Octavia's prophecy

The case for hyper(interspecies)-empathy

I opened my book club’s February 11, 2019 discussion of Octavia Butler’s famous – and now demonstrably prescient – 1993 book Parable of the Sower with these words:

“I hated this book and it was one of the best books I’ve ever read.”

Listen if you prefer:

It was a snowy, cold evening in our small Colorado mountain town and my then almost one-year old first-born daughter, Clara, slept peacefully in one of those close-wrap baby carriers, her head and body curled up next to my heart, the corner of her face just peeking out.

I remember that moment as if it were last week. After I said those words, our book club’s host for the night – Amy – who had selected the book – looked at me and my daughter and her eyes welled up.

“Oh, Becca. I’m so sorry. I don’t think I could have read this book when Sam was Clara’s age.”

I knew what she meant. The book was almost impossible for me to read. The rampant systemic injustices and racial tensions, the wide and widening socio-economic gulf, and wave after wave of environmental disasters — they were all so vivid, so eerily real. Instead of a dystopian future, Parable seemed to describe the shape of the larger present tense in which we sat discussing it in a paradoxically cozy living room, gathered around a wood-burning stove, noshing on delicious bowls of soup and bright salad, enjoying the warmth of intergenerational, female camaraderie.

This was 2019. Before George Floyd, before COVID laid bare the starkest of disparities, before 2024 registered a round-up (from 1.46) to 1.5 degrees Celsius warming – a figure nearly outpacing climate scientists’ declared tipping point. Before lots of things. But after lots of things, too.

I tried reading it in our clawfoot tub, drawing a near-scalding bath and adding a heaping handful of salts. But instead of calming me or relaxing me, the water stung and left my skin flushed. The salts and prose found their way into all of the cracks in my mental and emotional fortitude, and widened them like a freeze-thaw cycle.

It was just so dark. So dystopian. Sometimes Parable felt too close to the challenging world in which my tiny daughter would — did — does live (now with her little sister, too) – a world from which it felt like no amount of my motherly warmth and love could protect her.

At the time I was reading it, I had trouble with this. Maybe it was because I was a new mom. I’m not sure.

Fast forward to now and I’d get out of the bath, wrap myself in a towel, and remember I’m not a sky-is-falling eco-doomsdayer or sayer. I am a mother. I love people. I love more-than-human nature. I can (mostly) hold the good and the bad in one hand, one head, one big heart.

Dr. Howard Frumkin – an environmental public health guru – opens his book Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves¹ by quoting Charles’ Dickens:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

To the best of times, Frumkin names progress in material wellbeing. ‘Poor people today are living better than royalty a few centuries ago.’ He enumerates examples like longer life expectancies, higher levels of literacy, and better health writ large. Frumkin also acknowledges the elephant in the room: best-of-times progress is not evenly or equally distributed.

When he talks about the worst of times, he describes how today’s progress and prosperity have come at a cost. To arrive where we are, we have harvested our planet’s resources more than we can afford, polluted oceans and air, and come dangerously close to global tipping points begetting ‘irreversible and catastrophic’ changes.

For Frumkin, the challenge now is to preserve as many human benefits as we can within the limits of what the planet can handle. And, he sees this as an opportunity with lots of solutions, because what’s good for more-than-human nature is also good for humans.

I’m with Frumkin on this. And, it turns out, so is Butler. In her 2000 essay, A few rules for predicting the future, she writes about a conversation with a student:

The student asks: “SO DO YOU REALLY believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” …

“I didn’t make up the problems…” I pointed out. ‘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.’

“Okay,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”

“There isn’t one,” I told him.

“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least.

You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

In the wake of the Los Angeles’ fires, Parable’s readers – and especially scholars who study her work – have renewed the chant, “Octavia tried to tell us,” pulling out eerily prescient likenesses: the portrayal of a world split apart by inequalities, Parable’s Robledo all too similar to the devastated Altadena neighborhood, the book’s February 1st, 2025 journal entry, “We had a fire today” – so close to today’s date.

We shiver knowing the book’s February 1st fire preceded bigger flames to come.

But, while we marvel at Butler’s shiny crystal ball, we are missing the point.

Butler herself, who died in 2006, dismissed her ability to predict the future, describing herself as a diligent student of history and keen observer who played out current events to their logical conclusions decades into the future.

“It’s okay to look at Butler’s work as prophetic but we should also look at it as solution-based,”

said Brianna Whiteside, a scholar and public intellectual who has studied Butler’s work. From Whiteside’s vantage,

Butler’s Parable is an answer to the question “How do you survive when the world is going to hell?”

Yes. Answer. Solutions. Thousands of them. Me. You. We. Choice.

It is the solutions — not the dystopian future in which we seem to be living — that make me think of Parable almost every day right now, a full six years after I read it.

If I were to attend my book club today, I would amend my opening remarks. I would say,

“This is one of the best books I’ve ever read.”

Period. No hate.

And then I would trip over my words, emphatically, enthusiastically, breathlessly highlighting the solution Butler offers:

Parable’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, a 15 year-old Black girl growing up in a gated community in California, is a hyperempath. She feels other peoples’ pain – and pleasure – as if they were her own. Her hyperempathy isn’t just about understanding others, it is a full emotional and physical embodiment of their lived experiences.

As anyone who has ever felt someone else’s pain (which is, by the way, all of us) can imagine, this is a challenging – even crippling – way to live in a violent and ever-more-pain-filled world. But it is also a source of unparalleled strength.

“My hyperempathy is a liability, yes, but it’s also a tool,”

Lauren says of her condition.

In an era where empathy has literally been banned from school curricula

and in a time plagued by violence, destruction, and degradation that can feel incomprehensible in their gravity, scale, and speed – sometimes numbness seems the only way to get through the day.

And, like Lauren and Butler, I believe feeling with others — hyperempathy — is one solution. And each of us feeling makes for thousands…millions…billions of solutions.

Then I take it one step farther: interspecies hyperempathy — feeling others’ pain and pleasure where “others” includes other humans and more-than-human nature. This is the solution I am trying to be. Even when I don’t get it right. I’m trying.

May empathy be Octavia’s prophecy.

❤️, B

1. Full disclosure: I haven't read this book (yet), just enjoyed listening to Dr. Frumkin talk about this – and other things – on the Biophilic Solutions podcast.