Parable of the Sower

Octavia Butler

★★★★★

Parable of the Sower is hard to put down. And it’s hard to pick up again. It’s certainly not a fun book, but it’s extremely engaging, despite the bleakness of the slow-apocalypse setting and story.

Octavia Butler presents it as a teenager’s diary entries, starting in what was then the somewhat distant future of 2024, ravaged by climate change and socioeconomic collapse. It follows the next few years as the gated neighborhood she lives in gradually breaks down – both the infrastructure and the community – until the desperately violent people of the streets outside, and the fires they set, tear down and consume what’s left.

The second half of the book follows Lauren and a handful of survivors as they travel north, walking the old freeways, hoping to find a place where they can settle and rebuild.

Through it all, Lauren has been developing a religion she calls “Earthseed,” built on the central idea that “God is change,” and that while that change influences you, you can – and should – also influence what that change is going to be.

Voice

What makes this apocalypse so horrifying, and the story so engaging, is how matter-of-fact Lauren is in describing everything. It’s the world she grew up in, so it’s normal to her, though she can see clearly even at 14 that it’s unsustainable. There’s a sharp generational divide between those who remember what things were like back when water wasn’t prohibitively expensive, when more people had homes than not, when traveling outside your neighborhood wasn’t risking your life, grocery stores didn’t have snipers watching you shop, and police might actually investigate a crime rather than just charge you a fee for looking at the scene. When selling yourself and your family into indentured servitude in a company town didn’t seem like a path to a better future.

But all that is just history to her.

(Thinking about this, it’s markedly different from George in Mira Grant’s Feed, where she seems to be constantly comparing the historical and post-Rising society. Maybe it’s just the character’s journalist voice, but I remember it came off as a bit too well-tailored toward the present-day audience. Whereas Lauren, even when she does talk about the past, is focused on the present and future.)

Lauren’s present is hopeless and brutal, but her diary doesn’t linger on the ever-present brutality like a horror novel would. She acknowledges it, of course, but she’s focused on how to survive it so she can build something better.

Past Futures

Putting on my literary analysis hat for a moment: Dystopias and apocalyptic fiction tend to reflect the societal concerns of the time they were written.

The Reagan/Bush years stoked fears of crime, drug addiction, homelessness, more crime, racism, economic recession, foreign investment, and more crime, with a dash of arguing over whether immigration was good or bad. People were starting to actually think about climate change, despite fossil fuel companies trying to muddy the waters. Gated communities were either a good way to protect yourself from crime or a callous way to isolate yourself from those in greater need. And of course anyone who has lived in California for a while is well acquainted with drought.

Of course so many of those issues were (and still are) tied up in racism. Foreign investment was played up as more of a threat when it was coming from Japan. Inner cities were portrayed as a hotbed of drugs and crime, and white people with means had been fleeing them for those gated neighborhoods in the suburbs, leaving Black and brown people stuck both dealing with the problems and getting blamed for them.

Butler extrapolates these fears to a nightmare level, then turns the racial assumptions on their head. She centers her story on a young Black woman in a multiracial enclave. Everyone’s on the inside. Until they aren’t. Complicating matters is Lauren’s clinically acute hyper-empathy, which makes the struggle between compassion and safety something she has to navigate constantly, especially when their oasis collapses and she’s forced to live outside.

One reason the setting resonates so well today is that our present political climate is largely built by scaremongering over the same fears that defined the 80s (plus transphobia). Republican rhetoric about crime sounds like they never left the 1980s, and the way they talk about cities sounds like they got it from watching 1970s cop films. In reality, crime rates peaked in the 1990s and have dropped dramatically over the last ~30 years (with occasional blips upward, notably during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic).

And of course we’re dealing with an authoritarian President and major fires wiping out entire neighborhoods on Los Angeles, which seems a bit on the nose.

Strangely Familiar

That’s what finally pushed me to start reading it. The book and its sequel have been on my to-read list for years. (A lot of people made the same decision. I’ve read several articles on its sudden popularity, and it’s been a best-seller on several online bookstores.) The Olamina family lives in a fictional city near Los Angeles, and it’s hard not to think of it as a stand-in for Altadena, especially now.

On top of that, though, I’ve traveled a lot of the same route Lauren takes as her group makes its way north. I’ve been to Ventura, Santa Barbara, Salinas, even the route inland along the 156 around San Luis Reservoir…Mendocino is about the only place in the novel I don’t have a clear mental picture of. Sure, that’s mostly just having grown up in California and traveled the state, but anytime you recognize the place in a book as somewhere you’ve been, it makes it feel a bit more personal.