Parable of the Talents and The Light Pirate: Survival and Community
Extracurriculars
Mild spoilers for both books below.
I’m writing this in a week where scientists have announced that climate change is causing high waves that are damaging coastal towns, people are being sent to the hospital in Phoenix with second-degree burns from touching the ground, and it appears that leprosy has become endemic in Florida. Basically, the climate crisis seems to have arrived, and we’re still largely working at our jobs, going to see movies, buying new clothes, attending earthquake-level Taylor Swift concerts, etc. We’re living through the polycrisis, but our institutions and muscle memory are creating intense inertia1. I just finished two books that touch on what the next few stages of the future might look like, and how we build hope in a world where many things seem to be falling apart.
The first book is Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents, her sequel to Parable of the Sower, continuing the story of Lauren Olamina’s story as she spends her adulthood trying to both build a community and foster her religion of Earthseed, focused on its destiny of sending humans to other planets and making humanity a multiplanetary species. The United States is starting to emerge from the Pox, as they’ve termed the intersection of political, social, and environmental decay that set the tone for the prior book; notably, this partial collapse of civilization was caused not by any event or disaster, but by our refusal as a society to deal with small problems while they’re small.
Parable of the Talents serves as a reminder that not only are there Black people in the future, there’s religion in the future as well - new creations like Lauren’s Earthseed alongside American Christianity continuing to wrestle with its identity and relationship to the state. My brain connects it to this article I recently read in The Atlantic about the decline of religious participation in the United States. The thesis is that religious observance is the cure for much of modernity - isolation, worth/dignity derived solely via work and financial success, etc - but also that modern life and its burdens make religious practice increasingly difficult for individuals to sustain. I find this an odd argument to square with (for example) the fact that Europe is broadly considered to have a healthier culture of work than the US but has about half the rate of religious participation. Regardless, it makes sense that the collapse of the vestiges of the American Dream would drive people to alternative (new and old) sources of purpose.
There’s an elephant in the room when discussing Parable of the Talents: Butler’s book, written in 1998, features a right-wing presidential candidate (in 2032) whose campaign slogan is literally “Make America Great Again”, who spreads rumors that his political opponents are engaged in child trafficking, claims that he alone is able to rescue America from chaos, promises a return to Christian values, speaks by question and innuendo so people can read into his words what they want to hear, and stirs up mob violence by his supporters against groups who oppose him. Some support him because they are true believers in his vision for Christian America, some because they are tired of the chaos and believe that they can separate out the “nonsense”, and some because, in the words of the protagonist, “[t]hey scratch a living, working long, hard hours at dangerous, dirty jobs, and they need a savior”.
Make no mistake, Andrew Steele Jarret is not Donald Trump: he’s a true believer rather than an opportunist2, running a network of churches instead of a business empire; his movement is much more concerned with affirmative belief and orthodoxy instead of just acting out grievances; most notably, he’s more interested in widespread political violence but is also unwilling/unable to seriously contest a lost election - the Constitution means more to him than the basic social contract. But the proximity of the description isn’t arbitrary; rather, it speaks to some of the main themes of the book that are urgent today: the way social stagnation/decline make people myopic and desperate; our need for both the comfort of community and the discomfort of vision, and how those needs interact; how hate can serve as a counterfeit of hope; and how civilization is a fragile set of institutions and habits that take much longer to build than to destroy.
This last idea - that civilization is a thin, transitory layer of material, institutions, and customs that we only assume to be permanent - is also a prominent theme in Lily Brooks-Dalton’s delightful novel The Light Pirate. This book is the story of a girl named Wanda growing up in a small coastal town in Florida slowly being abandoned as climate change makes it uninhabitable, but it’s also the story of the land itself and its transformation over time, as the normal processes of natural change are accelerated by the Anthropocene. As the sea level rises, hurricanes become more intense, the heat becomes more unbearable3, and the town is swallowed from the ocean inland4, fleeing residents take the vestiges of civilization with them, starting with restaurants and neighborhoods and escalating until municipal government, electricity, and emergency services are no longer tenable. As the area goes through re-wilding, the last inhabitants survive in a primitive state; the final message of the story is that living without civilization is brutal, but living without community is inhuman.
I loved reading these two books back-to-back5; despite the overlap in themes, the writing styles present a stark contrast, with Butler’s prose direct and plain, and Brooks-Dalton’s flowery and luxurious. It served as a great reminder, as this summer of connecting Futures concepts to artifacts in popular culture closes, that the future has always brought change and surprises in our world, and called on us to adapt and be resilient.
This is exactly the kind of thing Inayatullah referred to as the “weight of the past” in his Futures Triangle.
Like the 5th (and best) episode of Extrapolations, the rising temperature creates frequent wet-bulb events, where daytime temperatures/humidity in sunlight are severe enough to prevent the body from evaporative cooling, and force people to become nocturnal.
This has already been happening in Miami Beach for a decade when the moon is right.
Though the experience certainly rekindled our family’s emergency preparedness efforts!