I don’t believe in prescience. I don’t believe, for instance, that when Octavia E. Butler began to write her 1993 novel, “Parable of the Sower,” she was working with a kind of second sight.
In recent months, much has been made of connections between the book — which opens in 2024 and involves the rise of an authoritarian U.S. president — and our present politics. And now, as the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire, and a storm of other conflagrations has burned through more than 60 square miles of Los Angeles County, destroying 12,000 structures and killing at least 24, Butler’s novel has taken on an additional layer of resonance. It unfolds, for the most part, in a Southern California that has been devastated by the explosive impact of wildfire and climate change.
For Butler, this represented one possible future for Los Angeles. We shouldn’t read it as predictive. Rather, it reflects her finely tuned sensitivities to this place. Prescience, Lex McMenamin wrote recently in Teen Vogue, is “a concept Butler resisted, even before reality hewed ever-closer to her expectations. She wasn’t clairvoyant; she was a student of history.”
In Southern California, history is, or has often been, apocalyptic. The city exists amid a wildfire ecology and in a seismic landscape where faults regularly slip. There are floods and droughts and debris flows. There are Santa Ana winds. “It is hard,” Joan Didion wrote in her 1967 essay “Los Angeles Notebook,” “for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” The weather here, she continues, “is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.”
Didion and Butler are just two of the many writers who have approached Southern California through the lens of its disruptions. It’s a tradition going back more than a century. “According to my own bibliographic research,” Mike Davis reported in his 1998 book “Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster,” “the destruction of Los Angeles has been a central theme or image in at least 138 novels and films since 1909” — and that tally was completed more than a quarter of a century ago.
Davis’ list doesn’t include Claire Vaye Watkins’ “Gold Fame Citrus” (2015), which reckons with drought and desert, or Edan Lepucki’s 2014 debut, “California,” in which a couple flees what is left of Los Angeles for Northern California. It pre-dates María Amparo Escandón’s “L.A. Weather” (2021), about a family reckoning with its own upheavals in a place where air quality is determined by “smog, fire smoke, or marine fog,” and Steve Erickson’s “Our Ecstatic Days” (2005), in which a lake arises in the broken city.
Then there are the specific works Davis cites, among them Robert A. Heinlein’s 1952 novella “The Year of the Jackpot,” where “epic drought is quickly followed by flood, earthquake, nuclear war, plague, a Russian invasion, and the reemergence of Atlantis. It is the ultimate cascade of catastrophe.”
Davis also recalls Myron Brinig’s “The Flutter of an Eyelid,” a 1933 satire of Santa Monica bohemian life that ends with a vast earthquake, after which “Los Angeles tobogganed with almost one continuous movement into the water, the shore cities going first, followed by the inland communities; the business streets, the buildings, the motion picture studios.” Woefully neglected, it may be the best novel about the Southland no one has read.
And let’s not forget what is perhaps my favorite example of Southern California’s literature of disaster: Carolyn See’s magnificent novel “Golden Days” (1987), which concludes with a nuclear holocaust, although in the author’s unlikely configuration, this becomes a blessing of a sort. “There will be those,” she writes, “who say that the end came, I mean the END, with an avenging God and the whole shebang. … I heard that story, and I don’t think much of it. You can believe what you want to, of course. But I say there was a race of hearty laughers, mystics, crazies, who knew their real homes, or who had been drawn to this gold coast for years, and they lived through the destroying light, and on, into Light ages.”
Apocalypse as a happy ending? Only in Los Angeles, the cynics might insist. Still, let’s stick with this idea for a moment because it feels epicentral (to borrow a coinage from Davis) to the identity of the place. I want to avoid mythology; Los Angeles has too many myths already and they are not useful in coping with the cold hard facts of catastrophe. But just as each of us has a story, a point of view, a set of elements that define us, so too do the places where we live our lives. So too does Los Angeles.
In this enormous city, human and geologic time are juxtaposed in all sorts of unexpected ways. I think of the dozens of faults that crisscross the metropolitan area, 10 to 15 kilometers below the surface of the streets. The disturbances they cause, like the wildfires we are now experiencing, are as much a part of living here as any of the more palatable clichés. I think of the La Brea Tar Pits, bubbling with prehistoric fossils hard up against the bustling commerce of Wilshire Boulevard.
Which is the real Los Angeles? All of these, and more.
To write and live here demands enhanced vision. But this is not the same as second sight. Let’s call it a heightened state of awareness. Let’s call it keeping one’s antennae up.
“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?” Raymond Chandler muses in the closing pages of “The Big Sleep,” one of the city’s foundational texts. “In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.”
Chandler was not making a claim to prescience either, although the future he described belongs to each of us. He was simply recording what he already understood. Something similar is the case with Butler, who, writing in the early 1990s, was extrapolating from the Los Angeles she knew. Two years before “Parable of the Sower” came out, the city erupted in an insurrection after four white LAPD officers were acquitted in the videotaped beating of Black motorist Rodney King. The year after it appeared, the 6.7 Northridge earthquake killed 57 and caused as much as $50 billion in damage, which may seem cheap when the total cost of the 2025 fires is calculated.
How could all of this not have infiltrated her imagination? How could it not have influenced what she wrote?
“We can’t live this way!” a character laments early in Butler’s novel.
“We do live this way,” her spouse responds.
There it is in a nutshell, the tension that drives the city, an impossible place that is itself full of possibility. Perhaps every piece of Los Angeles literature is at heart about disaster, whether as its dominant register or an undertone.
David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion.
