s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]'s Reviews > Parable of the Sower

‘The world is full of painful stories.’

When the world falls apart and people are beset by intense suffering and sadness, many turn to religion for the assuring promise of a better place beyond death. In Parable of the Sower, an intensely riveting and disquieting vision of America’s collapse by Octavia Butler, teenage Lauren Olamina instead asks why should we resign ourselves to hope in paradise after death when we could rise up with the power to fight the suffering we face while alive to embrace a brighter tomorrow for all. Lauren lives in a community protected by a wall from the violence outside and is afflicted with a condition of hyper-empathy. Her perspective on other’s pain shapes her towards a revolutionary new beginning for humanity, if she can survive that is. Drawing from the biblical parable from which the novel takes it’s name, this is a novel about the seeds of hope that we must believe can grow even in the darkest of nights and the harshest terrains. Butler plunges the reader into a bleakness of humanity where capitalism has reformed a fresh take on slavery and worker’s oppression as the economy gasps is dying breaths, while all around chaos reigns supreme. Harrowing yet hopeful, Butler’s novel rightfully belongs in conversation with 1984 and Brave New World as a prescient portrayal of social collapse while offering a way forward through embracing change and empathy.

‘Freedom is dangerous but it's precious, too. You can't just throw it away or let it slip away.’

Butler pulls no punches in her world building. Beginning in 2024, Lauren has been born into an America ravaged by climate change, violence and a collapsing economy that opened the door for outlandish inequality. A new President takes the helm on a platform to remove government programs and revitalize jobs, creating a fresh revitalization of Company Towns and debt-slavery. The set-up between a willful acceptance of a debt one can never pay off or succumbing to the violence that is spreading offers little chance of hope in lives already resigned to nothing more than a short lifespan having babies and suffering. Published in 1993, the parallels to our modern sociopolitical climate are striking, such as the pits of debt or fear of losing health care that keep people locked in less-than-desirable jobs (the 2018 comedy Sorry to Bother You from Boots Riley does an excellent job comedically skewering this concept as well--highly recommended). Butler bares her teeth in her critiques of capitalism and the slow creep on human rights that perish for the sake of “economic progress” that only seems to benefit the established elite.

‘There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.’

When it becomes necessary for human life to be normalized as expendable, is the system even worth upholding? ‘Will it be legal to poison, mutilate, or infect people—as long as you provide them with food, water, and space to die?’ Lauren wonders as those around her flee to the illusion of safety in the newly created company town. As she will say in the sequel, Parable of the Talents, ‘In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.’ . Like a phoenix, Lauren wishes for a new future to rise from the ashes of her dying society--which she quite literally witnesses being burnt by roaming gangs who then murder all her friends and family as they try to flee. The God of her forebearers has failed to provide meaning for her anymore and those who follow the old ways seem more of an obstacle to a chance of progress than a safety net. Butler demonstrates how many of our problems are blatant and in our face, but we have been socialized to accept them and those who speak out and warn others or offer an alternative, like Lauren, are dismissed as fearmongering and alarmism. This is a story about what happens when your warnings are correct, but the devastation gives no room for validation. Remember the parts of The Road that haunt you? Now imagine that sustained for a full novel. The second half of this book follows people walking a freeway under constant siege of theft and murder, long nights keeping watch and all the nightmares along the way.

‘That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.’

Butler evokes the spirit of Frederick Douglass in Lauren, who, like Douglass, had the rare ability to read and write in her oppressed community. As her small group of refugees trudge north, she considers how they have become a sort of ‘modern underground railroad,’ taking in those fleeing prostitution or debt-slavery, those fleeing a wasteland where everything they love was stolen from them. Douglass surreptitiously taught slaves how to read and write using the Bible as the primary text. Lauren, who is teaching her friends, is also spreading religion. But unlike when the oppressed embraced the God of their oppressors--an act of defiance and spiritual salvation--here they are rejecting the God of old in place of a new one: Earthseed.

Like the farmer from the biblical parable from which the novel takes it’s name, Lauren is spreading the seeds of her new ‘belief system’. God is Change, Lauren says. Her God is less a deity than an idea that she believes can transform humanity. Writing her scripture in poetry, she is walking the land preaching her new beliefs and taking in converts. Like the seeds of the parable her words may fall on deaf or disbelieving ears, but some, like Travis or Bankole, become her ‘first converts’.

All that you touch,
You Change.
All that you Change,
Changes you.
The only lasting truth Is Change.
God.

Earthseed draws on many religions--Lauren’s father is a Baptist pastor, which shapes her foundational thinking--mixed with afrofuturism. The ultimate goal is to spread humanity in peace throughout the stars, which is a defiant statement in a country where the newly elected President is working to abolish the space program. For Lauren, God is a trickster figure, an embodiment of change, which to many of her hopeful converts doesn’t seem enough of a powerful cause to believe in. This makes one consider why religious texts are so imbued with magic and wonder if without something magical--like the resurrection of Jesus from the dead--would his message of being executed by the State for standing up to them with a message of universal and equitable love as an opposition to oppression and wealth-seeking for power have been passed down throughout time. Lauren believes in a ‘Book of the living’ that informs on how to create a paradise for those alive, but without a magical goal it may be a difficult persuasion. Yet, she must still plant the seeds and hope they take in unfamiliar soil.

Seeds planting is thematic throughout the novel beyond religious context. Lauren packs different seeds as food in her survival pack--a concept she tries to introduce to her community early on but is shouted down as being alarmist for wanting people to prepare for the worst, an easily empathetic scenario for teens her own age to identify with--and collects different seasonal seeds as the group travels North. When they find a place to possibly settle, it is her seeds that offer hope for a sustainable society to flourish upon. This draws a direct connection between the environmental messages and the religious ones in the novel.

‘The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.’

Beyond progressive critiques of capitalism and expositions on impending climate crisis, Butler’s narrative embraces intersectionality and unity as imperative to survival. ‘Embrace diversity,’ Lauren preaches in her poetry as her group begins to pick up a variety of people, ‘Unite— Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed / By those who see you as prey. / Embrace diversity / Or be destroyed.’ There is a strong message of identifying the usefulness or any individual they welcome into their group, both despite their differences but also by recognizing and embracing differences. Lauren passes herself off as a man to make her initial party appear like a heteronormative couple, which attracts less attention. The biases we find in today’s society are elevated in Butler’s apocalyptic vision to remind us that certain groups bear privileges others do not. By recognizing them they are able to subvert them and take note of which social constructs enable violence upon others. Identifying the points of oppression are necessary to correct them.

It’s curious how Butler is always relegated to the Sci-Fi genre and shelved accordingly in bookstores. Not that there's anything wrong with Sci-Fi, but, as Ursula K Le Guin has spoken and written extensively on, the genre is often used as a diminutive to distract from many socially conscious works. She says it is a ‘lingering problem’ in the book community where ‘the maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre... become limitations rather than possibilities (read the full interview here). Why does Parable end up in the Sci-Fi section whereas Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy’s The Road or 1984 and Brave New World are considered Literary fiction? Of the latter two, Butler’s world feels the least dated and is in many ways more socially progressive than any of these aforementioned titles. Her other work, Kindred, happens to contain time travel, yet the Outlander series remains shelved in fiction. Admittedly, many of Butler’s novels are in fact Sci-Fi narratives, but there is a strong literary aspect to them and this is worth considering. For all the dystopian collapse and horror of gangs fueled by drugs that give them sexual satisfaction from fire (yep), the heart of this novel is one of social justice and dramatic social and economic revolution but most importantly the necessity to embrace change in order for these things to grow in a fertile soil of progress.

‘Belief Initiates and guides action— Or it does nothing.

Octavia Butler is an absolute gem of a writer and, while it is sad that the current state of world affairs leads people to seek out a book like this, I’m glad Butler was there to have a nearly perfect one ready and waiting. Earthseed is an interesting concept to consider, particularly because it is fairly secular, so those without a religious bent will not be turned off by strong focus on developing an afro-futurist belief system. In fact, it’s all rather beautiful and encouraging. This is the book I would most recommend for those looking for something in the 1984/BNW/etc category of dystopian classics. Butler invites us all to help build a better world before it is too late.

4.5/5

‘It took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change.’