In 1983, Octavia E. Butler published “Speech Sounds” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, a short story that would win her her first Hugo Award a year later. Written, as Butler put it in the afterword, “in weariness, depression, and sorrow” and with “little hope or liking for the human species,” the story ends in a place Butler seemed not to have expected: not with salvation, but with a sliver of purpose carved from ruin.

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“Speech Sounds” is set in a near-future Los Angeles plagued by a virus that stripped humanity of its ability to speak, read, and write (some can speak but not read or write, write or read but not speak). Examples of effective communication are few and far between, leaving humanity fractured. Loneliness and  fear fold into themselves again and again, shaking away any semblance of connection that’s left. The neighbor collapses into the stranger, the stranger into the other—and the other, an imposing threat closing in at every corner. Gestures, symbols, and the occasional grunt become the only way to understand one another, and those methods often cause misunderstanding.

What Butler captures isn’t as much an imagined dystopia as it is the logical products of systems long in place. The resulting fear, violence, and isolation, and the state’s abandonment of the most vulnerable as depicted in “Speech Sounds” aren’t only astute futuristic predictions.

This is the context in which Butler opens the story, with misunderstanding. The main character, Valerie Rye, sets out on a trip to Pasadena (Butler’s own hometown) to search for the last of her family. She boards a metro bus—a rare stroke of luck, given the collapse of public transit—only to find herself witness to a fight between two passengers, a conflict born of misunderstanding that escalates because no one has the means to defuse it.

That was a day’s journey one-way, if she were lucky. The unexpected arrival of the bus as she left her Virginia Road home had seemed to be a piece of luck—until the trouble began.

Two young men were involved in a disagreement of some kind, or, more likely, a misunderstanding. They stood in the aisle, grunting and gesturing at each other, each in his own uncertain “T” stance as the bus lurched over the potholes. The driver seemed to be putting some effort into keeping them off balance. Still, their gestures stopped just short of contact-mock punches, hand-games of intimidation to replace lost curses.

Butler largely leaves it up to us to wonder what sort of virus might have brought about this crisis, save for a quip from Rye about Americans finding a way to somehow blame it on the Soviet Union. If the COVID-19 pandemic (which people are still dying from, though not to the fault of any communists) offers any analog, there isn’t much left to the imagination regarding who or what is to blame for the virus’s exacerbation: inept governance, deeply embedded inequity, a culture of individualism, and an overarching racial capitalist system from which all of this derives.

In the context of the story, the two men’s misunderstanding and subsequent fight is, first, constructed and, second, a reflection—of the isolating consequences of our racialized, individualistic society amid a crisis that begs for collectivism, and of Butler’s observation of that society—not as a prediction for our future but a characterization of our recent past, her present. What unfolds on the bus is a manifestation of a society that has lost the capacity (and the resources) for collective care.

Reading “Speech Sounds” today, it’s impossible not to think about how these dynamics mirror our current reality. The recent wave of ICE raids and detainment that continue to rip families apart under the banner of law and order. The ongoing genocide in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo carried out with weapons and funds provided by the U.S. state. The continued assault on the right to healthcare for women and trans people. What Butler captures isn’t as much an imagined dystopia as it is the logical products of systems long in place. The resulting fear, violence, and isolation, and the state’s abandonment of the most vulnerable as depicted in “Speech Sounds” aren’t only astute futuristic predictions. They’re descriptions of the world as she saw it in 1983 and as we see it today, in 2025.

In a New Yorker essay titled “Lessons for the End of the World,” Hanif Adburraqib writes about apocalypse, remembrance, and recovery—looking to Nikki Giovanni and Butler, reflecting on the L.A. fires earlier this year, and drawing on Butler’s ubiquitous Parable series, published a decade after “Speech Sounds.” In the essay, Adburraqib offers necessary clarity as it relates to the future Butler envisioned:

It’s not the fires or drug use or tumbling literacy rates that she invented—all of those problems were simply there for her to see. What “Sower” imagines, rather, is a future in which surviving the seemingly unsurvivable requires people to show some emotional dexterity, some ability to surrender whatever selfishness they’ve been harboring and see if they have something that someone else needs. This is the starting point of mutual aid: What do I have that someone else may need?

This is a question Butler asks in “Speech Sounds.” At first, it seems Rye and her neighbors have nothing to offer one another when both have lost so much—when even the existence of your only family is uncertain. Further, Rye turns more sharply into isolation when the few moments of human interaction she does encounter devolves into violence. In this way, it seems Rye is a proxy for Butler, who reflected on the story’s inspiration—a real fight she had witnessed on the bus—in the afterword:

I sat where I was, more depressed than ever, hating the whole hopeless, stupid business and wondering whether the human species would ever grow up enough to learn how to communicate without using fists of one kind or another.

It’s important not to write off these feelings of doom and disdain, but it’s perhaps equally important to know where to place them—which is what, I think, Butler was asking us to hear in “Speech Sounds.”

*

For a good portion of the story, Rye is alone—grieving, disillusioned, cautious. When she accepts a ride from a man she calls Obsidian, it’s out of necessity more than trust. But something shifts between them as the story unfolds. Without words, they find ways to communicate, to cooperate, and to build connection—albeit a fragile, temporary kind. Through this pairing, Butler illustrates genuine connection, however fleeting, as a strikingly powerful force amid immense destruction.

She shrugged, tapped his shoulder, then her own, and held up her index and second fingers tight together, just to be sure.

He grasped the two fingers and nodded. He was with her.

She took the map from him and threw it onto the dashboard. She pointed back southwest—back toward home. Now she did not have to go to Pasadena…Now she did not have to find out for certain whether she was as alone as she feared. Now she was not alone.

However, just moments later, the fragile connection shatters. Obsidian stops the car and is killed while trying to stop a man from murdering a woman. In that same moment, though, Rye finds the dead woman’s children, and to her shock, they can still speak. What matters then isn’t some grand vision of rebuilding society or restoring the old world. It’s the immediate obligation in front of her: the children’s survival. In taking responsibility for them, Rye also remembers herself and who she once was:

She had been a teacher. A good one. She had been a protector, too, though only of herself. She had kept herself alive when she had no reason to live. If the illness let these children alone, she could keep them alive.

In “Speech Sounds,” Butler does not offer the reader any sort of conventional hope amid that apocalypse, likely because she didn’t feel any herself. The story, instead, insists that even in a world stripped bare, there are still practical decisions to be made, still possibilities for care and connection, however limited or compromised.

There is no rescue coming from above. There’s no return to normal. What exists is the choice to build something —to recognize our own needs and the needs of others, and then act on them. While we are doomed, we are doomed, as Adburraqib put it, “to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.” It could be one in which survival isn’t individual but collective, and where the work of continued survival starts with knowing hope not to be a feeling but an action and a tool—a noise to be made, a speech sound to hear.

By the time Butler finished the short story, she wrote, “my hope had come back. It always seems to do that.”