Hey, Readers!
Welcome to February. Being that it’s Black History Month, I thought I’d talk about another book by one of my favorite authors; Octavia E. Butler. Last June, I did a Spotlight on one of her other stories in Kindred and I’d just revisited Parable of the Sower recently so thought it was a pretty good option to share it with you this month. Back to Indies next month! Promise!
So. Parable of the Sower. This book was released in 1993 and accurately predicts a lot of things. Like… a lot. It’s set in the early and mid-2020s and if you read this and come away from it without a kind of “Oh my god, what!?” reaction, I honestly don’t know what to tell you. Anyway, spoilers for an almost 30-year-old novel incoming folks. Not heavy spoilers, I’m not going to give it all away, but there’s a lot to unpack here and so there isn’t much I can do about keeping all the good bits to myself. Also, as stated in my Spotlight on Kindred, there are many, many awesome literary experts who’ve done a lot of great work talking about this book and I don’t necessarily expect to add much to the discourse. I’m just not that good! My goal here is to maybe showcase this book to folks who haven’t yet read it and share it with people who might come to love it as much as I do.
So, strap in, gear up and get ready to hit the road with Lauren Olamina and her group of survivors.
Book Stats
- Author: Octavia E. Butler
Formats: Kindle, Hard Cover, Paperback, and Audiobook.
Price: $10.99 for Kindle, $21.49 for Hard Cover, $13.28 for Paperback, and $23.99 on Audible or one Credit.
Length: 320 pages, or 12 hours in audio format.
Number of books in the series: Two completed. The third was being worked on, but the author passed away before it was finished. What work was done on the book is among her papers in the Huntington Library.
Basic Premise
It’s the early 2020s and Lauren lives in a gated community. She’s one of the lucky ones. Life outside the gates is hard and uncaring. We’re in Southern California and the effects of climate change are everywhere. Food is scarce or expensive, fires are an ever-present danger as are roaming bands of killers. Some of these killers are addicts, some are gangs, some are just opportunists with little to no empathy for their fellow man. (Empathy plays a big part in the story so put a pin in this, we’ll return to it in a little bit.) Some killers aren’t even human – roaming packs of feral dogs live on the outskirts of human habitation and they aren’t Man’s best friend.
Lauren is an extreme empath. (Told you it would come up again.) The condition is called hyper empathy or sharing and it means that any pain Lauren witnesses, she feels. Smack a hammer down on your thumb? She feels that. Twist your ankle? She’ll probably fall with you. When she was younger, witnessing spilled blood would make her bleed in sympathy. It’s a monstrous ability, definitely more curse than a blessing in this hard, mean, violent world. Still, her father is the local Minister, she lives in a comparatively safe place, and despite everything she hasn’t ever wanted for much. Her community has the sense to support themselves with fruit trees, well-planted gardens, captive rabbits, and careful money management to provide the things they can’t grow.
Corporate greed and government corruption have both ballooned to the point where income inequality is the norm. Carefully constructed groupings like Lauren’s gated community are isolated islands in a sea of the desperate and destitute. Labor regulations have been rolled back to, ostensibly, allow for more people to work. This, of course, means that conditions for anyone who does have a job are the worst of all possible worlds. (The road to hell, good intentions, etc.) Corporate slavery is alive and well with company-owned towns employing people only to put them in and keep them in debt which they can’t escape or hope to work off. We’ve made it to Mars! Unfortunately, support for that program has been removed by the current administration because it’s not considered important enough to spend money on… that money could be going to corporate subsidies, after all, in the hope that some of that money trickles down to the ever-expanding destitute class.
In a word? Bleak.
Lauren, despite being raised in a religious household, doesn’t have much use for an omnipotent sky-daddy who either doesn’t know about or, doesn’t seem to give a shit about the level of suffering she knows exists in the world. Instead, she accumulates her own writings and ideas about the nature of the world and creates a religion around that. She also accumulates knowledge and resources to be self-sufficient in the larger world, expecting to leave home at some point. She learns to grow her own food from seed, and what native plants in her local area are useful. She even learns manual skills like cabin building and other things that will help her survive and forge a life in the wild. These are, technically, some of the same skills that you’d need to set up camp anywhere in the universe. Even on other planets…. and indeed, that is the endpoint of her ideology; the idea that humanity was meant to make a home in the stars. She calls her religion Earthseed, calls its central document The Book of the Living, and she dispenses bits of it to us at the start of chapters and in dialogue with other characters during her travels.
Because she does, indeed, travel. In your standard Hero’s Journey, the call to adventure is dispensed early on but in Parable, it comes a long way into the story. We see a few incursions by the outside world into the gated community where this part of the story takes place, but the last of these ends Lauren’s life as she once knew it. Junkies strung out on a new drug called Pyro (It makes watching fire an experience in ecstasy) set her community ablaze. She loses her family and most of her possessions. As I mentioned, she always intended to leave home eventually, but this pushes her into it rather more forcefully than she had expected.
She accumulates followers as she goes. And there comes a point where a goal is decided on.
Does she reach that goal? As per usual, you’re going to read the book to find out!
My take
For anyone who’s read this book before and who’s maybe just checking out this Spotlight to see my views on it…. does it annoy you that there have been religions created based on SciFi before, but Earthseed isn’t one of the major ones? It annoys me. I think, as is pointed out to Lauren at one point, the key stumbling block is the lack of a central human-but-not figure. God is stated to be Change because Change is literally the only constant in the universe. But Change is hard to personify, deify, blame and/or love. Hell, it’s hard just to accept for certain people, myself included. (I’m a creature of routine. Throw me a curve-ball and I’m going to be unhappy.) But the central premise, the idea that we should be able to rely on ourselves and do our best to be useful to our communities, take care of this world while seeking new ones to go to… what isn’t to love about this? The only thing I could find was a website (godischange.org) and that’s something at least! I wish these folks all the best.
Anyway, back to the book.
I think one of the key reasons I love this book so much is it’s challenging. The direction we’re traveling in as a society isn’t so far removed from the situation Lauren is born into. Her elders talking about the way things used to be, how wonderful the world once was, how the right person in power will set it all right and everything will be fine again. Corporations eroding regulations in a perfectly self-serving manner that lets the rest of the world sink or swim… but most people wind up born with concrete shoes on their feet. The climate crisis elevated to a point of, probably, no return. And then there’s Donner. He’s the guy who comes into power during act one with big promises about returning America to its former prosperity… but we know how that goes. Tensions between races escalated to a tipping point where race relations have regressed to pre-1960s levels and interracial couples are liable to catch hell. There’s more but you catch my drift, I think.
The only thing Ms. Butler didn’t accurately predict was the availability of and the form V.R. has taken. But the stuff about T.V.s that give sensory feedback, I think, is an homage to Huxley’s Brave New World and the Feelies. I could be wrong on that front, but the two books share a few themes in common despite Huxley’s moralizing being heavy-handed.
Things aren’t as dire for us as they are in Lauren’s version of the world but I say that with full knowledge that Parable of the Sower is set in 2024 to start so…. we’ve got a couple of years yet.
And this is why we need to read more stories powered by diverse perspectives. I’ll keep saying it as long as I can read and it’s a hill I’ll happily die on. Please, read more stories by a variety of Authors. It’s so important. You’ll think about things in ways you never considered before.
Oh, and by the way… it’s a good book, too. It’s a great story, well written with interesting characters and fantastic settings. Just in case you thought it was all doom and gloom, I should probably be sure to point this out. Lauren Olamina is an awesome heroine, filled with the kind of determination you wish you could muster in your day-to-day. She’s not always optimistic, but you can’t fault her for that considering the hand she’s been dealt. Besides, optimism without action is just wishful thinking, right? And she’s full of action. It’s no wonder people are drawn to her. The language is beautiful, alternating between frank and poetic. It’s written in the style of a diary or log, essentially allowing us to live in Lauren’s head during our shared adventure. The rub here being she’s the one who takes on other people’s pain, but we get to share in each excruciatingly well-written detail. This book isn’t nearly as brutal and unflinching with the violence as Kindred, but there are some bits in here I had to grit my teeth through. I’m a big baby with that stuff so your mileage may vary.
And hey, there’s a sequel!
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