I wouldn't describe myself as a full-blown sci-fi fan, but I enjoy reading thoughtful speculative fiction by writers I admire, like Ursula K. LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Margaret Atwood, and the late and much-mourned Octavia Butler. I can't help wondering if Butler's novel
The Parable of the Sower would have seemed as powerful to me if I had read it when it was first published in 1993, before the recent glut of dystopian novels, some very good, most aimed at the YA market. Right now, twenty-three years later, the terrifying, anarchic world of Butler's story seems all too possible, especially in this increasingly bizarre election year.
The story begins in another election year, 2024, just eight years from now, and the America Butler describes is much closer to the one we know than it is to, say, the world of
The Hunger Games. Her narrator/protagonist is a Black teenager, Lauren Olamina, who lives in a walled and gated, ethnically diverse community about twenty miles from Los Angeles. Some people, like Lauren's father, a Baptist minister and college professor, still go "outside" to work, but "outside" has become a dangerous and terrifying place, its streets filled with roving gangs of thieves, drug addicts (one new drug turns its users into violent pyromaniacs), and of course the homeless and destitute. The education system has crumbled and many people are illiterate; Lauren's stepmother holds classes in their home for the children of the eleven households inside their walled enclave. Self-defense is even more essential than literacy, so when they turn fifteen all children are taken "outside" into the surrounding hills for firearms training. It is a world that does not allow for illusions, one in which Lauren realizes that a time may come when she must kill or be killed.
Lauren is a reader and a writer; the novel is structured as a series of journal entries covering a period of more than three years. During that time Lauren develops and refines her own belief system, a theology she calls "Earthseed," which describes God as Change. When the "outside" breaks in and Lauren's community is burned and her family murdered, she escapes and takes to the road, like thousands of others heading north. Earthseed gives her strength to survive and go on and, as she joins with a small group of other survivors (two from her community and later a few others, all with their own stories). She becomes the group's leader, with the goal of establishing an intentional community, based on the principles of Earthseed, in some safer place. The search for that place makes up the second half of the book.
When I finished
Parable of the Sower last night, I felt actual separation anxiety, to the point where I nearly got dressed to go out to the book store for the sequel,
Parable of the Talents. But it was too late. All the stores were closed. I'll get it today.
Butler published
Parable of the Talents in 1998, and had plans to continue the series with a third book to be called
Parable of the Trickster, but she had trouble with writer's block and moved on to other projects. Her last novel,
Fledgling, was published in 2005. I've read
Fledgling, a stand-alone novel exploring the culture of a vampire community living in mutualistic symbiosis with humans, and her best-selling novel, Kindred (1979), in which an African American woman is transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early nineteenth-century Maryland, where she meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, a free Black woman forced into slavery later in life. She wrote many other books, including the
Patternmaster series and the
Xenogenesis trilogy, as well as short stories, which I look forward to reading.
Sadly, Octavia Butler died in 2006, at the age of 58, from head injuries sustained in a fall to the sidewalk in her front yard; the fall may have been occasioned by a stroke. No one knows for sure. What we do know is that the ideas expressed in her fiction show us a great deal about ourselves, about the world that shaped us and the world we seem to be creating. Things are very bad in that future world, but for Lauren and her companions it is not a world without hope. Nor need it be for us.
Butler herself described
Parable of the Sower as a cautionary tale. "I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third-world country," she said in a conversation about
Parable of the Sower. Twenty-three years later, some might say her words contain more prophecy than imagination.
