Examining Octavia E. Butler’s post-apocalyptic Parable series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), this chapter argues that Butler uses an Afrofuturist aesthetic to create an imagined future that is not simply a description of American life, but a possible direction for rethinking who we are and how we live. It explores the prescient politics of Butler’s science fiction by showing how the political and economic systems in which the characters move both deeply impact how they live and are also strikingly absent. At its most basic political level, the Parable series offers a dystopian warning about possible futures and about the present. Responding to the neoliberal undermining of the values of public services under Reagan and beyond, the novels warn about both power-seekers filling political vacuums and our own willingness to ignore the consequences. The chapter ends with an examination of the benefits and drawbacks of Earthseed, the protagonist’s fictional religion, that prompts readers to reconsider the value of community itself, one dedicated to new ways of living that will challenge people to grow in new ways.

The apocalyptic and postapocalyptic are staples of young adult fiction. While sometimes conflated with the dystopian genre, young adult postapocalyptic fiction (YAPA) is neither simply dystopian nor a watered-down version of adult postapocalyptic fiction. Young adult postapocalyptic fiction provides a stage on which young protagonists question the meaning and purpose of community and develop innovative responses to issues of identity and agency under challenging conditions (whether those come from zombies, pandemic disease, nuclear war, environmental degradation, etc.). YAPA novels include some classic postapocalyptic accounts of survival after nuclear war, as in Robert O’Brien’s Zfor Zachariah (1974) and the more recent popular series starting with Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) and including James Dashner’s Maze Runner (2009), Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies (2005), and Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011). These novels are to be contrasted with other YAPA novels, such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker or Octavia Butler’s Parable series. In each of those novels, the fact of living after a devastating event (or series of events) is not simply the setting of the novel but also a feature of the reader’s experience with the novel.