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.

Because her predictions/imaginings come from character, from knowing how people behave in both extreme and ordinary circumstances: It is not, however, what happens when Octavia Butler predicted the future. “And that,” said my friend, looking around at us all through his monocle, checking that we shared his pleasure in the story, “is what happens when you try to predict the future.”

And then, at some point, the hero (this was the sort of story, of course, that had a hero rather than a protagonist or main character) whips out his slide rule and performs a lightning calculation. A dear friend, to whom I was married for about a decade and a half, used to love to talk about a science fiction story he’d read as a boy, a marvelously built world full of moving sidewalks and hovercraft.

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