Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [280]

“It’s spreading again. It was on the east coast. Now it’s in Chicago. The reports say that it makes watching a fire better than sex. I don’t know whether the reporters are condemning it or advertising it.” I drew a deep breath. “Tornadoes are smashing hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people dead so far. And there’s a blizzard freezing the northern midwest, killing even more people. In New York and New Jersey, a measles epidemic is killing people. Measles!” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 280

Note

The chapter’s catalogue of apocalypse is built by collision rather than climax: a drug, then tornadoes, then a blizzard, then measles, commas and em-dashes doing the work of a news crawl. Butler gets her tone from bathos — the flat newsreader register snapped by the one-word exclamation ‘Measles!’ and by the earlier narrator-side aside about whether the coverage is condemnation or advertisement. Even the breathing is staged: ‘I drew a deep breath’ sits between weather systems, marking that this list is being recited, not merely known.