I saw the fire of little Saigon through the eyes of Octavia Butler

On the morning of June 10, I saw a cloud of grayish smoke rising from Little Saigon. I was walking down Elder Street. I had just been through King County Juvenile Detention. The plan was to take the 36 bus to Beacon Hill at a stop near the intersection of 12th and Jackson. But my plan was thwarted by a fire that, according to reports, “started at midnight” and destroyed much of the building vacated by the Viet-Wah supermarket in 2022. Seattle firefighters were still battling the blaze almost 12 hours after it started. . Buses, automobiles, streetcars, bicycles and pedestrians could not enter the area around 12th and Jackson.

As I approached the police “Do Not Cross Tape” on Jackson's east side, as more and more smoke drifted into the otherwise sunny sky, I noticed a number of people sleeping in the he shadowed space between the sidewalk and the walls of this place and this affair, the intensity of a feeling of dread struck and surprised me. It was as if my own experience of this city's not unusual (and self-imposed) scenes of misery, degradation and destruction was being replaced by someone else's. But who made me feel this way? A moment's thought revealed the answer: Octavia Butler.

Celebrate our Seattle Reads 2024 selection “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler by attending an event! Learn more about pic.twitter.com/hdOYv1fjh6

– Seattle Public Library (@SPLBuzz) May 2, 2024

At the end of May, I started reading two books, one by David Bohm Fullness and implicit order and that of Octavia Butler Parable of the sower. The first concerns a metaphysical interpretation of the strange world revealed by quantum physics; the first is a novel from 1993 that begins the year we are currently in, 2024. News from Parable of the sower made it an obvious choice for the Seattle Public Library's Seattle 2024 readings. I decided to join this “citywide book reading group” because I had never read what must be Octavia Butler's second most famous novel. (For reasons related to my obsession with time and quantum physics, I kept coming back to KinshipButler's most famous work.)

Taken from the Seattle Read webpage for Parable of the sower:

When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California finds itself fraught with dangers, from widespread water shortages to masses of drifters willing to do anything to live to a other day. Lauren Olamina, 15, lives in a gated community with her pastor father, family and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to the emotions of others.

Hyperempathy is key to the novel, to the novelist, and to the intense fear I felt watching the old location of the Viet-Wah supermarket go up in smoke. Lauren Olamina, ParableThe teenage narrator of , suffers from an illness that makes her feel the pain of others (and other animals). The illness, medically termed “organic delusional syndrome,” resulted from his mother's abuse, during pregnancy, of a prescription drug, Paracetco, which was “as popular as coffee.” The drug, initially intended for people with Alzheimer's disease, proved ideal for a competitive society. It improved intellectual performance and gave its users (mostly professionals) an edge in calculations and computers. Lauren's mother did not survive her birth. And, worst of all, she is hyperempathetic in a world that has almost lost all empathy.

Climate change has turned much of the country into a wasteland. Old illnesses return; new diseases are coming. Blizzards freeze these states; tornadoes ravage these states. The man in the White House, President Donner, is essentially Donald Trump on steroids – in fact, America's “carnage” in Trump's inaugural address is almost identical to that of Parables. Almost everyone is homeless or in a gang. There are still law enforcement officers, but nothing resembling law and order in the usual sense. Capitalism still exists, but no jobs, no middle class, no social services. The latest drug makes young people high at the sight of fire. The food is too expensive. Everyone is armed to the teeth. If you're lucky, you live in a gated community. If you're really lucky, you live in Oregon, Washington, or faraway Canada (the novel is set in Southern California).

The horror never ends. Page after page. It’s relentlessly intense. The corpses, the misery, the stench, the broken bones, the fires, the smoke. The reader becomes one with Lauren's hyperempathy. You see and feel it as she does, and so does her creator, Butler, whose vision of the American future after all was so present to her senses that she, like Lauren, decided to leave Southern California and to move to the Pacific Northwest. Butler spent his final years (1999 to 2006) at Lake Forest Park. She was perhaps the region's first climate refugee. Here, before the shit really hits the fans. I saw Seattle 2024 through his eyes.