I was less interested in the fighting of World War II 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. So I reread The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and other books on Nazi Germany. When I was preparing to write Parable of the Talents, I needed to think about how a country might slide into fascism–something that America does in Talents. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope. In this case, it was frustrating because the one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope. It’s sadly easy to reverse meaning, in fact, to tell a lie, by offering an accurate but incomplete quote. Then he quoted his own question: “What’s the answer?” The article ended with the first three words of my reply, wrongly left standing alone: “There isn’t one.” He mentioned my talk, listed some of my books and the future problems they dealt with.

Several days later, by mail, I received a copy of the young man’s story in his college newspaper. You can be one of them if you choose to be.” Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. “No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’ “I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming. “SO DO YOU REALLY believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. Reflection : When a student asks Butler what the answer is to ending the suffering in the world, she replies, “…there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems.

She wrote an essay in 2000 for Essence Magazine that teaches us the capacity we have to understand the future, as well as our limitations. Octavia Butler was an author of moving and prophetic science fiction novels.

Octavia e butler historical fiction