Last week: Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856, 1881)
This week: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
Next week: Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (1853)
This week’s novel takes the form of a journal, written by a Black teenager living in a dystopian future Southern California after a breakdown of the climate and the economy, which cast her community into free fall. The first entry is dated Saturday, July 24, 2024.
This novel does two things at once — as speculative fiction, it imagines a dystopian California in the age of climate disaster, and as spiritual fiction, it introduces the founder of a new religion called Earthseed, Lauren Oya Olamina. The spiritual verses appear on the first page of the novel, and at the top of each section, as excerpts from Lauren’s composition notebook entitled EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING. The key principle of Earthseed is that God is Change. Like many, and like the main character Lauren, I take the spiritual messages to heart, as a source of solace to survive the world that Butler imagines for us. From the top of Chapter 20:
God is neither good
nor evil,
neither loving
nor hating.
God is Power.
God is Change.
We must find the rest of what we need
within ourselves,
in one another,
in our Destiny.
Octavia Butler once explained that this novel is of the “if this goes on” speculative genre of science fiction. She looked around at the news of the early 1990s, and asked: if we do not interrupt this trajectory, what world would we have? In an essay for Essence Magazine, she said:
“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”
The world of 2024 is terrifying indeed — there are street drugs that turn people into monsters who burn babies, rape and and theft are commonplace, there are walled towns that are breeched by mid-novel, the water supply is scarce and expensive, federal government is hardly present, there are factory and farm towns that make debt slaves of their workers, there are cannibals and skinheads and wild dogs, and there is even a demigod candidate for president who promises to “Make America Great Again” in the sequel called Parable of the Talents. Parts of this novel are prophesy, others are warnings. It is up to each reader to parse what looks familiar and what is, thankfully, still fiction.
A science fiction genre has arisen in last 30 years, in the wake of Butler’s novel and others, that takes as its starting point the end of nature. And cringe, it is called “Cli-Fi,” for climate fiction. I am currently teaching a master’s level seminar on American Climate Fiction(s) and Butler’s novel is at the top of the syllabus. Often named as this genre’s earliest and most influential entry, Parable of the Sower was decidedly ahead of its time. Though she was the first science fiction author to be granted a MacArthur fellowship, and the first Black woman to win Hugo and Nebula awards, this book was not a huge hit in the 1990s. But, as climate change brought the world of Butler’s novel and the world we are living in closer in sync, the book has found a new and urgently committed audience. At the height of the pandemic, when a second wave put us all back behind walls again, as fires consumed California as they do in the novel— Parable of the Sower found its way back onto the New York Times best seller list, in September 2020. It felt instructional this time.
The problems that Butler spins into the future landscape of Parable are clearly demarcated in her interviews and essays:
“in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.”
This aspect of the novel’s prescience and contemporary popularity lead me to think differently about the novel’s chronotope, or timescale. How time and space are narrativized is one of the key ways we make meaning in a text. That this book offers meaning to us outside the novel in a time-scape that is supposed to be ours but is not exactly, is part of its power.
Lauren has a disorder described in the novel as “hyperempathy,” and she is a “sharer” or someone who feels other people’s pleasure or pain. This makes her vulnerable in a world that we quickly learn is full of physical pain. The novel is terrifying and gory — far more limbs and rapes and blood than I usually stomach. Lauren believes that her mother’s addiction during her pregnancy made her this way. It is something that emerges in the novel as a handicap for the hero, who must shoot to kill or suffer the pain of the bullet wound herself. But it also makes her empathize, and understand pain and pleasure in a uniquely acute way. When regarding the pain of others, Lauren literally experiences it herself, and this makes her trustworthy.
She has another gift: literacy. The books in her childhood home, no matter their genre, are converted into guidebooks to live in the post-climate wilderness. From them she learns how to prepare food and survive on the road. She learns from sci-fi not to trust company towns. Her father finds a recipe for acorn bread. In the imagined safety of their cul-de-sac fortress, the families cultivate fruit trees and orchards, watch the one television together, share a night watch and a church, and teach the kindergartners. The community is not born of shared beliefs— their only connection was that they were living on the same street when it became necessary to put a wall around them. The community of Lauren’s youth has racism, ignorance, and all levels of fellow feeling.
Even within this little space, Lauren stands up to shape the world around her. In one of the early scenes, in chapter 5, Lauren brings her best friend Joanne into her world — telling Joanne about her fear that their neighborhood is vulnerable to thieves and pyros and that she should be prepared for the worst.
“Have you read all your family’s books?”
“Some of them. Not all. They aren’t all worth reading. Books aren’t going to save us.”
“Nothing is going to save us. If we don’t save ourselves, we’re dead. Now use your imagination. Is there anything on your family bookshelves that might help you if you were stuck outside?”
“No.”
“You answer too fast. Go home and look again. And like I said, use your imagination. Any kind of survival information from encyclopedias, biographies, anything that helps you learn to live off the land and defend ourselves. Even some fiction might be useful.”
She gave me a sidelong glance. “I’ll bet,” she said.
“Jo, if you never need this information, it won’t do you any harm. You’ll just know a little more than you did before. So what? By the way, do you take notes when you read?”
Guarded look. “Sometimes.”
“Read this.” I handed her one of the plant books. This one was about California Indians, the plants they used, and how they used them—an interesting, entertaining little book. She would be surprised. There was nothing in it to scare her or threaten her or push her. I thought I had already done enough of that.
“Take notes,” I told her. “You’ll remember better if you do.”
“I still don’t believe you,” she said. “Things don’t have to be as bad as you say they are.”
I put the book into her hands. “Hang on to your notes,” I said. “Pay special attention to the plants that grow between here and the coast and between here and Oregon along the coast. I’ve marked them.”
This is a small, quiet moment, in a fiery, traumatic novel. Lauren wants others to prepare themselves, to find the information that might save them, should they find themselves outside the walls. She knows there is a long road ahead of them, if they ever need to walk to places where water is less scarce. Joanne doesn’t listen, she doesn’t take notes. Joanne tells her mother, who reports this back to Lauren’s father. Pointedly, the next verse from Earthseed reads:
Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers
Her father says not to scare people, because then they cannot be taught. Like from the Emily Dickinson poem from the first week: “The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.” This is wisdom, but Lauren feels more urgency is needed. Earthquake packs, weekly target practice — not softly, gradually share the truth of “the abyss.” Her dad says:
“It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.”
Lauren speaks two parables in Parable of the Sower (on the last page; Luke 8) & parable of the importunate widow (Luke 18). This second parable, that biblical mode of teaching gradually, of easing people to the truth, she speaks at her father’s funeral. They haven’t found his body, but he hasn’t come home. The persistent widow fights for justice in the face of certain failure. “We persist” she says, at the end of her first sermon, “No matter what.”
In class the other day, we kept picking at this moment when Joanne rejects Lauren’s guidance, and rejects the books and knowledge that could keep her alive. For many of the students generation, the science about the climate feels like the abyss, and the adults lack urgency. The temptation to look away from this warning is strong.Heed the signs, Butler tells us in this scene. There are many, and you need to be more prepared. Under the hashtag, #Octaviatriedtotellus, adherents are collecting just these sorts of stories of warning, real world examples of how real this novel could be coming true. They’re taking notes.
The other parable is that of the sower, which Lauren reads at the funeral of those who have been lost in her community (her entire family) when the walls were breeches, and the birth of a new community based on Earthseed, called Acorn. The message here is clear: the sower casts seed that falls on rock, or is eaten. Don't be like Joanne. Be fertile ground.
July 24, 2024, the opening bell of this other version of our present, is coming up. On that day, I hope we take a moment to celebrate what has not yet been lost, what has adapted, take stock of what has changed, and plant an oak tree for the people we have buried. I imagine that the adherents of Earthseed, the religion that this novel called into being, will be doing so.