Octavia Butler’s Not-So-Distant Future Novel Parable of the Sower
Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower
Parable of the Sower is the first of two published novels in Octavia Butler’s unfinished Earthseed series. A work of speculative fiction, this 1993 novel imagines a future 30-years hence in which the USA’s states have cut themselves off from each other because of climate change and political conflicts that result in extreme levels of social inequality. Although set in a rapidly unfolding socio-political and environmental apocalypse, the novel illustrates alternative philosophical and religious ideas that could lead humanity out of its collapse. The novel was nominated for a Nebula Award and contributed to Butler winning a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 1995. Although she passed away in 2006 aged 58, Octavia Butler’s work overall remains popular, prescient, and relevant today, with Parable of the Sower becoming a New York Times bestseller in September 2020 and her novel Kindred (1979) being adapted into a miniseries released by FX in 2022.
Parable of the Sower unfolds during the years 2024–2027, about 31 years into the future from when Butler wrote it—but a mere six months into the future from when we were reading it (November 2023). This timeliness lent the novel some additional power, especially given the past twenty years’ increasingly fractious social polarization and the frightening effects of climate change that have led to weeks of 110-degree weather in places as disparate as Arizona and the Pacific Northwest, the drying of lakes and reservoirs in the US and around the world, and massive wildfires across North America. It was difficult to read the novel and not think about the potential consequences of further intensification of humanity’s greed, fear, and factionalism.
The story is narrated by its female protagonist, a black teenager named Lauren Oya Olamina. Her father is a preacher and a professor at a local university. The Olaminas live within a makeshift gated community in the fictional town of Robledo, about 20 miles outside of Los Angeles, California. Some within the community recall the good times of the 1990s, but the younger generation knows only the dystopian life of the 2020s in which drug addicts and arsonists roam freely, the police and fire departments operate as privatized services available only to those who can afford to pay, basic services such as water and power have fallen into disrepair, and corporations operate their own fiefdoms independent of any government.
Lauren was born a “sharer” (blessed/cursed with hyper-empathy), which sets her apart from others because she is attuned to their feelings and pain. Being an empath and having a preacher for a father while witnessing the failure of Christianity and the social contract to maintain social bonds leads Lauren to develop her own religion, which she calls Earthseed. Each chapter of the novel is one of Lauren’s diary entries, which are punctuated by excerpts from her religious manifesto, Earthseed: The Books of the Living. The central tenet of Earthseed is that “God is change” (p. 25). Her conception of God is that of a state of being, rather than a kind of anthropomorphizing or personification, and thus her God doesn’t love or hate or watch over us or know us, doesn’t demand our love or loyalty (pp. 25–26). Lauren characterizes God/change using the following descriptors:
· Infinite
· Irrisistible
· Indifferent
· Inevitable
· Pliable
Lauren preaches that God/change exists to be shaped—that humans can shape change, but if it is not shaped in any particular way or is shaped in too many ways at once, the result is chaos (p. 26). In her mind, we must either adapt to change or be a victim. Octavia Butler drew on several world religions in conceiving of Earthseed, including Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam.
Portrait of Octavia Butler
According to Lauren’s Earthseed religion, humanity’s destiny is to populate other galaxies and worlds: “The Destiny of Earthseed / Is to take root among the stars” (pp. 77; 84; 222; 261). Octavia Butler’s third (unfinished) installment in the series, known as Parable of the Trickster, was set in the colony of that new planet (Canavan, 2019). The idea that humans can abandon Earth and start over elsewhere is problematic because it permits the destruction of Earth. Reinforcing the narrative of abandonment is my only criticism of the novel (well, not this novel so much as the trajectory of the series). Rather than operate on the unrealistic assumption that technology will advance enough to enable the species to leave by the time the Earth becomes unsuitable for human life, we should instead strive to preserve the planet and integrate humanity into the ecosystem harmoniously. Aside from that one quibble, this novel is fantastic, and it makes an interesting prequel to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006).
Much of the novel can be understood as an exploration of what it means to be a community, the mutual responsibilities that community members bear for each other, and what happens to a community when members fail to maintain those responsibilities. It also explores the consequences of governments removing labor protections and the social safety net, as we see society roll backwards to the 1800s with not only the privatization of firefighting and safety services but also a return to company scrip and debt bondage. As civilization regresses, the breakdown of barriers between humanity and the rest of nature accelerates as people must re-evaluate their relationship to the world. This ecological emphasis provides a different area of intellectual exploration than other dystopian speculative fiction in its peer group, such as Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale (1985), although perhaps Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) would be a more apt comparison.
Ultimately, Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower provides a great deal of food for thought and discussion. The book group’s conversation was wide-ranging, and it covered many of the topics I wrote about in this piece. We discussed aspects of the Earthseed religion that might have made it appealing in the midst of social collapse, including its similarities and differences to other world religions—particularly the extent to which its tenets might be seen as compatible with other religions such as Catholicism and Buddhism. We also focused on the ways in which Lauren tried to prepare herself for life without social infrastructure by acquiring and reading books about gardening and survival. We noted references to indigenous knowledge and wisdom—including fundamental knowledge such as the planting of the three sisters (the companion planting of corn, beans, and squash)—which made for interesting points of intersection with books such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.
Additional Resources
Anderson, Hephzibah. “Why Octavia E Butler’s novels are so relevant today.” BBC, 18 March 2020. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200317-why-octavia-e-butlers-novels-are-so-relevant-today.
Canavan, Gerry. “‘There’s Nothing New / Under The Sun, / But There Are New Suns’: Recovering Octavia E. Butler’s Lost Parables.” LA Review of Books, 9 June 2014. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/theres-nothing-new-sun-new-suns-recovering-octavia-e-butlers-lost-parables/.
Canavan, Gerry. “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia.” English Faculty Research and Publications. 533. (2019). https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_fac/533.
George, Lynell and Ainslee Alem Robson. “The Visions of Octavia Butler.” The New York Times, 17 November 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/17/arts/octavia-butler-vision-kindred.html.
Goodman, Amy and Juan González. “Remembering Octavia Butler: Black Sci-Fi Writer Shares Cautionary Tales in Unearthed 2005 Interview.” Democracy Now! 23 February 2021. https://www.democracynow.org/2021/2/23/octavia_butler_2005_interview.
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas, and Ranu Samantrai. “A Memorial to Octavia E. Butler.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3 (November 2010), pp. 353–361. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25746438.
Rose, Charlie. “Octavia Butler.” Interview. Charlie Rose, 1 June 2000. https://charlierose.com/videos/28978.
