A 1993 Octavia Butler novel imagined the world in 2024accurately -

The effects of climate change are reshaping America. Those with sufficient resources retreat inside protected communities. Those with even greater resources finance an exploratory Mars mission, presumably in an attempt to one day escape Earth’s destabilization.

In the political realm, a populist presidential candidate denounces claims made by scientists, promising the electorate that he’s going to “return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century.”

This is life in 2024.

Or at least it’s life in 2024 as imagined by the writer Octavia Butler 31 years ago.

“Parable of the Sower,” a 1993 novel by the late science fiction writer and MacArthur Fellow, depicts a future America ravaged by ecological collapse and civil unrest. The book’s narrator, African American teenager Lauren Olamina, begins writing a journal in July 2024 documenting the upheaval.

In the time it’s taken us to reach 2024 for real, Butler’s story has been adapted as an opera and a graphic novel; a movie adaptation is also in the works. In 2017, director Melina Matsoukas cited Butler among the Black thinkers who inspired her “Formation” video from Beyoncé’s award-winning album “Lemonade.”

In September 2020 — perhaps fueled by an interest in apocalyptic fiction prompted by covid-19 lockdowns — “Parable” appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for the first time, 27 years after publication.

Butler didn’t live to see the renewed interest in her ninth novel — she died in 2006 — but she indicated that the issues faced by the characters in “Parable” and by the United States today were inevitable.

In a radio interview on “Democracy Now!” three months before her death, Butler said the universe of “Parable” was about “what happens because we don’t trouble to correct some of the problems that we’re brewing for ourselves right now. Global warming is one of those problems.”

It’s a subject on which her novel is highly prescient. Lauren, the protagonist, observes in 2024 that “people have changed the climate of the world” and are blindly “waiting for the old days to come back.”

She describes floods, droughts and a storm that has “bounced around the Gulf, killing people from Florida to Texas and down into Mexico,” claiming the lives of 700 Americans. The storm bears an uncanny resemblance to Hurricane Michael, the first Category 5 cyclone to make landfall in Florida in almost 30 years when it hit in 2018, causing a $1.5 billion loss in agriculture that mirrors the book’s scenes of weather-driven crop destruction.

Driven to seek shelter from an unstable climate and rising lawlessness, the future citizens of “Parable” have taken up arms and retreated to “walled estates.” Lauren’s family is based 20 miles from Los Angeles in Robledo, described as “once a rich, green, unwalled little city” that in the book’s 2024 is fortified against marauding outsiders.

We haven’t quite entered this dystopia, but there has been a boom in gated communities. By 2009, a reported 11 million Americans had chosen to live behind walls; six years later, that figure had risen to 15 million. Today, gated communities offer security measures from surveillance systems to 24/7 armed guards.

In “Parable,” one reason so many citizens opt to hunker down is a distrust of police. In Lauren’s world, law enforcement has been semi-privatized: Officers collect a fee when responding to a crime.

Cops seem to offer little help to their customers who are fearful of the criminals trying to lay waste to their gated communities. This police indifference was written by Butler as a “critique of the neo-conservative assault on the welfare state” — and may reflect widespread criticism of the police amid the 1992 unrest following the acquittal of police officers in the arrest and beating of Rodney King in Butler’s city of Los Angeles.

In the real world, the number of private officers is on the rise. Last year, the New York Times reported that in most major U.S. cities, there are at least three times as many security guards as police officers on the street.

And distrust in police is high. In July 2020, amid demonstrations against police violence around the country following the murder of George Floyd, the Pew Research Center found that only around a third of Americans thought police used appropriate force and treated racial groups equally, down sharply from four years earlier.

Political leaders in “Parable” try to address social anxieties by promising a great reset. Presidential nominee Christopher Donner declares that, immediately following his inauguration, he’ll put people back to work and suspend “worker protection laws” for employers prepared to accommodate and train a labor force made up of vagrants.

By the time of the novel’s 2032-set sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” Donner is being challenged by Andrew Steele Jarret, a religious fundamentalist who’s running for president on the slogan “Make America great again.”

During the turbulence of the first book, Lauren decides the authorities are unable to help and resolves to leave Robledo in the hope of finding a less adversarial way of living. She sets out to share her private “Earthseed” philosophy that people should try to live sustainably.

Studying books on Native American bushcraft and heading north on Highway 101, Lauren abandons the work ethic that authorities are keen to espouse. Driven by her “hyper-empathy,” a sensory condition brought about by her mother’s drug use while pregnant that causes the teenager to experience the emotions of others, Lauren hopes to establish a community where people can learn to accept change and cooperate.

But she might need to go a lot farther than the highway can take her. Earlier, she’d dismissed the ongoing space exploration in 2024 as a folly. “All that money wasted on another crazy space trip,” she’d mused as a 15-year-old at the start of the novel. “So many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter.”

But now, she says: “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. It’s a destiny we’d better pursue if we hope to be anything other than smooth-skinned dinosaurs — here today, gone tomorrow, our bones mixed with the bones and ashes of our cities.”

In the novel, President-elect Donner vows to abolish the federal Astronautics Department. Donald Trump, by contrast, revived the National Space Council while speculating, “This is infinity here. It could be infinity. We don’t really don’t know. But it could be. It has to be something — but it could be infinity, right?” Later, he created the Space Force.

The novel opens with a description of a failed Mars mission. In this sense, we may actually be ahead of where Butler envisioned the planet in 2024: Three years ago, NASA’s Perseverance rover “Percy” touched down in Mars’s Jezero Crater.

Six days after the Percy landed and 15 years after the death of the creator of “Parable of the Sower,” the agency officially named its rover’s site of arrival the Octavia E. Butler Landing in the author’s honor.

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