Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [872]

It’s all the same drug, and it’s been around for a while. From what Keith said, it’s becoming more popular. It makes watching the leaping, changing patterns of fire a better, more intense, longer-lasting high than sex. Like Paracetco, my biological mother’s drug of choice, pyro screws around with people’s neurochemistry. But Paracetco began as a legitimate drug intended to help victims of Alzheimer’s disease. Pyro was an accident. It was a homebrew—a basement drug invented by someone who was trying to assemble one of the other higher-priced street drugs. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 872

Note

Butler does exposition as comedy of catastrophe: the drug that will burn the neighborhood down is explained through an escalating taxonomy of names, then undercut by its origin story — a legitimate Alzheimer’s drug tolerated because it began well, versus pyro, born of a single chemical slip in a basement. The flat, clinical register (‘screws around with people’s neurochemistry’) is the joke and the horror at once.