In California in 2024–27, climate change, drought, economic collapse, and violent inequality have pushed most people behind walls. Inside one cul-de-sac community, Lauren Oya Olamina, a minister's daughter, lives with hyperempathy — a drug-caused condition that makes her literally share others' pain and pleasure. Secretly she is composing Earthseed: The Books of the Living, verses built on her conviction that "God is Change" and that humanity's destiny lies among the stars. When fire-worshipping addicts destroy her community and kill her family, Lauren escapes disguised as a man and walks north, gathering companions and converts on the road. Butler's novel joins survival narrative to the founding of a new faith, and its account of water scarcity, corporate towns, and authoritarian politics has made it one of the most widely read American dystopian novels of the 1990s.
Author: Octavia E. Butler · Original publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows (New York), 1993
