The Parable of the Sower

by Octavia Butler

ISBN 9780446675505

“I’ve never felt that I was making any of this up—not the name, Earthseed, not any of it. I mean, I’ve never felt that it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation.”

Lauren Olamina is part of the generation of children who do not remember the world before. Before the water shortages, and the walled communities, and the drug addicts who burn anything and everything just to watch the flames. Before the California-Oregon border was closed, and Alaska began to talk about seceding. Lauren believes the Earth is dying, and that sooner or later, humanity will have to take to the stars in order to survive. And Lauren means to survive. But how can she convince those around her that they must be ready, that the good times her father and step-mother talk about are never coming back? As the world outside the wall continues to crumble, Lauren hones the philosophy she believes to be humanity’s only hope, becoming the lonely prophet of a new religion born from the ashes of American civilization.

Although originally published in 1993, Parable of the Sower is set in what is now the near future, opening in the year 2024. Lauren has reluctantly submitted to being baptized into her father’s church, even though, for the past three years, she has not been a follower of his god. Rather, she has been slowly laying out the tenets of her own religious philosophy, premised on the seductive idea that God is Change. Therefore, every human action is the act of shaping God, whether deliberately, or carelessly. Lauren calls her religion Earthseed, and believes that the ultimate “destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.” Lauren makes her first attempt to articulate this new philosophy to her best friend Joanna, but is repulsed, and so returns to biding her time behind the walls of the struggling middle class neighbourhood led by her father, as the world outside continues to deteriorate.

The story is told in the style of a diary kept by Lauren as she is growing up, and beginning to hash out her ideas about the world. She is coming of age at a difficult time, and constructs and elaborate system around herself that gives her hope for the future. The early part of the novel is spent inside the walls of her disintegrating community, as her father and step-mother struggle to keep things together, unable to admit that the old world is not coming back. Lauren also pens a lot of poetic or biblical passages, painfully earnest verses that try to convey her growing ideology, and her dream of sharing it with others.  But ultimately, she cannot achieve her destiny until the cataclysm finally comes that cleaves her from her home, and she becomes a sort of traveling prophet, gathering around her a group of people who are willing to form a community based on her unusual philosophy.

The Parable of the Sower is a complex feat of world-building. Butler creates both a crumbling dystopian vision of the United States, and simultaneously incarnates Lauren’s Earthseed philosophy out of that wreckage. She slowly and carefully balances the two, first introducing the reader to Lauren’s world, and then going deeper into her protagonist’s heart and mind to reveal her unusual belief system. What becomes clear in all of this is how much the more recent surge in the popularity of dystopian fiction stands on Butler’s shoulders. More eerie still is the resonance with reality; the novel’s presidential candidate is running on the promise to make America great again. Readers of contemporary dystopian will find much that is familiar here, despite the fact that this novel is nearly twenty-five years old.
___

You might also like:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

We Stand on Guard by Brian K. Vaughan