When the Los Angeles fires began last January, the designer and futurist Tracee Worley was re-reading Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler’s chillingly prescient novel, written in 1993 but set in the 2020s. In the book, climate change has devastated the world, an increasingly dangerous and inequitable society has resulted in many people living in private, heavily-armed compounds, and Los Angeles is ablaze, burned up by people addicted to a drug called “pyro.” In the book’s sequel, Parable of the Talents, a hyper-conservative Christian fundamentalist candidate rises to power under the now-familiar slogan “Make America Great Again.”
As with many people who have recently re-read Butler’s work—and a new literary biography of Butler, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler by Susana M. Morris was published this month—Worley was disquieted by the unsettling accuracy of the series. Butler was a science fiction writer born in Altadena—one of the Los Angeles county communities devastated by the fires— and her Parable series has aged almost too well, with vivid scenes from the books leaping off the page and into reality with terrifying speed.
“Butler’s vision fits our disorienting moment of flashbacks and fast-forwards,” wrote professor Tiya Miles in a 2024 analysis of Butler’s work for the Atlantic. “Russia’s corrupt designs on a reconstituted Soviet empire, devastating war in the Middle East, the resurgent appeal of white ethnonationalism—it’s as though 20th-century scenes are replaying before us, reconfigured for maximal 21st-century damage.”
For Worley, though, the message of Butler’s work was even more personal. A futurist, Worley has long worked for companies, especially tech companies, to help forecast trends and imagine products that would be useful for what might be coming next. It’s a practice, she says, “of studying change across several different realms: social, cultural, often very technological. You do that to imagine what might happen next and help us prepare for it.”
As a Black woman, though, Worley had become increasingly aware of how unwilling many companies were to consider a future that would not only not offer a better life for most people, but one in which life could be demonstrably worse, where climate change, social inequality, ultra-nationalism, and the omnipresence of racism continue. In the futurism field, she says, “We don’t make room for darkness or pessimism.”
The potential collapse of familiar social structures and guardrails, like the kind described in the Parables series, Worley adds, is not necessarily going to “produce freedom or liberation. It could easily lead to fascism and fundamentalism.” For Black people, who have lived through “so many horrific apocalypses,” she says, this lesson is easier to absorb. Not so in the disciplines of futurism and human-centered design. “Those are fundamentally optimistic fields,” she says. “We don’t make room for darkness or pessimism.” But this generally ignores the true value of a kind of pessimism, she adds: “Expect that things will change, surprise, and collapse. Know that you can survive it, but you need to be more communal in the way that you approach it.”
“Expect that things will change, surprise, and collapse. Know that you can survive it, but you need to be more communal in the way that you approach it.”
That’s what happens in the Parables series, in which the main character, a young woman named Lauren Olamina, ultimately designs the Earthseed system, a religious discipline rooted in the notion that God is change, and that the image of God, in a certain sense, be shaped by believers who know that change is inevitable and embrace it.
During the Los Angeles fires, Worley, who is based in the Bay Area, felt compelled to talk to other Black women futurists—an extremely underrepresented group in the field, she says—and dive more deeply into Butler’s work. Worley’s conversations with other Black women futurists resulted in a March 2025 panel at South by Southwest, titled “What Octavia Knew.” Afterwards, she got “much deeper into her methodology,” Butler’s exact methods of futurism, by studying Butler’s massive archives at the Pasadena-based Huntington Library.
Butler died of a stroke in 2006, when she was just 58 years old. The Huntington acquired Butler’s papers in 2008, a huge archive of some estimated 8,000 documents. “There’s a treasure trove of evidence of how she did this,” Worley says. “There are 350 boxes, and hundreds of things in them.” As she began to explore the material, Worley learned a great deal about how Butler could so accurately foresee our future — and, even in the midst of an unfolding dystopia, how not to despair.
Often, Butler’s fans endow her with a sort of clairvoyance, a seer’s eye that allowed her to predict with chilling accuracy in the way that she did. But Butler, Worley says, was relentlessly analytical, relying on forensically detailed analysis of current events. Butler coined the term “histofuturism” to describe her method of writing speculative fiction, where analyzing past trends, historical events, and societal forces helped her fix her gaze into the future.
“She read voraciously,” Worley says. Butler haunted the Los Angeles public library and ventured across disciplines. In her files, Worley found Butler’s meticulous research, neatly marked, from a dizzying number of fields. She lists some of the files she’s found: “Medicine-physical health, medicine-mental health, personality, cancer, molecular biology, twins and other multiples, ob-gyn, blindness, psychology, biomedical sciences, cults, cults and religion, Black people and Latinos.”
For the Parable series, Worley says, “She was tracking newspaper articles and I’m assuming books as well about climate change and political corruption and gated communities. She annotated these things. She looked for patterns between them. She looked at immigration.” Worley describes getting the “chills” when she reached the notecard on immigrants, which described the ways they would be made into scapegoats.
Sometimes, the commentary on Butler’s work stops here, with the observation of how she predicted much of what we’re currently living through. But for Worley, in her discipline as a futurist, Butler’s books and archives also contain profound lessons about how to move forward.
“She painted a very clear picture about survival,” Worley says. “That’s something I take away. Survival is a collective act. All the characters who survive—and many people do not survive these books—are not alone.”
“Survival is a collective act. All the characters who survive—and many people do not survive these books—are not alone.”
Worley describes herself as “obsessed with dystopias,” as Butler also clearly was. Worley has also studied Afro-pessimism, which views anti-Black racism as a structural element of many societies and cultures, rather than an aberration that will eventually be corrected. Its power, Worley says, is that it “strips away illusions about American racial progress and forces us to confront reality about a system. That’s the power of speculative fiction when you turn it on racial analysis.”
All of this can sound tremendously pessimistic, but in the end, Worley sees seeds of radical hope in Butler’s vision, seeing her not as a pessimist but as a realist and a disciplined visionary. “When she looked at the world with all the climate collapse and white supremacism and patriarchy, and greed, she didn’t stop there,” Worley says. “Which is why I don’t think the prediction or the diagnosis is where we should end. The story itself is her insistence on imagining yourself through it.”
After re-reading the Parables series, Worley re-read A Few Rules for Predicting the Future, a slim book based on an essay that Butler first published in Essence in the year 2000. In it, Butler writes that in preparing to write the Parables series, “I needed to think about how a country might slide into fascism.” She was less interested in the fighting of World War II, she adds, “than in the prewar story of how Germany changed as it suffered social and economic problems, as Hitler and others bludgeoned and seduced, as the Germans responded to the bludgeoning and the seduction and to their own history, and as Hitler used that history to manipulate them.”
Once more, Butler’s essay is not about the act of prediction, but what to do with what is discovered. “Unintended consequences and human reactions,” she warns, can create futures that seem to “defy any obvious trend,” leading her to ask, “So why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible?” She then answers a question that she and many of her fans share. “Because making predictions is one way to give warnings when we see ourselves drifting in dangerous directions. Because prediction is a useful way of pointing out safer, wiser courses. Because, most of all, our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even if we can’t control it absolutely.”
As she continues incorporating her studies of Butler’s work into her own futurism, Worley says, she turns again and again to Butler’s fearsome imagination, which allowed her to see so far ahead, both through one possible hellscape and then beyond it. Butler’s novels, Worley says, “ are a rehearsal of what could happen afterward, and I find that very optimistic.”
“I love the act of imagining how we might survive, if the worst were to happen,” she adds. “And how to survive it in a way that doesn’t cost us our humanity. I don’t think she was a pessimist. I do think she was a realist. I do think she believed that collapse is feasible.”
For Worley, the antidote to despair is imagination, “the tool for all of us to escape this,” she says. “I think our imagination is our most underutilized resource to get ourselves the fuck out of this nightmare.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.