SF (I agree with the late Harlan Ellison that "sci-fi" is atrocious) is the modern folklore, the medium for expressing the discontents, warnings, and promises of the techno age. Butler was one of the best. She helped expand the field from young white nerds to an inclusive futurism.

The John Henry story is the perfect blend of sf and folklore. It's based on historic reality. It tells of man against the machines introduced by capitalism. It's also arguably the first afro-futurist story. John Henry was Black.

Octavia Butler wrapped the two (the Supreme Court and MAGA) into one—just MAGA. In the first novel of the Parable series, Parable of the Sower, MAGA is represented by a president, Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner, who promises to return the US to "the good old days" days by basically asset-stripping the whole nation for the benefit of global corporations and suspending "'overly restrictive' minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws." This economic agenda corresponds with the Supreme Court's present determination to maintain capitalism at all costs. Instead of addressing climate change, which would place an intolerably high price on the extraction of surplus value from the environment and labor, SCOTUS is pushing the US in the opposite direction: a pre-EPA regime of low-cost (or unregulated) value extraction that transfers real costs from private enterprise to an increasingly powerless public. This is how capitalism makes life more expensive.

But Donner plays a minor role in Parable of the Sower. And he fizzles to nothing by the start of the second novel, Parable of the Talents. In this work, capitalism turns to Christofascism for its survival. This is the second MAGA, the Jesus and guns MAGA, the "Church of Christian America" MAGA. The cultural attack on American democracy is represented by a man, Andrew Steele Jarret, who defeats Donner in the presidential election of 2032. Butler gives President Jarret far more attention than Donner. He is all over the novel, and he sounds just like Donald Trump.

" Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them."

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Reading has been superseded by staring at phones, the boob tubes of the 21st century. We see the results in shallow impulsive thinking. I've been saying that Trump is the tv era prez, but maybe I should call him the snarkphone prez.