Lessons for the End of the World

“We must move on to the true issues of our time,” wrote the late poet Nikki Giovanni. The line, from Giovanni’s “A Historical Footnote to Consider Only When All Else Fails,” is an incisive, complicating refrain to this essay from Hanif Abdurraqib, in which the author details his experience of the California wildfires and the AI-generated distractions that surrounded them. Alongside Giovanni, Abdurraqib considers Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, hailed for its dystopian vision, and gently urges readers to see beyond its parallels to our moment. Even awe can be a kind of distraction.

“Sower” is about a future on fire, but the author’s present was on fire, too. We can’t always be looking toward the future. The climate disaster isn’t coming. It has been upon us for years—at this point, most of the years that I’ve been alive. The crises are here, and they are speeding along, and they are not particularly interested in whether you, or I, or any of us are clocking their presence. The crises have no ego, no desire for acknowledgment. The world will collapse with or without the agreement of the people inhabiting it. Indeed, the world as we know it has ended several times over, in ways small and large, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Yes, we are doomed—doomed to adapt, to define our comforts and part with them when we must. Like Butler’s characters, we get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have, and you can’t drag everyone to a better place. Not everyone can get there.