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Three decades ago, the science fiction and Afrofuturist writer Octavia Butler wrote about a dysfunctional Los Angeles struggling with climate change and ravaged by fire. Her book Parable of the Sower, written in 1993, includes a fictional diary entry dated February 1, 2025. The diary entry is about fires in Los Angeles that become apocalyptic. She was writing 30 years ago about climate-driven fires she imagined happening in 2025, and she was just a few weeks off.

As Gerry Caravan, an associate professor at Marquette University said in a 2020 interview:

She seems to have seen the real future coming in a way few other writers did. It’s hard not to read the books and think “How did she know?”