Credit: Cathleen Williams
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Chanting “No Kings!” and “no hate, no fear, immigrants welcome here!” over 5 million Americans protested the policies of Donald Trump on No Kings Day June 14th. Even people’s clothing made statements, displaying messages like No Kings, No Tyrants and Power to the People. Some shirts read Octavia Butler Tried to Tell Us, aimed at drawing people to read the words of a visionary writer who years ago had seen these dangerous political times coming.
Before her death in 2006 Butler wrote 16 books of science fiction, Afro-futurism and speculative fiction by which she warned of the growth of American fascism. Activists, writers and thinkers across the U.S. have said that her 1993 and 1998 novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents were especially prophetic. This April a graphic novel version of Parable of the Talents was published, 27 years after the text version first came out and 19 years after Butler’s death. What accounts for this renewed interest?
It’s because today’s events have validated her warnings. To take just one example, when the news show Democracy Now! reported on the recent fires in LA and Altadena January 16th they noted that “These climate-fueled fires have also drawn renewed attention to the writing of the late Octavia Butler”. They explained that years earlier she had forecast that the government’s failure to address climate change was putting her Altadena neighborhood at risk of burning in the future. She was proven right.
On a national level, in 1998 Parable of the Talents looked thirty-four years ahead to imagine America’s possible future, producing an eerie alarm about what we’re facing now. Not only did she envision a 2032 America where poverty and homelessness have become epidemic, and where the police openly violate the rights of the poor. She presented a fascist who gets elected president, using the slogan “Make America Great Again”!
FICTION AS REVOLUTIONARY INSPIRATION
The new graphic novel version of Parable of the Talents was published by Abrams ComicsArts, written and drawn by the award-winning team of Damian Duffy, John Jennings and David Brame. While some might assume that a “comic book” format cannot convey important political information, Duffy explains in the book that it deals with “the devastation of climate change and the rise of fascism in the United States”. That view is shared by Nikki High, owner of the Altadena store Octavia’s Bookshelf where the new version was unveiled, who told the Los Angeles Times “it’s an organic push to meet people where they are and to understand that different forms of media helps us retain information. We’re all different”.
Revolutionaries often find inspiration in books of fiction and the debates they provoke. During the old era of Industrial capitalism, the suffering of France’s working class was depicted so powerfully in the 1862 novel Les Misérables that it added to the social pressure that erupted just 9 years later in the world’s first socialist revolution, the Paris Commune. Writer V.S. Pritchett quoted Russia’s Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin as feeling that Anton Chekhov’s short story Ward No. 6 in 1892 “made him a revolutionary”. And the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 added to the calls for the abolition of slavery, achieved by the Civil War that began 8 years later. The debate over that book included demands that African American writers also be published on the topic, especially those who had actually experienced slavery.
Parable of the Talents is about today’s different era. As the main character says “I have seen education become a privilege of the rich. I have watched convenience, profit, and inertia excuse greater, more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger and disease become inevitable for more and more people.” As the economic revolution provoked by new digital technology eliminates much of the human labor from production, this also eliminates the very basis for the capitalist mode of production. The book’s characters are from that section of the old industrial working class which now is being pushed into today’s new social class, made up of displaced and dispossessed people.
REVOLUTIONARY LESSONS AND WARNINGS
The book’s new government opens homeless shelters only to entrap poor people, using electronic stun collars to force them into slave labor. Amidst that misery, pain and death, a young African American woman slowly develops writings and methods of organization to help people escape and organize themselves into free and diverse communities. On one farm, some of them overthrow their enslavers, but when the government begins to hunt them they ultimately see that their only safety is in organizing others to rise up.
Google’s AI Overview reports that the two Parable books “inspired activists and communities to create alternative models of living and governance, focusing on sustainability, resilience, and collective action”. John Jennings notes that “Damian and I were in the mindset that, in some ways, we were providing some kind of ‘service’ for the greater good because of the lessons and warnings embedded”. This era’s revolutionaries need that same mindset about our own work, producing lessons and warnings about how the ruling class is trying to preserve its system of private property by means of the new technofascism.
Revolutionary service to the greater good also means fighting in partnership with the newly emerging class against that technofascism. As Butler wrote,
“Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action –
Or it does nothing.”
Octavia Butler’s book had her characters unite around the idea that “Only in partnership can we thrive, grow, Change. Only in partnership can we live.” The book deals with impacts of technology, but was not able to also go into how digital technology could be owned in common to serve the collective needs of humanity and of the Earth. She left the task of explaining that to all of us.
Published on August 4, 2025
This article originated in Rally!
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