In the Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh presents issues that arise for authors when trying to capture the climate crisis in their writing; he expresses how it becomes difficult for readers to understand the danger that the world is currently in when a great amount of today’s scientific fiction incorporates unrealistic concepts like aliens and interdimensional travel. While this issue is real, it poses no barrier for Octavia Butler, who very realistically captured what the world could transition into because of our role in the climate crisis in “Parable of the Sower.” Through her characterization and world building, she develops a dangerous setting in which everything that is happening is a real-world possibility and not inconceivable for the average reader.

“Parable of the Sower” is told through the protagonist, Lauren’s, journal entries, which add a sense of realism to the story. Lauren is a teenage hyper-empath who already struggles enough given her mental disability; she is learning through her experiences without any guidance, writing that she trusts in her ability to grow, though still afraid (Butler, 4). Because Lauren is hyper-empathetic, she feels others’ pain as well as her own, which is very distressing in 2024 California, which is full of violence and other dangers because of the climate crisis. These Journal entries create a closeness between Lauren and the reader; the more we learn about Lauren, the realer she becomes, and through her journal entries we see the changing world through a dynamic character’s eyes rather than a narrator’s description of the setting.

The state of the world as described in Lauren’s journal entries is one that is realistically worse than the state of the world currently; we already see issues like shortages, violence, and fear within communities today, and in Butler’s depiction of 2024 California, these problems become bigger. In a world where fresh water is a luxury that not many could afford (Butler, 13), or calling upon emergency services like the fire department are a fee that majority are not willing to pay (Butler, 32), there are, imaginably, many people in pain, so imagine Lauren, the hyper-empath’s suffering. Not even Lauren’s family who was middle class could afford these “luxuries,” but were still targeted for being anything but poor; Lauren writes that “if you’re clean, you make a target of yourself. People think you’re showing off, trying to be better than they are.” (Butler, 18) Going outside was “dangerous and crazy” according to Lauren’s dad (Butler 7), which is how many people feel in certain neighborhoods in the real world. When the state of the world is up in the air, certain settings become dangerous due to how people respond to turmoil; Butler shows us how our dangerous reality can quickly transition to worse if we do not start acting against climate change.

In “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,” Amitav Ghosh points out the challenges that climate change presents for writers, these challenges being the result of older literary forms. Ghosh launches his argument with the idea that readers and journalists do not take science fiction seriously since issues like climate change are often associated with unrealistic and unrelatable concepts like extraterrestrials and interplanetary travel. Rather than explicitly stating the substantial human impact on the planet’s decline, writers provide impractical reasoning and problem solving in their works. Ghosh goes on to say that the signs of our planet’s decline are undetectable in art and literature because artists do not mention humans’ role in it, calling it the time of Great Derangement. Realism in fictional writing is easy when it comes to the inclusion of our historical events and references to pop culture and real word matters; the inclusion of predicted events, like humans’ eventual extinction due to our part in the climate crisis, however, would seem less realistic to a reader because it has not happened yet; it seems fabricated. Rather than trying and failing to realistically work events that have not happened yet into their writing, authors should shed light on the pressing issue that is climate change in a way that works, which is by making readers feel uncomfortable through literary devices.

Climate change is scary, or in Ghosh’s words uncanny. Humans have recognized the part we play in climate change, but our inability to collectively make a change and push for more eco-friendly alternatives to practices rooted in imperialism and capitalism is scary and unsettling, and after absorbing a work of art that contains subject matter as serious as the climate crisis, we should feel exactly that. Writers can easily incorporate climate change and the fear it should make us feel into realistic fiction through devices like symbolism and exaggeration. Examples of this include “Never Let Me Go”, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which depicts a group of children that are were born and raised to donate their organs prematurely; the novel was an uncomfortable read, as it should have been, as it was a symbol for the lack of control that we are given over our own bodies today, especially after the overturning of Roe V. Wade. This symbol was an exaggeration which warns readers of what could happen if we continue allowing the government rule over our bodies. The use of exaggeration is also in Don’t Look Up, a Netflix satire about the politization of climate crisis, which ends in a comet destroying all human civilization, an outcome that could very well happen should we fail to gain control over the worsening climate crisis. Works on the climate crisis should always have negative resolutions rather than positive, unrealistic ones; if we remain on this path, there will be a negative outcome, and a realistic work would reflect that. The unsettling nature of these negative resolutions would then encourage more people to make a change; it is up to us to be the heroes that save the day, not the characters in a story.