Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [81]

Tonight the last big Window Wall television in the neighborhood went dark for good. We saw the dead astronaut with all of red, rocky Mars around her. We saw a dust-dry reservoir and three dead water peddlers with their dirty-blue armbands and their heads cut halfway off. And we saw whole blocks of boarded up buildings burning in Los Angeles. Of course, no one would waste water trying to put such fires out. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 81

Note

The triple ‘We saw’ anaphora stacks three separate catastrophes into one screen, moving outward from a body to a dried-out infrastructure to a burning city, so that the medium’s collapse arrives as a summary of everything it was showing. The closing sentence is the real turn: the fire is unstoppable not because it’s large but because water is too valuable to spend on it, so the disaster is read through price.