Butler’s book starts in the distant future of the year 2024. Butler tells us a story focusing on the main character, Lauren, and the world she lives in that has been affected by climate change. Within the first chapter of the novel Lauren tells us about her stepmother who lived in the old weather saying that “Kids today have no idea what a blaze of light cities used to be-and not that long ago.”(6) That description alone shows how the change in climate can happen so sparsely and yet have such a drastic impact on our lives as we know it. The stepmother puts into perspective how slow things were as she tells Lauren that the “lights, progress, growth, all those things were too hot and too poor to bother with anymore.” (5) This is when she was younger and as Lauren starts to grow up she gets to see even more stars as the need for the street lamps. All of this goes into the same line of what Nixon was talking about with the topic of “Slow Violence”. Nixon goes on to explain how a situation such as 9/11 was slow violence since the deterioration of the buildings and the collapse of the building happened over time. Nixon recalls the “Efforts to make forms of slow violence more urgently visible suffered a setback in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11.” (13)
Butler shows the downfall of humanity though. Showing the future of what could be as people are now trying to fix what they caused throughout the course of so many years. Lauren tells us of the day she is going to get baptized and how they ride bikes to the church. This is so that they don’t allow for the cars to burn more Fossil Fuels and increase the carbon emissions by driving everywhere. Lauren also tells us about how going outside doesn’t feel safe anymore but her parents and every other adult chose to got out so they can step back into the “good old days when there were churches all over the place and too many lights and gasoline was for fueling cars and trucks instead of for torching things”(8) The way that she describes these people and their actions it sounds like they entered the apocalypse. She describes this naked women and she questions if she was on drugs or if she was raped so many times that she went crazy. It seems that the people here have stopped caring about everyone else and started going crazy. This heat the walls that they had to put up most likely led to all of their psyche’s to break due to the isolation from the outside world. The way the world is in this story Butler created just further proves Nixons idea of “Slow Violence” as he brings up the fact that this newer generation doesn’t have a long enough of an attention span to even begin to process what is happening to the world around them. They are letting the world die out because no one is even noticing what’s happening they aren’t seeing the Earth decay and when it happens it will already be to late.
