FL-01.0010 Parable of the Sower

A real neurological condition, described years before science named it, and an invented cause that was wrong.

Lauren Oya Olamina is fifteen and lives behind a wall in Robledo, twenty miles from Los Angeles, in a cul-de-sac of families who grow their own food and take turns on night watch. Outside the wall, water costs more than gasoline, a drug called pyro makes watching a fire better than sex, and the country has not so much collapsed as stopped being maintained.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, first published 1993. This packet is the science that comes with it, in Geosciences and Social Sciences.