Parable of the Sower

Octavia Butler, 1993

Summary

Lauren Olamina is a 15 year old girl living in a gated community in southern California in a civilization on the verge of collapse induced by climate change. Water is a rarity, food prices are steep and climbing, disease and destitution rampant outside the walls of Lauren’s home, and the wilderness of man breaking down the gates trying to get in. Lauren has rejected the God of her father, a local preacher, and has begun to tentatively expound the precepts of her own religion, one she calls Earthseed that holds that God is change.

The novel is set up as a journal, tracking several years of Lauren’s life as her gated community is beset by robberies and death. Her younger brother, Keith, leaves the community to become a man and then a corpse in short order, as the unrelenting outside destroys him. Lauren tries to open people’s eyes to the reality of their plight, begging them to prepare as they sit on the precipice of a void. Her father agrees, but doesn’t want to scare anyone. One day, her father just disappears on his way back home from his job at the college. Despite the community’s best efforts to find him, they can’t, and he is presumed dead. Eventually, the community is completely overrun, leading to a near complete slaughter of all residents, including Lauren’s stepmother and brothers.

Lauren barely escapes with her life, but her preparation has paid minor dividends. She has a survival pack, and the clothes on her back. Upon returning to her town to see if she can find news of her family, she encounters two survivors, Zahra, one of the wives of someone in town, and Harry, someone Lauren’s age. Together, they set out up north to find salvation. There are intimations that Canada is a haven. Along the way, they continue to grow their group, picking up a mother and her son, an older man named Bankole, who Lauren eventually becomes romantically entangled with, and a few others. As they head up north, Bankole reveals to Lauren that he has a homestead he owns, several hundred acres, where his sister is currently living. Bankole wants to escape there with Lauren, but she only agrees if the group can also come, and she can start the first Earthseed community there. Bankole, after some cajoling, agrees.

When they finally reach Bankole’s homestead, they find that his sister and her entire family have perished in a house fire likely caused by pyro addicts, pyro being an addictive and widespread drug that makes fire orgasmic to watch for its users. Despite the setback, everyone agrees that they will stay on Bankole’s homestead to start the first Earthseed community.

Thoughts

I had never read Octavia Butler before. Frankly, despite being what could generously be called a hardcore sci-fi nerd, I hadn’t really even heard of her, and while we are doing disclosures, I bought this book accidentally. I had wanted to purchase the graphic novel that had apparently come out this year and had won a Hugo, so imagine my surprise when this book showed up and there were no pictures, just a sea of words. But what this book did have, other than the sunk cost of an already debited purchase, was, emblazoned on the cover, the words “foreword […] N.K. Jemisin”. As an avid Jemisin fan, I thought, might as well give this a shot. I knew the follow up had won a Hugo as well, and Butler was a MacArthur fellow, so I figured why not. And I sure am happy I did.

Butler crafts a convincing world, one that, while maybe not hitting the prophecy mark for ~2026 when the novel is set, does pass the smell test of believability. Written in 1993, Butler imagines a world that is on the cusp of disintegration, one not just staring out to an abyss of civilization-less chaos but teetering precipitously over that edge. Climate change has destroyed what we thought was a robust ecosystem, has exposed humanity’s fragility, reducing life to the base physiological needs of food, shelter, and water. Safety, love, belonging – these are fever dreams of a dying civilization.

Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, at once self-assured and confident, on the other, vulnerable and frightened, is an interesting intersectional character, a black female in a world where there are no more protections from the pack ostracizing the Other. Implicit in any dystopian novel seems to be the argument that civilization is what protects the marginalized, that as soon as that civilization, that socially enforced decorum, goes away, the most savage pack wins, but within this novel, Lauren leads a new vestige of humanity, one that takes care of the physically weak or infirm, one that esteems loyalty and safety in numbers regardless of race or creed. When civilization collapses, little communist shangri-las blossom in the petri dish of the dissolution. Earthseed is that utopia.

The writing is straight forward, and the narrative is told in epistolary format, with Lauren composing her journal entries sometimes days later. There is the sense of performance, of Lauren constantly aware that her writing and memory is for posterity, and so at times feels contrived and too heavily mytho-poetic. This of course isn’t a criticism of Butler, but rather, an interesting avenue of criticism of the text, how Lauren as author sees her role in her own reality and the reality she is trying to create through Earthseed.

All said, the novel presents what feels an exceptionally timely world here on the dawn of 2022. The world was so compelling, its characters so realized, I had ordered the sequel before the 100th page, and I was already mourning the fact that a third in the series was never complete. I suppose I’ll have to settle for a two-sided triangle of a trilogy, and I can’t wait to see what Earthseed comes to next.