Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [873]

Pyro worked its way west without making nearly as much trouble as it could have. Now its popularity is growing. And in dry-as-straw Southern California, it can cause a real orgy of burning. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 873

Note

Three sentences that move like a fuse: the mild past, the present growth, then the geographic punchline. ‘Dry-as-straw’ and ‘orgy of burning’ are the kind of compressed, slightly vulgar images Butler uses to make a statistical abstraction feel physical. The paragraph is a load-bearing hinge — the next thing we read is a burning house.