Sometime in the future, three years after an epidemic has killed much of the human race and left the survivors, like stroke victims, unable to either speak or read, a woman named Rye boards a bus to make the difficult twenty mile journey from her home to Pasadena to see if her brother and his three children are still alive. When a fight breaks out on the bus, she meets a bearded man in an LAPD t-shirt who has a car and the rare ability to read. Rye takes up with the man, eventually revealing that, while she cannot read, she can speak. The two of them intend to move in together if just for company until things inevitably go wrong.

This is familiar, post apocalyptic territory for readers of Octavia Butler. But this story, while full of action, is one of ideas. Just how would the loss of language affect the human race? Without the ability to speak or to read signs, people become no better than animals. Once they realize someone can either read or speak, they become enraged with jealousy. What hope for a future do they have if they cannot overcome this tendency towards violence? It’s certainly a heavy question for a writer to ask what would become of us if we could no longer read, but Ms. Butler has always been interested in possible futures and in finding just exactly what it is that makes humans human.

You can find this story in the collection Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams. I’m giving Speech Sounds by Octavia Butler five out of five stars. I wish she had been able to develop it further; it would have made a terrific novel.