There is so much going on in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower that I’m pretty sure I’m missing part of it. What a great book! Technically, there’s no apocalypse in the story, but the story is generally a post-apocayptic tale, and I like to sink my teeth into them. In addition, this is an aggressively multi-racial novel, perhaps the most so that I’ve ever read. I definitely brings a different feel to it than most science fiction, because the racial make-up of the characters is not in the manner of Star Trek, where it matters little to the story or the characters. In Parable of the Sowers racism is alive and well, and characters remember their own racial and cultural heritage too.
Lauren Olamina lives in the community of Robledo near Los Angeles. It’s a Los Angeles in the mid-2020s, social order is no longer what it used to be. Government barely functions and exists mostly so workers there can extract money from citizens. The fortunate have erected walls around their communities to keep out the poor and drug-addicted who will steal everything if given a chance. Southern California sees rain only once every 5 or 6 years because of global warming, and the citizens see the armed states of Oregon and Washington as paradise because they still get rain.
A significant portion of the book takes place in the Robledo community showing a teen-age Lauren interacting with her Baptist minister father and resentful step-mother. He’s strict, but engages Lauren and makes her think. For instance, while her father requires her to practice shooting, he doesn’t allow young Lauren to keep a gun in her bedroom. Lauren believes that someday the great unwashed masses will knock over the community wall. She wants to be prepared to live like a survivalist. It scares her friends. Dad doesn’t think she should scare people.
People are bored. They wouldn’t mind another informal class now that they’ve lost the Yannis television. If you can think of ways to entertain them and teach them at the same time, you’ll get your information out. And all without making anyone look down.
Look down . . . ?
Into the abyss, daughter.[…]You’ve just noticed the abyss,he continued.The adults in this community have balancing on the edge of it for more years than you’ve been alive.
It’s a violent world. Few jobs. Armed stores. Police who charge for their services (as do the fire department). Water scarce and costing. Stepping outside the walls of their community brings constant risk of death.
The book does not shy away from death. Characters you know die. Characters you love kill, and sometimes not even completely with proper Christian justification.
One major thread throughout consists of Lauren’s ideas about the nature of god. In my own youth, I also pondered much about god and thought I had determined exactly how god could work. I rebelled against my religious upbringing. My ideas weren’t so far off from those of Lauren Olamina. In Parable of the Sower, Olamina gets to do what I never had the guts to do: proselytize. After the riff-raff do indeed overwhelm her street’s walls, Lauren leads a group of them walking north toward the promised land of Oregon. Being a preacher’s daughter, she’s scared at first of telling them. They knew her and her father. But they want to know what she’s writing in her notebooks. As they walk further and further north, she becomes more and more confident in passing on her new religion, Earthseed.
I suppose that’s the real science fiction of the book, that anyone wouldn’t roll their eyes at the religious proclamations of an eighteen year old girl. History does have numerous examples of the young and on fire establishing new sects, so it’s not completely out of the question. Despite my own aversion, it doesn’t feel wrong in the book. Butler introduces and expands it in a way that makes it natural and believable.
The typical image of a science fiction geek is that of an acne-infected white teen boy reading stories of space-faring voyages in his basement, far from interaction with other people. Those stories, by Heinlein and Asimov and the like, contain similar stories of daring-do by individuals who seldom form strong bonds with a community. This would be my introduction to science fiction in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That is not Butler’s book, however.
As I wrote in the introductory paragraph, this is one of the most aggressively multi-racial books I’ve read in a while. The leader is a black teen, grand-daughter of a 60s black radical. One earl companion is an older white teen. Latinos and Asians and mixed race people all join the traveling group. I think it’s fair to say that the rejection of a white-only story is also a rejection of the individualist approach as well. The story is a celebration of the small group over the individual. And yet, individuals in the group do not lose their identity, their background, or their individual choice. There’s a sequel, Parable of the Talents that I need to read now to see how Butler writes this dynamic into a larger group. It’s much tougher to make that work on a larger scale, where the community has to seriously deal with the free-rider problem on a large scale.
Lastly, Lauren Olamina is a hyper-empath. When someone around her feels, Lauren shares their emotion. It’s not real. It’s a psychological syndrome, the result of drug abuse by her mother when Lauren was in utero. But it’s not real in the same way depression isn’t real. A depressed person’s circumstances may not be hopeless, but psychological beliefs have both physical and mental causes that are not subject to logical reasoning. You can’t just buck up and get over it. Whenever Lauren witnesses someone feeling pain, including pain that Lauren has caused by knifing or shooting them, she feels that pain to the intensity that she thinks the other person is experiencing it. There’s got to be a broader interpretation to this syndrome in the story than a mere plot device, but it’s one of the things that went over my head. As a plot device, it was interesting and made the story richer, but didn’t seem integral to the story. Since everything else ties in at multiple levels, I’m pretty sure I’m missing something.
A most enjoyable and thought provoking book.
Title: Parable of the sower
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Cover creator: Don Puckey (designer) / John Jude Palencar (artist)
Series: Parable novels; 1
Imprint / publisher: Aspect / Warner Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 295 p.
Publication date: February 1995
ISBN-10: 0-446-60197-7
Subject: African Americans — Fiction
Subject: Twenty-first century — Fiction
Subject: California, Southern — Fiction
LC classification: PS3552.U827 P37 1993
This is one of my favorite books. I read it in college *mumblety* years ago, and every year or so since. During grad school I wrote a reading guide for it for 12th graders and realized I had forgotten what a violent book it is, because the violence, while inescapably present, is not gratuitous.
I can even say that this novel informed some of my spiritual thinking, way back when and up to the present day. I think Butler had some important things to say about how religions come to be, and it saddens me that we’ll never see Parable of the Trickster.
I read this book about a year ago. It’s terrific, and I think you’ve captured quite a few of the more interesting aspects of the story in your review. I wonder if Octavia Butler’s experiences as a black American didn’t inspire her ideas about how the police and other authorities would behave toward the public. It certainly had the feel of knowing what it’s like when the authorities aren’t interested in your problems, that’s for sure.