Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [2216]

“Yeah. Workers make things for companies in Canada or Asia. They don’t get paid much, so they get into debt. They get hurt or sick, too. Their drinking water’s not clean and the factories are dangerous—full of poisons and machines that crush or cut you. But people think they can make some cash and then quit. I worked with some women who had gone up there, taken a look, and come back.” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 2216

Note

Butler builds the world out of secondhand detail rather than exposition: the debt-trap logic, the ‘machines that crush or cut you,’ and then the quiet inoculation of credibility — ‘I worked with some women who had gone up there, taken a look, and come back.’ The last clause ‘and come back’ does the work of ten pages of geopolitics.