Book Review: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler
Goodreads Description: In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.
When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.
My Review: The world as we know it is ending. In Lauren's version of America, society has all but collapsed, with only its skeletal remains in place. Democracy is only available to the privileged few, public services like police and firefighters work on a libertarian fee-for-service model that leaves their help woefully out of reach, and rising food and gas costs have left people using bikes and growing their own food. A gated community is all that keeps Lauren and her family safe from the gang violence that ravages the streets at night, but soon even the walls won't be enough to keep out the hungry. Lauren knows it's only a matter of time before the gate comes down and all hell breaks loose. She knows she can't risk her survival on chance, or the kindness of strangers, and so she prepares. Amaasses books, supplies, practices her shooting, refines her scripture. The end of days are coming, but Lauren will be ready. Out of the ashes, her new world will grow.
Written in the 1990s, Parable of the Sower's depiction of 2020s California is haunting, to say the least. Like most dystopian novels written decades prior, it's fascinating to compare what Butler thought the world would become with what we actually got. There are a lot of ways in which the apocalyptic nightmare of Butler's America is very true to reality -- the depiction of police feels figuratively accurate, while they may not take direct payment from citizens (outright), they certainty do harm/cause legal trouble for the people who called them, do not solve/stop crimes, and utilize unchecked brutality. Butler's depiction of police reminded me of what so many black people in America today face when dealing with police, highlighting how little has probably changed in the 30 years since the book was written. Despite the apocalyptic description of life in California, Butler specifically leaves elements of our own society intact to highlight how this societal degradation can take place under our very noses. Much of our apocalypse narratives involve the dissolution of government systems as a signifier that the Thing™ (climate change, asteroid, virus, zombies, etc.) has succeeded in apocalypting the world, but Butler puts the breaks on that thinking and poses the question, "But what if we didn't have the usual signifiers of societal collapse? What if the frame was still there, but everything within had rotted away?" The result is both fascinating and refreshing.
At its core, Parable of the Sower is a story about survival and patient resistance, especially for marginalized people, and how one can carve out space and a future for themselves in a hostile environment. Lauren knows the world she's living in is unsustainable and ultimately fatalistic, and from a young age begins preparing to leave her environment to build a new world, complete with a religious ideology to influence the culture of her new settlement. She spends years amassing supplies, knowledge, skills, and resources to actually succeed in her endeavours. Lauren's entire personhood is constructed around surviving and creating her community, and while some readers (and characters) find this part of her personality overwhelming, the narrative stresses that it is the entire reason why she (and thus her companions) survive and succeed. Some vulnerable moments reveal that this obsession strains Lauren, but she feels it's a necessary sacrifice in order to quite literally save the world. Like many marginalized people fighting against inequalities and injustices, the task ahead of Lauren is daunting, and she needs to prepare to fight for a long time in order to see success, so she finds ways to cope and build resilience so she can endure, such as building a community and falling in love. In this way, the novel presents an interesting perspective on what it means to resist for long periods, and not only how to survive that period, but thrive in it.
Personally, I struggled to connect with the story, hence the lowered rating. While it's obvious that Butler is a talented writer and deserves her place among acclaimed SFF authors, I didn't connect with the plot or its characters, despite the wide cast. This is just my personal opinion, which I feel I have to honor, even though objectively I realize there's a lot to love about this book. Butler's observations on human behaviour and society alone, as well as the gritty realism when it came to wilderness survival, built the narrative up into a satisfying and insightful read. So, despite the lowered star rating for this classic, I still highly recommend this novel for dystopian lovers far and wide.
TL;DR: All in all, 3/5 stars. Badass black girl magic meets a defamiliarized apocalypse.
