The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 4 April 1999
by Octavia E. Butler
This book brings forth an utterly nightmarish vision of California and the USA in 2027, but one with an almost shockingly firm grounding in reality. Los Angeles has devolved into walled island neighborhoods in a sea of utter chaos and collapse. Everything we take for granted today comes with a price. No-one is to be trusted. Everyday violence is a way of life. Slavery is returning. In one of the gated communities, a small unlikely collection of residents tries to keep neighborly order. Lauren, a young woman in that neighborhood, has the gift and curse of hyperempathy, feeling other peoples pleasures and pain, and can see the day when the encroaching chaos will crush her safe little village. When that day finally comes, the world that erupts into her life is frightening. Lauren, envisioning a hopeful new religion she calls Earthseed, goes on a journey north, seeking security. The book is steeped in her own vision, as well as biblical references. This future is almost too dark to contemplate, and Butler, perhaps has gone to unecessary lengths to express that darkness. Though the characters pretty much ended up where they started, there is, however, a vague hopeful tone to the end of the nightmare. Butler treads on west-coast post-apocalyptic ground covered previously by Kim Stanley Robinson, but brings home a more memorably realistic and often riveting account of the future.
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