As I began reading “Parable of the Sower” I was blown away by the foreshadowing Octavia Butler did in her depiction of Los Angeles and Southern California. The novel was written a year before the LA riots broke out yet it depicts a landscape that could have truly happened had the pressure cooker known as LA had continued to boil. The descriptions of a failing economy companied by rampant drug use is precisely what was occurring at the time that the novel was written. The LA riots, although violent and tragic, were a way for African Americans to relieve the stress they had been living with for so long and also a means to cry for help from the rest of the world. However, had the riots not happened, that tension could have very well continued to build while new and more innovative drugs were created thus leading to a world very similar to Butlers.