Elizabeth (Plant Based Bride)'s Reviews > Parable of the Sower

"In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn."

Parable of the Sower is a dystopian pre-apocalyptic science-fiction novel written in the 1990s by the ever-prescient Octavia E. Butler, set in a drought-ridden and essentially lawless California where violence, poverty, and drug addiction run rampant.

The kicker? The book begins in 2024.

As Gloria Steinem says in her introduction, "If there's one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true." and she couldn't be more right. I spent much of the novel with a pit in my stomach, thinking about how easily this vision of the future could become a reality while simultaneously feeling deep gratitude that it hasn't quite arrived on Butler's timeline. This book focuses on our protagonist, Lauren, a teenage girl living with her family in a walled community, hiding a dangerous secret, resisting her father's religion and searching for her own answers. Slowly, over the course of years and through the novel, Lauren assembles her own seedling of a religion, Earthseed, based on the central truth of the universe as she sees it: "God is change."

Through a series of disturbing and heartbreaking events leading to a fraught pilgrimage to Earthseed's only hope of a holy land and sprinklings of passages from Lauren's 'Earthseed: The Book of the Living,' Butler presents a vision of a different type of faith, a different understanding of a God and their relationship to humans and the Earth, and the harrowing vision of the future she saw on the horizon living through the late 20th century and events such as the LA riots. This book doesn't shy away from looking the real threats to life on Earth as we know it in the face, diving headfirst into topics such as climate change, human apathy and cruelty, wealth disparity, food and water insecurity, drug addiction, unequal access to education, privatization of natural resources and land, misogyny, racism, and slavery, among others.

Parable of the Sower is not an enjoyable read. It's prophetic, visceral, painful, raw, and deeply confronting. But that's also why it's worth your time.

"Like her, I believe in something that I think my dying, denying, backward-looking people need."

We are not as far away from this future as we'd like to think, and a commitment to apathy and ignorance can only lead to our destruction.

I hope we are able to take this novel's grim warning to heart because, like Lauren, "I intend to survive."



Trigger/Content Warnings: death, decapitation, rape (adults and children), violence, drug abuse, arson, poverty, suicide, incest, grooming, children giving birth, animal cruelty and death, gun violence, child labour, misogyny, physical abuse of a child, slavery, cannibalism


This was included in my Top 10 Favourite Sci-Fi Books and Series video: https://youtu.be/2v0hcBS9zlQ


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