Where It All Goes Down
California, 2024-2027
Don't you forget it: setting is made up of two elements, both place and time. This novel, Parable of the Sower, is set in California in the near future, during the years 2024-2027.
Where Are We?
We start off in the fictional town of Robledo, which is somewhere in southern California—but far enough away from the ocean that Lauren has never seen it until she leaves home for the first time as a teenager. Her neighborhood in Robledo is basically a cul-de-sac surrounded by a wall that keeps out dangerous strangers. So, it's kind of a post-apocalyptic gated community. Now, Lauren's not super rich or anything, but compared to most of the population, her family and neighbors are doing pretty well.
Robledo is a kind of an enclave, a little place where Lauren is sheltered as a youth and blocked from experiencing much of the outside world. Her information early on mostly comes from the Window, which is a kind of television bringing in news. But the Window stops functioning pretty early in the novel, which leaves Lauren to get her news from the radio and other archaic sources. There doesn't seem to be much of an Internet at all in this world. Lauren knows from the start that life beyond Robledo is dangerous.
At the halfway point in the novel, Robledo is destroyed by the face-painting pyro addicts. Once that cataclysmic event occurs, Lauren has to head north, gathering around her whatever followers for Earthseed she can find along the way. She has some maps to help her navigate, and she has a radio device at one point, but for the most part, Lauren and crew are winging it. Among the real-life roads they travel are Highway 101, State 156, and I-5. They also visit the Pacific Ocean and stop at some pleasant parks.
What Time Is It?
Octavia Butler envisions a period from 2024-2027 when the United States is pretty much collapsing. There's still the presidency, but as Bankole points out toward the end of the novel, state lines are functioning more like international borders, and everything seems to be in collapse. Gasoline is scarce, cars are rare, water is expensive, and paying jobs are often just some myth, things that may or may not exist up north.
Science fiction writers sometimes say that near-future science fiction is the hardest type of sci-fi to write. After all, if a sci-fi story is set in 3000, we just assume that a lot of things have gone on in the hundreds of years between now and then that have caused the world to change so much. There's a lot of flexibility, and there's room to get things wrong. None of us will be alive in the year 3000, after all. But a story set in 2024-2027? Well, that's right around the corner. What the author predicts needs to be much more plausible and based on the life we're familiar with.
But then again, it's also said that sci-fi writers don't really try to predict the future—they just use the future as a metaphor to comment on the present. So Octavia Butler, writing this novel in the early nineties, might have been using the near-future setting as a way to show most readers what the poverty and other misfortunes she and other minorities were experiencing back then looked like to them at that very time.
In other words, for some people, right now, gasoline is scarce, cars are rare, water is expensive, and jobs are often a myth. But say that, and you might get in trouble, or you might get not published. Set it in 2024-2027, and then people might be willing to listen.