Los Angeles is arguably the science fiction capital of America. Blade Runner’s iconic sino-Futuristic downtown notwithstanding, there’s a strong historical lineage for science fiction in the Southland: the fan culture which took root here mid-century, the early conventions, the legacy of Forrest J. Ackerman and his one-man museum of memorabilia, Ray Bradbury’s lifetime on the West Side, Harlan Ellison’s local screeds, and, of course, the Hollywood culture machine, which has been spitting out genre epics from backlots in Burbank since time immemorial. Science fiction in L.A. has had many stomping grounds, from the fourth-floor dining room of Clifton’s Cafeteria, where the early heads congregated over free lime sherbet, to the hallowed halls of the L.A. Science Fiction and Fantasy Society clubhouse in North Hollywood, but it’s also always everywhere, just a feeling, something disconnected about a city both so fake and real.

I have been enjoying, very much, being a science fiction reader in Los Angeles.

Not only does the city’s atmosphere of accreting globalization, total simultaneity, and neon lend itself perfectly to my inner wanderings, but the culture is alive and well. Several weeks ago, I attended a birthday party for Ray Bradbury at Mystery and Imagination Books in Glendale. When he was alive, Ray would spend his birthdays at the bookstore, signing for fans and eating cake; after he passed away this year, the owners decided to keep the tradition going. Friends in the community took turns telling stories about Ray, showing off old letters, and reading miscellaneous Bradburiana. Old men in thick glasses sat nestled on plastic chairs like thrones. Christine Bell, the owner of Mystery and Imagination, gave a halting eulogy to her friend that brought the whole room to tears.

On the other end of the spectrum, I also recently saw William Gibson speak at the Last Bookstore. In a sense it was the perfect genre dichotomy: while Mystery & Imagination is a hole-in-the wall bookshop, all lurid pulp paperbacks stacked vertiginously (and tends to host moldies and tenderhearted horror geeks), The Last Bookstore is a cavernous warehouse, an old bank building in the always-already cyberpunk milieu of downtown L.A.

Gibson was chewing gum and perpetually craning his neck to gawk at the monstrous ceilings, like some kind of enfant terrible bobble-head. He kept referring to the bookstore itself as the perfect example of science fiction’s divergent predictions; if a person from 100 years ago were to peer through a time-portal at us sitting on folding chairs in this once-grand building perverted, he postulated, they would have thought we were dressed like longshoremen and wouldn’t recognized our activity as something cultural. He called the store “glorious, Borgesian, mad in the best possible way.”

He had some great things to say about the early days of cyberpunk, too, namely that the moment the epithet materialized, he immediately sought to avoid the inevitable typecasting to follow. “If we get any on us,” he remembers thinking, “we’re finished.” The attempt wasn’t quite a success; he recalled looking around and realizing that all his contemporaries were lining up to get “Cyberpunk” stamped on the backs of their jean jackets. “I didn’t want to spoil the party.”

He called contemporary SF a “forest of unfamiliar names” and confessed to reading scarcely any of it. Essentially, he said, it’s not a problem with the genre–rather, it’s a problem of genre itself. When science fiction aficionados write off all other fiction as “mundane,” something is wrong, he said, adding, “Isaac Asimov is far out and Cormac McCarthy is mundane? And you want me to talk to you?”

Other great Gibsonisms from my notes:

• “The banal Holiday Inn-like ruins of post-Tolkien epic fantasy”
• “In The Wire, we have our Dickens”
• “Bruce Sterling is the Leon Trotsky of cyberpunk”

Of his recent trilogy’s (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History) diversion away from science fiction, he summed it up as a recalibration of his weirdness stick:

In order to induce the kind of cognitive dissonance we come to good science fiction for, one must have a yardstick for how weird it is right now. My yardstick of weirdness was too short to describe the weirdness outside my window.

Which is as fair a description of Los Angeles as I could summon right now: weirdness outside the window, ever-changing, and rife with exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance we come to good science fiction (and interesting cities) to experience.

People throw around words like “dystopia” and “post-apocalyptic” a lot when they talk about modern science fiction novels. I wonder, have those people read Parable of the Sower? Dystopia. Dissed Topia. Apocalytpic and Apocryphal-ictic.

Parable of the Sower takes place in a dramatically fucked-up Southern California in 2024. The state’s traditional problems — water shortages, racial tension, economic disparity, botched government, fuel costs, gang violence — are all extrapolated to the nth degree. L.A. is an “oozing sore” of inconceivably terrible violence, cannibalism, contemporary slavery, drug addiction, and perpetual rape. There’s a new drug called “pyro” that turns people into addicts who set fire to entire neighborhoods (and people) just to watch them burn. The freeways are flooded with people fleeing North on foot. Private armies of security guards protect the estates, enclaves, and businesses of the super-rich, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves, or else form decrepit, self-sustaining micro-communities shut off from the outside world.

There’s a Hanns Eisler quote about Los Angeles that I’ve always really liked, which I found in Mike Davis‘ City of Quartz: “If one stopped the flow of water here for three days the jackals would reappear and the sand of the desert.” Octavia Butler‘s Los Angeles is one where all the artificial resources that sustain the city have been exhausted; the jackals have indeed reappeared. It’s a wholly dystopic interpretation of modernity (what if everything got worse?), but at the same time it’s so nightmarishly plausible that it shocks with familiarity, not estrangement.

In this situation, the ordinary concerns of science fiction — which is to say, questions of Utopia — are made urgent. There is no room or time for fantasy, nor are issues of causality relevant. In fact, Parable of the Sower never discusses the reasons why the world went this direction: only a faint hope that things might one day return to the “good old days,” before kids had to learn to use firearms as soon as they can walk. The novel isn’t about causality, it’s about change; Change as a force which molds and shapes our lives impartially, a God that we have the power to shape back.

The main character, Lauren Olamina, suffers from a hyperempathy disorder in which she feels the physical pain of others. No small issue in her barbarous world; she is practically incapacitated by violence, and yet she is often forced to inflict it on the maniacs which brutalize her neighborhood and eventually destroy it. Lauren, however, is concerned with more than just survival: she attempts Utopianism, even after the end of Utopia. Her empathy problem is the root of her worldview, and she tries to start a new agrarian community of fellow disenfranchised people somewhere in Northern California, which would seem cliché if it weren’t for the fact that it takes place a post-cliché universe entirely. Utopianism after Utopia. Will it work? We never find out; although the tone is hopeful, Parable of the Sower promises nothing. Despite essentially being a novel about having hope on a shoestring, it does not inspire confidence, only the dread of fulfilled prophecy.

The only inspiring thing in the pile of festering murk of Butler’s 2024 Los Angeles is Lauren Olamina’s valiant mutiny against entropy, which I suppose isn’t heroism — just what you do. Olamina refuses to accept what has been laid out for her (fear, death) and instead attempts to shape Change rather than be overrun by it.

It is, definitely, weirdly affecting. I’m in Los Angeles right now; I had this nightmare last night that I had to cover the windows of my survivalist bunker with black garbage bags so that maniacs from “outside” wouldn’t be able to see in and ravage my precious stores of food and water. This morning, during a conversation this morning about the state’s current political and financial situation (miserable), I bleakly contributed only that when it came to Los Angeles and that sharp precicipe before apocalypse, it has all already been written.

NEXT BOOK: ROBERT A HEINLEIN’S THE PUPPET MASTERS