Parable Of The Sower

I'm fascinated by shows such as "The Walking Dead" and the BBC's 2008 "Survivors," which is about the small fraction of the population who remain after a man-made virus wipes out 99.9 percent of humanity. These shows create circumstances favorable to psychopaths (he who kills without hesitation has an advantage over anyone with a conscience), and put good people in the position of having to decide how best to use force in order to stay alive without killing their own humanity.

The Parable of the Sower is in a similar vein, but it's more realistic than the two shows I mentioned. There's no pandemic and no zombies. The "big bad" is a societal collapse in the US caused by climate change and corrupt and inept government. Society has become stratified into the super-rich, who we never see in the novel, except for a mention of them flying around in helicopters; "middle class" people who have jobs but who are barely scraping by, who are forced to grow much of their own much food, and who live in improvised walled communities comprising a few houses or part of a neighborhood; people who are essentially enslaved by corporations; and the mass of humanity who are starving or killing themselves with drugs.

A sheriff's badge is a license to steal. At best the police will show up late and charge you a fortune. (Everything is privatized; water costs more than gasoline, and no one can afford gasoline as well as water.) The police are just another gang. States have hardened their borders against influxes of refugees from other parts of the country. In effect there only nominally a United States. (Still, the US government has a Mars program!)

The book is the journal of Lauren Olamina, a teenage girl whose father is a preacher and a college professor with a PhD. Her stepmother also holds a PhD. This means they are middle class, which means they are poor. The Olaminas live with a number of other families who are barely getting by, in a walled community trying to defend themselves against raids by the hordes of the desperate poor that live around them.

At age 16, Lauren, seeing that everything is getting worse, knows that her community is doomed, and secretly plans to hit the road as soon as she turns 18. As it happens, her community is wiped out before she can make her planned departure. She and two other survivors hit the road with the hope of finding somewhere better up north. Unfortunately, so are many thousands of other people, many of them with evil intentions, and many of them taking drugs that drive them to violent acts.

This is a story about good people gathering together for safety, trying to defend themselves against the desperate and the evil. How to decide who to trust? Lauren's group grows slowly but steadily.

This story is about people who hold onto a shred of hope in a society that seems hopeless. This resonates today.

The Parable of the Sower opens in 2024. Butler even has a president whose slogan is "Make America Great Again." It was written in 1993. It's all too believable as a portrait of societal collapse.

The extract from Lauren's writings (a compilation of poems and reflections she calls "The Book of the Living") is the nucleus of her religion: Earthseed. She says she hasn't invented this religion, but discovered it through observation.

Change is everything. But we can choose how we interact with this constantly changing world. And what we change changes us. This is a teaching on karma.

Lauren has the long-term aim of getting humanity to the stars. On one level that's a ridiculous notion. Even the US's remaining space program is likely to be scrapped by the next president. Lauren's first step toward that goal is simply to establish a Earthseed community, growing its own food and protecting itself from the world. Even that is monumentally ambitious in the time she inhabits. As I said, this is a book about hope.

Does Lauren ever make it to the stars? I don't know. There are two Earthseed books, and I plan to start on the second, "The Parable of the Talents," as soon as possible. There was to be a third book, but alas Butler never got the chance to write it.

The title is a reference to the new testament parable of someone sowing seeds, with some of them falling on stony ground, or being outgrown by thorns, yet others landing in fertile soil. Hope is a kind of soil in which many things can live. We need to have hope, but we also need to plant seeds in it, and to tend them as they grow.

It's certainly not a fun book, but it's extremely engaging, despite the bleakness of the slow-apocalypse setting and story.

What makes this apocalypse so horrifying, and the story so engaging, is how matter-of-fact Lauren is in describing everything in her diary. It's the world she grew up in, so it's normal to her, though she can see clearly even at 14 that it's unsustainable. There's a sharp generational divide between those who remember what things were like before, but all that is just history to her.

Lauren's present is hopeless and brutal, but her diary doesn't linger on the ever-present brutality like a horror novel would. She acknowledges it, of course, but she's focused on how to survive it so she can build something better.

The setting resonates so well today in part because the societal fears of the 1980s that Butler was extrapolating from are the same fears that have been re-stoked to create our modern political moment, and the problems she focused on remain unsolved. (I go into a bit more literary analysis on my website if you're interested in that sort of thing.)

Me resulta difícil concretar per què m'ha fascinat tant. La pobresa, la desesperació i la mort regnen en un futur massa proper (en anys i en versemblança), però sempre hi ha un bri d'esperança.

Per molt que diguin de les segones parts, no puc esperar a llegir Parable of the Talents!

Which feels like a cheesy thing to say in a review about dystopian fiction, but I genuinely didn't realize this book was published in the year 1993 until I read Butler's biography at the back and realized she passed away in 2006. It feels... pertinent

Others have said this is a pretty grim novel. I agree. It hurt to read, quite often. I feel like I've mostly moved out of my dystopian fiction era but this one hooked me a lot harder than most I've read. I haven't finished a book this quickly in quite a while.

I think Parable of the Sower has a lot to say about eco-fatalism, as well as the many "fatalisms" of neoliberalism in general, which it delivers on very well. I also felt like it would have a lot to say about the value of religion, divorced from the way people in my life and I suspect many others in the west tend to equate religion with Christianity. It delivered on the former part, but not so much the latter in my opinion. Still very compelling, and very well written nonetheless.

Cuando estaba más joven la ficción y la ciencia ficción eran espacios que me hacían sentido para conectar con la imaginación y con la posibilidad de pensar y sentir la vida fuera de límites que percibía en mis presentes.

Como estos ámbitos de la literatura no resonaban tanto en algunas de mis redes cercanas, me alejé un poquito de éstos por algunos años y me metí a libros más teóricos y "serios". Pero desde que empecé a leer a Octavia Butler volví a interesarme por textos de (ciencia) ficción.

Octavia reflexionó sobre la ausencia/invisibilización de mujeres negras en un contexto donde predominaba una ciencia ficción de escritores hombres y blancos. También propuso escenarios que abordaran los pasados-presentes-futuros y que estimularan la imaginación y la creatividad como posibilidades ante las crisis que seguimos viviendo.

En Parable of the sower, Octavia tejió temas como: sensibilidad hacia otrxs seres; críticas al capitalismo, a las desigualdades socio-económicas, a la explotación y hacia la crisis climática; formas de construir relaciones y comunidades basadas en el reconocimiento mutuo; cercanías y comprensiones diversas con la tierra y la sostenibilidad de la vida (entre muchas otras cosillas).

Algo que me parece muy curioso, es la manera en que Octavia toma aspectos del libro, que como lectora me estuvieron haciendo cierto ruido de forma muy sutil, y los hace evidentes en la secuela (Parable of the talents). Creo que no es sencillo plantear todo un imaginario y luego construir una narrativa que lo replantee o que muestre sus matices, al menos de forma convincente. Por eso, aunque Parable of the sower es un libro que aprecié haber leído, verlo de la mano con Parable of the talents fue aún más apreciable para mí.

This was the first of what will certainly be many books by Octavia E. Butler in my TBR list. My copy (2019 reissue with great foreword by NK Jemisin) was a gift from @leahlove@mastodon.world and I thank her for it!

Like Jemisin, I'm sure this book will mean different things to me each time I read it, but two things fascinated me on this read. First, the view of a belief system at its origin reminds us that before such beliefs are collective or cultural, they are individual. Ultimately, their essence and purpose is to help each of us make sense of the world, so in truth, there are as many religions or belief systems as there are people (and probably more, in truth).

Second, I love that Butler endowed the protagonist with a quality that could be a superpower or could be a disability. Through Lauren, Butler explores with us how it can be both -- which can lead us to reflect on other qualities (in ourselves and others) that we assume to be one or the other.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (@OctaviaEButler) is a fascinating novel that serves as a cornerstone of climate fiction. As I read it, I'm just shocked that it was published in 1993: drug abuse epidemics, wildfires, corporate towns, inflation, the reemergence of slavery, collapse and so much more. I'm rather agnostic and the Earthseed religion feels extremely compelling. The way that Butler combines climate fiction and the creation of religion gives the book a depth that so many other books in the genre lack. I'm excited to start Parable of the Talents and pillage the rest of the books that my library has by Butler.

On a second read, I feel a lot differently than I did the first time around. I can't separate uncomfortable feelings of reading about a teenager basically starting a cult and attracting people who are at their absolute most vulnerable to join. It doesn't sit well with me to read about Lauren's glee to "raise babies in Earthseed." And the intense, intense, dehumanization and otherizing of people using drugs, making them into physically unrecognizable monsters, is something I can't get past. If Lauren has hyper-empathy, and is more sensitive to people in need of help, then why does the buck stop with people using drugs?

When I heard an old interview of Octavia Butler on NPR, I was both very impressed and very surprised that I had never heard of her. She won a MacArthur Fellowship, Hugo, and Nebula awards. At the time, there were so few women's names in science fiction, and even fewer who were African American.