels like you're getting more direct access to that character's interiority, but actually there's a further distance.

39:49Because as someone who's written a journal, and I know a lot of people have kept diaries in journals, there is always already a sense of audience and the performance in those things. I'm sure there are people out there who are just like automatic writing. This is just my interiority. And I don't imagine anyone's going to ever read it except me. But I think that's less the case and certainly less the case when it's a work of fiction using this as a tactic. And the other thing you can know that it's not just here I go, is that she has come back to put these verses in because she hasn't written them yet at the time of a lot of these events.

40:25And then the later and later you get in the book, you can see here's the August 18th entry that's composed out of August 28th notes. So she's taking notes and then reforming them. And somewhere along the way, I think it's interesting to think about her being self-conscious of this text being a holy document to the people that come in the future.

40:47Jeff:Yeah, that's a great point. We don't know how old Lauren is or how long after the events take place in the story, she's constructing this. But a good analog, I think. And like, by the way, it really helps to know a little Bible going into this. Like, you'll be just fine if you don't, but it helps to know a little. And this feels to me like if you imagined that somebody, you know, took notes as they were going on a journey, and then they came back later and constructed those notes into what looks like a journal of here's what a document of here's what's happening on August 16th. And then they matched it with a Bible verse that, you know, was related to the themes of what happened that day.

41:27Jeff:Like, that's how it unfolds, that the verse at the top of each entry is somehow thematically connected to the story that she's telling us about what happened that day or what's been going on in the last week or so of their journey. But yeah, she must have constructed these after the fact, because she has not completely created Earthseed and written all of it as it's happening, because they're busy just walking up the highway trying to survive. That's, I think, really helpful. And for being journal entries, it's really plot heavy. Like, at least my personal experience of journaling is pretty interior.

42:01Jeff:Or if you read like a writer's personal notes or journals, often about thoughts and feelings, this is a pretty straightforward document of what happened. who did what there's we get some of the like what she was thinking or some of the strategy that lauren is trying to exercise what she's worried about in the group dynamics but it's pretty exterior and the like the peril is pretty relentless like it is one episode after another of here's a dystopian thing that happens here's another dystopian thing we are our community was broken into a fire was set we're trudging along the road and these people attacked us and here's how we met the other people that joined our group.

42:45Jeff:Butler has played this very successful game of what if with herself and then followed all of the ifs down to logical ends. But it feels, I guess, less literary and more plot heavy than a lot of the books that we've talked about. Well, as a document of survival, you see journals or diaries from people in survival situations, it tends to be a lot more practical matters, right? Because you and I, when we were keeping our journals when we were 14, we were not worried about like, we need to learn how to use guns because people are coming over the wall tonight. This is fair. She doesn't have the luxury of navel gazing.

43:18So she's under duress. There's a lot that happens from the jump, though we start out with a dream sequence, which is never my particular favorite thing. Dreams is something I would get rid of in all literature if I could. I never find them interesting or illuminative. But for the first 100 pages or so, a lot happens, but it's in the service of world and character building, right? Like it takes a while for Lauren to get out on the road that we've been talking about quite a while. A lot has to happen for her to find herself in a position where she is ready, able, has to launch, even as she's been thinking about it for a while, which I found pretty interesting.

43:55She's ready to strike out on her own and go somewhere, but she doesn't until she's the only one left. I mean, for lack of a better term, her domestic world ends in many ways, and she's left with essentially no choice, or the choice is to give in or become a prostitute or a drug user or really give into the squalor and hell. And she tries not to do that. And she tries to go on the road. But to give you some sense of the world, and this is always tricky with any kind of alternate history or future, is how do you give people a sense of the world without just saying how it is? And it can take some time to do that because you need to learn important logistical, practical things without the character saying it directly to themselves in the form of a journal, which you and I would never do.

44:41You and I would never be like, you know what? In this world, I need to go put gas in the car, right? Because it's so taken as read. So that can take some time.

44:51Jeff:That's true. And I did appreciate the way that Butler does the world building, that it isn't like that the first sentence of the book isn't like, and here's the thing that happened that totally made the world change, but that the book opens with a group going for a baptism, like coming back around to the biblical stuff. They are all walking together to go to this water source where they can conduct a baptism. And the logistics around it tell us a lot about what has changed in the world, the concerns that they have for their safety. Are they bringing guns? Who's going to come? Who's allowed to?

45:23Jeff:What's happening back at home that they need to worry about? And that it continues to unfold that way. That she just casually mentions that a fire has been set and will it be worth it to call the firemen? Because can we pay the fees? Or should we call the police about this break in because that's going to be really expensive. And that's a level of artistry and I think careful craft that does elevate a reading experience like this. Other writers, lesser writers would just say like, and now we have to pay for police, you know, like in a world where. And there are writers that it must be tempting because that would be the easier thing to do.

46:04Jeff:but that she constructs these series of vignettes, this series of experiences that we get to watch Lauren have where we are able to build the world bit by bit. Yeah, and part of, I think one of the fascinating things that she does is where she puts us in the timeline of the fall, right? Of the before times and the after times. We're in the, is this going to hold? Because there are still elections. There are still police, but you have to pay them and they're pretty mercenary, money is still good for stuff. You're using dollars to pay for nuts and stuff on the road, but 2 ,000 bucks gets you essentially, as I'm understanding, nuts and rice for two weeks.

46:45That's how much everything is.

46:47Jeff:Yeah. It's like$1 ,000 for groceries for a week. There are still airplanes that fly, that go places, but they're terribly expensive. And And one of the folks who ends up in Lauren's little band of travelers is going north and says something about, I thought about just flying up there because it would have been cheaper, but then I wouldn't have had any money left to get myself set up. Well, it wouldn't have been cheaper. It would have taken less time to just fly north. So you also know that those pieces of infrastructure do still exist. And that to me also feels true for how this erosion happens.

47:23Jeff:how public civilized society becomes gradually less civilized. Yeah. And unless you have a way of getting outside of it for a moment, and part of one of those ways is to be the reader of this text. As a reader, I was like, this thing is falling, man. Get the hell out of it. There's no reason to... And the people who have slowly, with every day, experienced new deterioration, but then has adapted. Deterioration and adapt and deterioration and adapt. Whereas Lauren, because of her personality, because of her reading, because of the hyper-empathy, I think there's a lot of reasons she is different in this regard.

48:00She's like, how can I deal with this? We've got to prepare because this is not going to hold. and I need some other strategy. I need some other tactic for not just putting up walls and staying in place, but then also not like her brother throwing himself at the will of the thing beyond the wall. Like, I'm going to go out there and see what happens and participate in it and is destroyed by it. And I think that piece of it, there is a really sort of logical chain of imagination, which I don't think is a phrase I've ever thought of before, of how she gets from one place to another and imagining a future.

48:35is prepare. There is no safety, right? There's no wall high enough here because she's imagining even the rich people are having this problem, maybe even more so because they have more stuff to steal. And then it opens up in a space of a kind of a critical consciousness is like, we got to get away from here. There's got to be some other way of doing this. And the reducto ad absurdum of this is the stars. This is the fate of humanity is to take ourselves and seed the stars with our own presence. But part of that is that's undiscovered country, right? It doesn't have all of this baggage to go along with it so that it gives you room to reinvent.

49:16And I think that's a commentary on art and the imagination and maybe science fiction principally among that is these step changes of possibility open up new terrain, which you can imagine things that are hard to imagine if you don't get farther away from the quotidian every day. Let's talk about some of her... Oh, go ahead. Follow up on that.

49:35Jeff:I think one of the companions of that, though, while she's got them dreaming about the stars, or while she's dreaming about getting people to the stars, is also a very grounded idea that informs a lot of activism today, that we take care of us. That you have to form community. That you have to form connection. That the seed needs good ground to fall upon, and that you can be both seed and good ground if you form this new kind of community and that the world she's living in is very polarized and people are very paranoid because there are good reasons to be very paranoid about who might be coming for you does this person or this bad group of people know that you have resources that they might come for is your house going to be broken into are you safe when you're out on the road all of these things can drive people into little silos and one of the driving tensions and forces of her philosophy is that diversity is good for us.

50:29Jeff:And that is overtly written into the sort of sacred text of Earthseed, that God is change, and that learning how to work with change is how we will approach the future, but that also diversity is a kind of power. And where she and most of the characters that we meet have previously been in their own little homogenous communities, they find themselves out on the road and that the way that they're able to survive is instead of hunkering down and like closing and trying to protect all of their resources, they express a form of generosity, of openness, of curiosity about the possibility that maybe some of these people are good and can be trusted.

51:11Jeff:And what new powers, what new way of being in the world, what new access to survival might they unlock, if they can be open to those things in a world that tells you that you should be closed, and that you should be really, that you should be closed and worried and like stingy. And I probably like there's, I'm not gonna look, there are probably terrible TikToks about like, the Octavia Butler abundance mindset. But it is like, it is a an open mindset, a growth mindset, rather than a scarcity mindset. And I think Butler is writing directly into what she understands to be the tension around, especially race, but how that's connected to resources and scarcity.

51:53Yeah. One of the verse, chapter headers, sacred text, scripture pieces reads, embrace diversity, unite or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed by those who see you as prey, embrace diversity or be destroyed. And that is put in action on the road. So Lauren eventually leaves with a couple of people she knows from her fortress town and, you know, whatever, how we're going to describe this group of 11 homes that's surrounded by a wall to strike north, to try to get to Oregon, somewhere else where water is more possible. And where water is more possible, the rule of law tends to hold a little bit better because the scarcity has made people into savages and turned people against each other.

52:34And their morality is, it's actually more complicated than one might think where they will give someone a shot to join them, but if they are betrayed, they will be killed or exiled. There is no, well, you know what? We'll give you another chance, even though you stole from us or did something else. Or they're like, we're going to give you a little bit of a probationary period. But there's a recognition too, that part of this is like, you have to participate in the same morality and the same ethic with us, or you're going to exploit us and we can't have that here. We cannot tolerate that. And one of the things that's happened in the fallenness is people are not held accountable.

53:15People are not held accountable for their transgressions because the police force, the judiciary system, and the political powers that be aren't interested in enforcing it. So people get away with more and more, and then the fabric of that shared understanding has strained. And I got to tell you, that feels a little close to the bone, Rebecca Shinsky.

53:30Jeff:It does. It does. It's, this is still a really powerful book. Like, even though she's predicting the time we are living in right now, it's powerful because some of the things are happening right now. And it's powerful because it asks us to think about what might be happening 30 years from now. Like, we're not yet in the place where groceries for two people for a week are $1 ,000. But it's not impossible to imagine how that happens. We did live through a time where you couldn't get toilet paper. I mean, we've had some of these micro experiences of the world turned upside down in a radical way and how different things can happen.

54:13It's also a story of creating possibility that's not interested in political revolution, right that's not what it's trying to overthrow or run for something this is a smaller longer term thinking about creating a new ethic around which you can build some sort of society and there's they talk a little bit about the end as they sort of form this new community so she meets they meet these people across the way and they've come from all over and one of them is an older fella he's what 57 we're told and has he's a doctor and he has a piece of land up in central california that is protected enough and kind of out of the way but also since in central california can grow anything that it might be able to sustain some people and he falls in love with lauren and they have an age gap situation that you know it's the end times rebecca consenting adults do your thing but he then agrees to let that become a place where this new religion, society, political ideology can take root.

55:19But even when you get there, everything's not ready to go. This book does not traffic in the promised land. There's just us here. And I found that, refreshing is not quite the right word, but I found that grounding and in a way more hopeful. Because Butler on the whole, I don't know if we've said this, she's even said in interviews, is a hopeful person. Even the person who writes this is a hope. This is a book about hope. This is not a book about false hope. It's about real hope. Now, it may be longer term, it may be quite small, but it's real hope, don't you think?

55:50Jeff:Yeah, I do. And like, it's at risk of sounding like trite about it. It kind of is, you know, like the real hope is the friends they make. That like the stakes are really high and, and the stakes of being in their group are still extreme because the worlds that they live in is extreme so as you were saying like lauren kind of issues these ultimatums to new people as they're interested in joining the group like these are our values you don't have to believe in all the earth seed stuff but these are our ethics this is the way that this group lives and you have to live as we live if you're going to be part of it and that even when they get to what they hope will be their promised land where they can have a fresh start it's not at all what they expected they don't have the resources that they thought they were going to have but it's not a like shit i guess it's over they still have each other and the fact that they have found each other and that this community has formed and that they are committed to taking care of each other that ethic of care is the thing that distinguishes their group from everything that's happening in the outside world it's all competition everywhere else competition for survival competition for resources, scarcity, danger, violence.

57:01Jeff:You can't trust your neighbor. And these people have committed to being each other's neighbors. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that this open, it's an open, essentially open acreage, 300. There's no structures at all. Even the one that was supposed to be there is burned down. It's just open land. And they're coming from a land of walls, right? And there's a good fences make good neighbor situation, Robert Frost. You've all read it wrong. Everyone knows. Everyone else reads it wrong. Maybe we'll do poems. We'll do short stories and poems someday on Zero to Well Read. But the walls themselves are protection and separation, right?

57:34And that is the deal you make with a wall. And they're trying to some other kind of deal with each other and with community. One of the things that struck me this time, and I think probably when I read it, if I would have read this when I was 15 or 16, I don't think this would have hit me as hard. But reading and writing is not a given for people. It's actually a rare skill and it's valuable and it's like literally valuable in terms of employable, but it's valuable in terms of survival and learning about other parts of the world and everything else that goes on, having some sort of exterior knowledge.

58:06And I don't remember, Rebecca, in the book, do they tell us what happened? Like, is this government? Is it just people aren't going to school? What happened to reading and writing that it became so scarce? Now, clearly there are people who do not read and write and there's all kinds of problem with the modern educational system. but I'm, my sense of this is it is super rare for people that even own their own homes or have jobs that we would consider non-menial to read and write. But I didn't, it just seemed part of the decline. It seemed part of the erosion, but I didn't see a specific antecedent.

58:38Jeff:It is just presented as part of this world that especially a lot of younger girls and women in this world don't know how to read and write. And we don't know what's happened to education. Like people are still getting on planes and going places. There are still big corporations that exist. There are still rich people. Still a college, weirdly. I didn't know the college would still be around at this point. Yeah, my assumption reading into that was that there are schools and that people have stopped going to schools because it's too dangerous to get out there. Or maybe school isn't free. Maybe there's no such thing as an underwritten public school anymore.

59:14Jeff:But also some of the girls that we meet have been, like Lauren meets them because they were sold into marriage as teenagers to older men. And of course, those older men have incentives not to educate these young women and to provide them with exposure to ideas that might make them even more desirous of being liberated from their current situations. The ideas are dangerous and a less educated populace is easier to control. A less educated personal slave is easier to control. And I think we see aspects of both of those, like the micro and the macro of that happen in this book. Yeah. And that in our current landscape of book banning and censorship, that feels more present than it would have to me at 15, if I had read this in 1993.

59:59I don't think, I think naively I would have like, the impetus to keep books from people and the slippery slope of this isn't good for kids to, this shouldn't be anywhere, this should be outlawed, you can't get this to people not being able to read and write and think for themselves. I'm a little more, I'm a little more sympathetic to that chain of events.

1:00:20Jeff:It's the access to history too, right? Like one of the things that we learn about that's happening in the world is that company towns are popping back up where they advertise themselves as come work here and you can live for free. Like maybe even room and board, maybe even your meals are free. But what we find out is that they don't pay enough to actually subsidize the cost. And so people end up in debt to these companies And that means they can never stop working for them. They're stuck. And this is not the first time that this has happened in American history. And Lauren knows this. And a couple of the other folks she meets along the road know this.

1:00:58Jeff:But she's writing it in her journal, into the Earthsea documents, partially as a way of educating people who have come across those, that this was happening in the world and it has happened before. And we know this. But people who don't know that, who don't know that that's happened in history, are more gullible for an offer because they don't know this is a trap and they don't know that we've seen it be a trap in the past and i i assume that history classes if nothing else have have changed drastically by the time that this book is taking place but that many fewer people have access to education because the less you know the easier you are to take advantage of yeah Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyam, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

1:01:42Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industry's shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. I want to talk a little bit about the hyperempathy and then pyro, which is the drug that is a scourge.

1:02:16And I think there's a version of this book where the creation of this specific drug might be the thing that has led them to this place because it It is so all-consuming. It is so dehumanizing. It unmakes the people who take it, right, to the point where they shave off all their hair and they paint themselves like blues and greens. And they have this very strange attraction to fire, like to the point where they will go close to it and just stare at it to the point like they burn their faces off and stuff. It is dehumanizing. They turn into some other kind of being. And in a simple way, it may just be a metaphor for id of just raw desire for power, sensation, radical self-interest, I think, is a way of thinking about it versus the thing, frankly, it's created or another drug's created, which is this opposite, which is hyper-empathy, where you are so in tune with the physical feelings of others that if you punch them, you feel the blow yourself.

1:03:16If you stab them or they are stabbed within proximity, I'm not really sure the duration or the radius of this empathy circle. But Lauren, it becomes a bit of a plot mechanic where some of the encounters are governed by her ability to participate them or not or do other things or not. But those are the two poles that are being navigated here. And I don't think it's presented where hyper empathy is a good, but there's a little bit of messianic stuff going on, right? This is the ultimate turn the other cheek, right? It's hyper empathy given embodiment of I literally feel what you feel, not just that I am going to suffer and die for you metaphorically, but I suffer along with you.

1:03:59And so I'm interested in you not suffering because I suffer. And that kind of radical identification is a fascinating idea. But I don't know that it's... I wonder a casual reader if they're going to make all of those kinds of extensions and connections.

1:04:16Jeff:Yeah, I mean, I think there's the Christ stuff, certainly, that you're getting to of like, I suffer with you, I feel your pain. And there's also a really humanistic reading of it that committing violence dehumanizes not just the victim, but the perpetrator. Right. And that one of the ways that Lauren is positioned to maybe see life and see humanity and possibilities for the future in ways that other people aren't is that she does experience that, that if she inflicts harm on someone else, if she shoots somebody else, she feels the pain of the bullet, literally. and there's a real cost to that that's not just psychic or emotional and and sometimes the psychic and emotional costs of that sort of violence in other survival stories get written off because like it's just necessary right we just had to commit this violence in order to protect ourselves but when she has to commit commit violence to protect herself she still has to feel the cost of it so she's doing a different calculus about is it really going to be worth it to stab this person?

1:05:20Jeff:Will it be worth it if I have to shoot them? How does that change me? How does that change my humanity? I think that's subtler. I think that's probably in Butler's philosophy of this world, but that it's not overt enough and it's not on the page to be part of, I think, a casual reading of the book. It's certainly not something I would have thought about if I had read this as a teenager. Yeah. And it's a little deterministic too, right? Because it's a quirk of biology, but not of morality, right? That, you know, someone could, and people have developed these kinds of ideologies without this kind of genetic imperative, you know, or genetic constraint to guide them into that kind of direction.

1:06:00Jeff:Butler talks in some interviews about having read a lot about Buddhism. And a lot of this, like I've been to some meditation retreats, Jeff, like some of this is pretty familiar to me from Buddhist in a lot of Eastern teachings, but also not wanting it to just feel like Buddhism light or Buddhism in the future. And I think she threads that needle very well, but that it is from a biological cause, not because Lauren has been like meditating on these ideas or engaged with philosophy that's guiding her. The philosophy comes out of the physical experience. Let's do some quotes. I'm going to start with something I have a little bit lower.

1:06:37I have it in this, are we sure this is about art and writing? But I'm going to come up here because I think it's a good bridge to some of the ideas that Butler has and what her project is and the deployment of them. This is Lauren writing in her own journal, but I think it's not hard to make a skip and a jump over to Butler here. Here we go. Here's the quote. Quote, I'm trying to speak to write the truth. I'm trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty if I can only achieve them. If it happens that there are other people outside somewhere preaching my truth, I'll join them.

1:07:09Otherwise, I'll adapt where I must, take what opportunities I can find or make, hang on, gather students, and teach. I think that's not the worst way of understanding Butler's approach, style, and ethic here, to take that as a whole. What other quotes should we talk about? What did you have?

1:07:29Jeff:Let's see. I mean, there are some that just really capture it. She says, we are a harvest of survivors. and of course harvest is an interesting word because she's thinking of themselves as seed but also talks about the ordinary unspeakable things that we did now to live and that ordinary unspeakable is so concise and says so much about what life feels like like we really do get to feel the drudgery and the fear and the just like how you get ground down by like walking every day in the heat and being constantly scared and hungry and waiting until you have enough money to buy the good water and like you know there's dogs everywhere and are you going to be are you in danger just like it's it's a real life is a real grind and that these these things that would have been previously unspeakable continue to feel unspeakable but have also become ordinary Yeah.

1:08:28Earlier in the book where before the really bad stuff has happened to her family and their family realizes that things are intensifying. It's not just a status quo that you're surviving, but things are getting worse. One of the characters says, we can't live this way, Corey shouted. I jumped. I've never heard her sound like that before. We do live this way, Dad said. And then Lauren's unsaid third rejoinder would be something like, we don't have to live this way. We don't have to go back or stay. We could go forward because Corey's thinking about joining the company town, which is a real regression.

1:09:05Like sort of everyone understands it's a compromise to trade security for liberty and really agency of any kind. But this third way is out elsewhere. Go. So that one's really powerful there. Let's see. I used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos, the world that would destroy the neighborhood. Instead, these things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit. We've talked about that a little bit. I thought this was interesting too. Lauren has told her father something of the nature of her beliefs and she is trying to shake people out of their complacency or their bunker mentality of weathering it to say this is not weatherable.

1:09:48And she's trying to freak them out. It's better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear and you lose some of your authority over them. It's harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching. I thought that was fascinating.

1:10:05Jeff:That's fascinating. And that feels - Present. Yes. Yeah. Present and true to our political landscape, especially messages that are about what you should be afraid of and the like if this happens and this happens then this is going to happen like sort of the the doomerism of it all when those things that you have predicted don't come true you do lose power and trust and that she does lauren starts to figure it out she takes her dad's advice that like to set an example to teach about ideas rather than to just like kind of it's preaching versus teaching and sort of interesting that she fashions fancies herself to be both but she's much more effective in the teaching mode in the modeling of things than when she's just trying to preach and i did appreciate that that like she's i mean we both grew up in kansas we're not unfamiliar with you know people trying to set out churches and like evangelical sorts of modes of engagement and i and i think butler was familiar with that too like what can be a turnoff about somebody who just so powerfully believes in what they believe in and desperately wants you to believe in it too.

1:11:15Jeff:And then how people who are effective in those roles and effective at sharing their beliefs or persuading other people, like that often hinges on a demonstration of something and of an action or an ability to convey the idea rather than just like pounding them over the head with it. And then Lauren comes around, like she develops a little finesse with how she shares these ideas. The last one I have here that I'll mention, it's a little bit longer one, but I think this connects the religiosity, the sort of creation of a sacred belief system around a moral philosophical ethic, and then using narrative and story as a vehicle for it.

1:11:52This is when she's talking to one of the people they meet along the road. And one of her navigations, it's always interesting to see her do it, is at what point do I try out their, I don't know, their sympathy, their interest, their openness to this earth seed idea. I took a chance. I told Travis about the destiny. He asked and asked me what the point of earth seed is. Why personify change by calling it God? Since it's change is just an idea. Why not call it just that? Just say change is important because after a while it won't be important. I told him people forget ideas. They're more likely to remember God, especially when they're scared or desperate.

1:12:29Then they're supposed to do what? He demanded read a poem. or remember a truth or a comfort or reminder to action. I said people do that all the time. They reach back to the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran, or some other religious book that helps them deal with the frightening changes that happened to them. So, you know, make it easy, make it simple, make it sacred for people to turn to something than to rather, you know, just remember two plus two equals four. I thought it was a fascinating conversation and something I think Butler is trying to work out is like, what will people turn to? Because clearly Butler is a book that people have turned to, and why do they turn?

1:13:06Why not? This is a question that some people ask of fiction writ large. Why not just say it plain? Well, the answer is because if you say, well, life is hard, and we don't know everything, and sometimes you don't know what to do, that's easy to say, but people remember Hamlet, right? You can get consumed by the pursuit of something to the point where you forget all else. Like that's an easy platitude you could put on the pillow. But Moby Dick is doing different work in the exploration and articulation of that kind of idea. The story matters, I guess what I'm trying to say. The form of the story matters.

1:13:42The form of the message matters. And to reduce it to a platitude or just even a syllogism doesn't stick. It just doesn't work as well as art or religion or some other kind of articulation. Why is it, is it for you? Is it maybe not for you, Rebecca? or where do you want to start?

1:14:00Jeff:I think it's for you if this idea that there is no going back to normal resonates. And it's radical and grounding. And there is also something kind of comforting that like we will not go back to the way it used to be. But there is work to be done and hope to be had in seeking to create a way forward and a new life. I'm not sure Butler would ever use the term new normal. I don't know that this book believes that there will be the establishment of anything that feels normal again, but we're not going back to whatever came before. I think if you're curious about one of the seminal books that influenced a lot of contemporary sci-fi, if you've read a lot of contemporary sci-fi, but never Octavia Butler, I imagine you will find a lot of seeds here.

1:14:45Jeff:I have not read super widely in contemporary sci-fi. Folks who have but haven't read Butler, I think you'll find a lot to pull on. I think if you are a reader who's drawn to, there's a lot of action. There's a lot of plot and story and it moves quickly. Like, you know, it's books a little over 300 pages. It's not going to take you that long to get through. Things are always happening. There's always something to engage with. That's really compelling. Yeah. If you've read a whole bunch of sci-fi already and you read this, you may have deja vu all over again, but then you're going back to the headwaters, right?

1:15:19Like that's another, so that's like an if not if, get ready for that. If you're a sentence reader, the quote I just mentioned like she writes clearly and crisply but on a language level she's not you know she's not working on a level of uh Ishiguro or Zadie Smith or some of the people we read for the sentences but it has other virtues a tough one for dog people you say

1:15:41Jeff:yeah the dog will die all of the dogs there are dogs yeah lots of bad ends for lots of dogs in this book. And just a lot of animal cruelty, a lot of violence. To everyone, right? It's trigger, this book is just a giant trigger. I didn't remember it being, I was younger and less sensitive, I guess. I just didn't remember it being so, and casually so, that people are so used to sexual assault and torture that they're numb to a lot of it. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that because it's not graphically described but how casually they refer to like having seen a rape happen or having watched as someone was attacked that is violent in itself that like it's painful and difficult to read in itself in a way that like she doesn't need it to be graphic or gory for it to really come across so like i i think you know make your own judgments about what you can tolerate as a reader but like the world they live in is very violent and they mention it quite often.

1:16:51Yeah. Let's do the immortal questions aren't asked. Which of these are primary here? Here are the questions under consideration. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil? I don't know if I would have said going into this, it's really about these questions, but boy, howdy, is it really about these questions?

1:17:14Jeff:It's really about almost all of them, or maybe even it is all about all of them, that Lauren is striking out trying to figure out, like, the life she's living doesn't feel like the ultimate good life and what might be better. So much of what do I owe my neighbor? I think that's the primary one, especially in contrast to the other things that we've read and done with Joda Red so far. it is so concerned both pragmatically and existentially with what is justice how should we be together what does human community and civilization look like how does it go wrong what should we avoid and what should we strive towards I think that's at the core of it and then the other questions are related but sort of almost flow from that right that's right in a certain kind of way are we sure this isn't about art and writing you said this you weren't so sure I am more sure why don't you give the skeptics case before I come off the top rope You're turning me around on this, like through the course of this conversation, as sometimes happens, you know, when you're discussing a book with somebody.

1:18:12Jeff:When I was making my notes, it felt a little slippery to me. Like Lauren is compelled by this need to write in order to process her experience. She tells us that like, I just have to write about this. but the book doesn't spend time on the value or the importance of like creativity itself the thing that they're creating is this new community but there's not the like survival is insufficient vibe that you get from something like station 11 that is overtly concerned with we're not just trying to make it down the road and get to our next meal we are also trying to generate art and beauty and that that's a mode of developing additional hope and lauren is frustrated, she tells us, by people like herself who are full of books and ignorant of reality.

1:18:56Jeff:So I think Butler has maybe like, is walking a line of some healthy skepticism about exactly how useful art is, or maybe that art comes secondarily after these necessary components of survival. But there are works of speculative fiction that make art and creativity central to survival. So it just, it just, yeah, it just felt slippery to me. Yeah, there's one line that it's almost a non sequitur. The third part of it I'll read here. But I've been thinking about a lot. She writes, God has changed. I hate God. I have to write like I don't know what to do with that except that her process of thinking and feeling is a textual one.

1:19:36She is she uses the writing to make herself and to make her philosophy. and the form of the poems and verses, as she says, at one point, this is just what I mean by this. I've been working on my articulation and it's this strange sort of poetical thing, right? The form of the idea is as important as the idea itself. Some of that, so it's communicable. Some of it makes it feel sacred, right? Writing in a different way makes the message seem elevated or outside of our normal modes of communication here. I think I'm in tune with your survival is insufficient route. I think where you look for that is Urseed is about something else.

1:20:15The ultimate goal is out there to go forth, to find, discover these places that we haven't been before. All of this is preparatory work and prepare. We have to get ready so that at some point far in the future, our efforts will be part of a process that's to let people leave this mortal coil and go to the stars and go to Alpha Centuria, these other kinds of places. And I think here, it's in science fiction, a lot of times, frankly, space exploration or other kinds of technological revolution are a metaphor for a creativity which itself about art and literature itself. How do we make new things?

1:20:48How do we imagine new things? Technology allows us to imagine new things, but imagination allows us to think about what other technological things, what are we going to do with this stuff, right? It's not just that we can make something, but then once you've made a space shuttle, what are you going to do with it? I know some people that are into space and they're frustrated with just sort of sending people up into space and spinning around for a bit and coming back down. You know, one of the critiques, and it's included in this book of things like art and things like poetry and things like NASA is all those energies could be pointed towards feeding people.

1:21:22And of course, they're right. But that goes into the survival piece. I think Butler here and Lauren here in her philosophy, her religion, is not just holding space for higher aims, but making the higher aims primary. That is the point of the arrow, which all this wood and bow and arrow and string is being built. But the goal is to shoot that arrow into the future. And I think that's inherently about art and creativity.

1:21:46Jeff:Yeah, I think that we just had an exchange that's kind of a meta moment for what this project of Zero to Well Read is all about. That in for this particular book, like I have not read nearly as much science fiction as you have, or as many of the folks listening might have. And so we each bring our experience and what we have read and what we know of the world and of the genre into the new reading. And you're going to have a different experience with a book like this. If you're an experienced sci-fi reader who's drawing on a lot of stuff, like space exploration is often a metaphor for art and literature.

1:22:18Jeff:I believe you, you know? Well, that's not like written down on a tablet somewhere, but I think that's an easy, Yeah, that's a way of understanding. Yeah, I think it makes a ton of sense. But I want to say to our listeners that I hope that what you're hearing in these conversations is that there is room for all modes of engagement with these books. That you can come to these now canonical books with a lot of experience and get something new and interesting out of them. And you can also come to them as a new reader of this genre or a relatively new reader or an experienced reader of this kind of book.

1:22:50Jeff:and you will have a different experience than somebody who's read a lot of them, but you will have and can have a really enriching experience. And for me, that feels like unlocking something that like my next science fiction reads will be enriched by having read Octavia Butler, but also by having had this kind of conversation in this case with a person who is coming from a more experienced place with the genre. And I hope that like, that we can be both guide and like fellow traveler with everybody who's listening with us. Could you get most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation in brackets here if one existed for this because there isn't one?

1:23:28But what do you think, Rebecca? Could you?

1:23:30Jeff:I think you could, yes. Yeah. I'm good too. All right. Since there isn't one, should this be a movie, musical, limited series, or Muppets? This is way too violent for Muppets. Like, I could not. No, no, this is the worst. I can't entertain that. We continue to find new depths of no for our Muppet adaptation question. I think this is an Apple limited series. I want six beautifully produced, terribly expensive episodes. Let's do it. The thing that I think would be hard or what could be lost is the metatextual piece of this is a journal with the poems and stuff. Are those voiceovers? I'm not really sure how that would work.

1:24:15Anyway, that's, but I think this is the right, Like a movie, I don't think is going to give you the sense of time that a six episode series would because there's multiple stages. You need to live in the neighborhood under siege in the walls for what, two episodes, three? Like probably the end of the second episode, Lauren leaves if we were to script this herself.

1:24:36Jeff:And then some time on the road and the last episode of the season, they arrive at the land in California and we see them starting to try to build life there. the temptation then would be to like do six more seasons of them building up their life there. But I like the, I want to dwell in the question. Yeah. And I should say Parable of the Talents is not just the next day. Like it jumps into the future. It's more like a foundation, which Apple has done a lot with at that point. Trivia adaptations, rumored, misattributed quotes, et cetera. I've got a couple here. She, like Lauren, will do her homework and she wanted the survival elements to feel real.

1:25:12So she did a ton of research about seeds and guns. that could be an alternate title for this the ballot of seeds and guns by october a butler

1:25:20Jeff:um we talked about parable of the sower much more poetic the we talked about this was going to be a trilogy but she got stuck oh this is where i get to talk about the have you seen these pages i linked it here i didn't come across these in my research um so i saw these and the link i found is on austin cleon's blog but she would write these motivational pages to herself in her book her notebooks. And they're a little bit of the secret or manifesting. So this one I'm just going to read. I'll put a link in the show notes here or in the episode notes on your podcatcher. She just writes, I shall be a bestselling writer.

1:25:53After Imago, each of my books will be on the bestseller list of the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Poets and Writers. My novels will go onto the above list, whether publishers push them hard or not. Those are underlined, whether I'm paid a high advance or not, whether I even win another award or not. This is my life. I write bestselling novels. My novels go onto the bestseller list or on or shortly after publication. My novels each travel up to the top of the best. I'm not going to read the whole things, but I don't know why I find these so amazing, Rebecca. This is your first experience with them.

1:26:29What am I seeing? Do they speak to you as much as they speak to me maybe the post facto piece of this i find this amazing oh i mean and the so be

1:26:38Jeff:it so be it at the very end yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's a a well-known quote i i mean i love this i think this is a real like everybody has a version of this whether you're writing it in your journal or like saying it to yourself in the mirror or just like holding it in the quiet of your heart, your vision for how you hope things will turn out and what you are working for. And to declare it this way, there are some evangelical roots and some Baptist roots in this. This might be something that she learned in some ways at church, that you can speak things into existence, you name it and claim it.

1:27:18Jeff:So there is some religious stuff happening that probably is from early education for her. But this is like, everybody needs motivation to do work. And being an artist is hard. And I love to see the human side of someone that we have, you know, sort of deified in a way, or at least sainted, you know, Octavia Butler is in the realm of saints for modern readers. And to look at her journal pages and be like, even this person had to hype herself up to keep doing the work that she was doing. and that bit about like whether I'm paid a high advance or not, whether my publishers push them hard or not is the realest thing that a modern writer can contend with.

1:27:57Jeff:That's very, very pragmatic. I also want to mention, if you look at this, you'll see it, but for those of you who don't get to it, the top three quarters are in a larger handwriting, but then you get to the bottom third and it gets smaller. And this is, the top is really the what, but the bottom is more the why, right? So it says, I will buy a beautiful home in an excellent neighborhood. I will send poor black youngsters to Clarion or other writers' workshops. I will help poor black youngsters broaden their horizons. I will get the best of all health care for my mother and myself. I will hire a car whenever I want or need to.

1:28:32I will travel whenever and wherever in the world I want to choose. So I find this really powerful, amazing. And there's an element of Octavia Butler's life that interestingly maps onto, Like that Saint Octavia thing you just said, you know, she died early, kind of mysteriously, tragically. The work was unfinished. She leaves behind these testaments. And saints, to be sainted, you have to perform a miracle. And if there's a miracle you can perform in science fiction, there's one you can perform, and that's to be prophetic. And she did that, right? Yeah, she did. It really checks a lot of secular saint boxes, which I hadn't really thought before, so thank you for that.

1:29:10Jeff:And that the motivation here is not ego. Like, she's not, I want to be a bestselling author for fame and fortune. It's because the fame and especially the fortune will be tools for buying homes for people for getting young black writers into workshops that might open up their careers for them. It's getting her mom, a nice house like this comes through in the kind of book and character that she created as well. Like, what are our motivations for being a good person? What does it mean to be successful? is about more than the material impact of it. And it's cool to see her do that in the privacy of her own journal here.

1:29:47Yeah. I didn't know where to put this last one because it's not really part of what it's about. But I like the idea that Lauren is aware of science fiction tropes. She writes at one point, cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. I thought that was a weird breaking of the fourth wall. It's like, Lauren has read all the science fiction. And so science fiction exists in this world of science fiction. Like kind of, I got a little bit of literary vertigo reading that, but I thought that was pleasurable.

1:30:10Jeff:When you stand in the hotel room bathroom and the mirrors do that infinite hall of mirrors thing. Yeah. I have a new quick category that I had meant to do for the secret history. And it's called, that's what literature is metaphor. And sometimes the metaphor can be too obvious and sometimes it's not. I want to adjudicate the case of the acorn here. A lot of action for acorns in this book. So they call the town acorn. And there's a lot of stuff with seeds. Is this generative, useful, beautiful, or is this too on the nose, the idea of the acorn to you? I think it walks the line. It walks the line.

1:30:54It's kind of where I came to the same place. Go ahead. Why does it walk the line?

1:30:58Jeff:Well, no, I mean, it walks the line, and I think that's what makes it work. That a lot of the thing, a lot of the ideas that are relatable and easily translated to a wide array of readers are a little trite, like, or they are a little familiar. It's not overdone. It's not live, laugh, love of science fiction, but it's also not that far. I think I came around to liking it because I think it is both, it takes the obvious version of the acorn, which is a seed that can turn into an oak. But because earlier in the book, what we get, the use of acorn there is that you eat it. It's food. You turn it into food.

1:31:37But Lauren takes the acorn from eating it to survive to something that she can plan into the future to thrive. So that's why I kind of like it. I think it transcends the bound of like, duh, that's a metaphor, because it actually takes the first level reading of an acorn and does something else with it. It's like, there's a version of this where you can subsist on, frankly, pretty unpleasant stuff, right? There's a reason you and I and even like the weird Richmond and Portland restaurants are like, here's our acorn pwn. because it doesn't taste good, right? Like if you've ever thought about there's a reason we don't eat acorns.

1:32:08But in that mode of the acorn, when you're reduced to eating it and then you stay eating this unpleasant thing, that's the mode Lauren's trying to get out of. She's trying to get to a place where she can plant an acorn, invest in the future and imagine a world in which people are gonna enjoy it. The tree rather than having to eat the raw and bitter nut. All right, hot takes. You have a couple.

1:32:28Jeff:I think if this were published today, it might be young adult fiction. Yeah. there's like youthful conviction a lot of black and white thinking in a post hunger games world it does it does feel like it could be more yeah and like i'll acknowledge it i might be jaded but i related more to the older characters in the book who were skeptical of lauren's preaching at least at first i did feel some like okay honey you're young you know in response to it it feels like she is speaking in a way that's really powerful to young people um but i think this would be young adult fiction if it came out today.

1:33:04I have, this is a story about inflation.

1:33:07Jeff:Incredible shit.

1:33:12Jeff:It's a story about affordability. Yeah, it is. It's a story about affordability because like resources become more scarce. So more people are vying for them to the point that they will do extra legal activities to do them. Yeah. Octavia Butler just powered the 2025 election. Jerome Powell. Read Parable of the Sower. I also have reality acceptance is an underrated superpower. Yeah, I like that too. I already did my thing about epistolary novels and novels and journals are disarmingly not the same as first person narrative or omniscient. Third, be very wary. They are performing for you. They want you to think they're telling you secrets, but they are performing for you.

1:33:52Further reading. You'd mentioned the Flournoy. I've got the Dog Stars and the Road. But these are all children of this book. in a lot of ways, either directly or indirectly. They're about post-survival, rebuilding, what's worth fighting for, how do we get out of this stuff.

1:34:07Jeff:Yeah. Station Eleven, if you're looking for this, plus some more beautiful, artsy stuff. And of course, you'll see Butler's influence in the work of N.K. Jemisin and Nettie O 'Grefor and countless other writers working today. Yeah. Cocktail Party Crib Sheet, Three to Five Takeaways. You go first. Man, you can just say this book is groundbreaking and scarily prescient. It's sci-fi by a writer who opened the door for today's science fiction stars. And as I said earlier, there's no N.K. Jemisin winning a MacArthur if Butler hadn't gone first. Yeah. I think you have a nice one here about change is inevitable.

1:34:43If we learn to work with it, we can shape to our advantage. That's interesting. We didn't talk a bunch about the idea of change being central to this, maybe because it's so obvious in the book. But Lauren wrestling with what to do with that inevitability is fascinating. And a different kind of attitude towards changing worlds than we get a lot of the time, which is the doomerism, right? Doom scrolling is an interesting metaphor for many reasons. I don't think Butler would be a big fan of that. You know, a change gonna come is both good and bad, but it's gonna come. and to quote Hamlet, the readiness is all.

1:35:23I don't know what's going to happen, but Hamlet's ready, Lauren is ready and you're not going to fight against it. You're going to kind of surf it, I guess. I don't have a good metaphor for how you're supposed to -

1:35:32Jeff:I think surfing is a great metaphor for it. But it's not shaping the wave, right? But endemic in Lauren's metaphysic is that you can shape, you can't control the change, but you can mold it to a degree. And to think you can control it or to think that you have no power, both of those directions are misguided, but there's this third way of some limited agency that's hard to kind of wrap my head around, I find interesting. Yeah. And I think the big one here is really that the way to save ourselves is communal and not individualistic, that we have to recognize that our freedom, our liberation, survival are tied up with everyone else's.

1:36:11Jeff:And we have to be willing to be in community and to work alongside others, even when we don't agree with them. Like that happens in this group. There are philosophical differences, but the people agree to live by the same general principles. And that's fine and necessary. My other one, I didn't write it here, but it's more of a half-baked takeaway. I wonder if this is the first book in a castaway apocalyptic setting, someone realized it's really good to have a primary care physician as part of the group. We get this a lot later with Lost and some others, or Castaway. It's really good to have an emergency room doctor.

1:36:51And if you want to save yourself and be useful in the apocalypse, emergency room doctors would be my first overall draft pick. So there you go.

1:37:01Jeff:Yeah, you want Dr. Robbie in your band with people walking up to California coast. Final beat, zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. I guess we could say zero. We're not going to give anything a zero. It hasn't had occasion here. The five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read cred, and oh damn factor. Interesting one, Rebecca. Historical importance. I feel like this is still being written. Like the historical importance of Octavia Butler is still unfolding. It's like a seven in pencil.

1:37:33Yeah, that it could go to eight or nine over time,

1:37:38Jeff:depending on how the world continues to unfold. it's hard to imagine it really going below a seven, but it feels like a seven to me right now. Readability. With an asterisk. This is incredibly readable. Once you figure out, yeah. Once you figure out what's happening with the Earthseed verses and the journal entries, which is not that hard to get into the flow of, yeah, I think it's a nine. Current relevance of central questions. One thousand. Yeah, 11. Can we spinal tap this one? Yeah, yeah. 10. Book nerd read credit. Interesting. I think this is related to historical importance. We could put something in a pencil here.

1:38:13I think right now it might be pretty high.

1:38:17Jeff:Yeah, I think some familiarity with Octavia Butler is pretty high for read cred, seven or eight. Like I had imposter syndrome when I started reading it and realizing I hadn't read it before. You had false consciousness. It's so read cred that you had imagined yourself into the... All right, show notes at bookriot.com slash listen. You can shoot us an email, zero to wellread at bookriot.com. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airway Podcast Network. And if you can spare a moment for us, rate and or review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or others. If you listen to the show and like it and you use Apple Podcasts, hit that follow button.

1:38:54Apparently, that really helps. Rebecca, thank you so much. A joy and a pleasure as always.