Geordy Kortebein started reading Bubblegum

"It's a perfect time to be reading Earthseed. Butler's version of America in 2024 is eerily prophetic - not quite America as it is right now, but America as it could soon become given its current tailspin. Her America is an America in precipitous decline. An America suffering from severe social fragmentation, violence and discontent. An America that has turned its back on the liberal reforms of the 20th century, with robber barons who have revived slavery through company towns and indentured servitude; right-wing demagogues stoking the fires of class and racial resentment to turn the poor and disadvantaged against one another; and religious fanatics who proudly preach the oppression of women and brutality towards anyone who doesn't embrace their dogma.

As all of this unfolds, Butler recounts the lives of small embattled community in a tiny suburb of south LA, struggling to hold on to kindness and community while barely staving off total annihilation. Anyone who's lived in LA and paid attention will recognize that her portrait of these people is simply a heightened version of south LA as it has been for decades. Seas of black people and other minorities struggling with poverty, the constant threat of violence, systemic exploitation, the illusory and self-destructive hope of escape through drugs and sex work - all in the shadow of the ostentatious wealth and self-important but ultimately hypocritical 'progressive' culture of West LA.

Our main character is Lauren Olamina, a remarkable young woman whose father is the backbone of this impoverished community - the local pastor who, at least for a time, inspires them to band together in faith and hold back the cruelty and suffering all around them. Lauren has a rare genetic 'disorder': hyper-empathy, which causes her to experience the suffering and joy of everyone around her as if they were her own. This is a science fiction novel, and this is its central SF conceit, but Butler leverages it to sketch a riveting and very real portrait of a person who can hold on to compassion in a desperately cold, unfeeling world.

In the story of Lauren and her family, Butler demonstrates a James Baldwin level of skill at drawing us into the strains and stresses of a tight-knit family under constant threat. Seriously: I found these parts of the novel as gripping and heart-wrenching as the best parts of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain.

And this is just the novel's first half. Once the world around Lauren crumbles further and destroys her community, she evolves into one of the most admirable and fascinating characters I've come across in fiction. Her drive, not just to survive, but to survive without losing hope, love and compassion in the most hopeless of circumstances was...well, it's been a while since I found it this difficult to tear myself away from a book.

It's sad that a lot of people won't give such a wonderful, humane novel a chance because it's science fiction. This really is an American classic and deserves to be much more well-known than it is."