Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [698]

Olivar, incorporated in the 1980s, is just one more beach/bedroom suburb of Los Angeles, small and well-to-do. It has little industry, much hilly, vacant land and a short, crumbling coastline. … Parts of it sometimes crumble into the ocean, undercut or deeply saturated by salt water. Sea level keeps rising with the warming climate and there is the occasional earthquake. Olivar’s flat, sandy beach is already just a memory. So are the houses and businesses that used to sit on that beach. … The whole state, the country, the world needs help, it’s been told. What the hell is tiny Olivar whining about? — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 698

Note

A piece of world-building done entirely through the passive voice of geology: land ‘undercut or deeply saturated,’ beaches demoted to ‘a memory.’ The free indirect jab — ‘What the hell is tiny Olivar whining about?’ — smuggles the world’s indifference into the narration without quotation marks, so the contempt arrives as ambient rather than spoken.