This is not a perfect book, but wow has it aged well. Octavia Butler said "I write not to predict, but to warn!" but the predictions seem right on track. The 1200-year drought in the Southwest had not started when she wrote this, but here we have a climate novel that captures that situation.
Lauren Olamina as a narrator is plain-spoken. She is coping with civilization's dissolution in what seems to be the most rational way--with a plan for the future. She carefully builds her team for surviving the collapse, and collects her ideas of a spiritual foundation for getting through and rebuilding. I had not read this until now, and am reading it with a background of having read adrienne marie brown's book Emergent Strategies, highly influenced by Butler. You can't pick this up today and read it as a work of fiction--it is a deeper part of the literary canon of our time, a description of the process of capitalism's collapse along with American civilization. Things might be going better elsewhere, like Canada, where so many of the refugees in the book are trying to go.Butler's warnings in the book have gone unheeded by those who could most make a difference. Some will take inspiration and try to apply them to the world that is to come.
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