I’m somewhat of a doomsday prepper. I check the news far too often, I keep non-perishable food around, and one of the reasons I bought a sailboat was to have an escape plan if the chips are down. If I had had a car in 2020, I would’ve been one of the people stocking up on toilet paper. So books like Parable of the Sower make me feel seen.
The story is told through narrator Lauren Olamina, a 15-year-old girl living in Los Angeles in 2024. For reference, the book was written in 1993 (more on that later). On a literary note, by using a teenage lens, Octavia Butler excellently captures frustration and rationalization in the face of world issues. What better subject could a misunderstood apocalypse prophet choose to write through than a young woman? Visionaries and teenage girls alike face crazymaking situations and dismissal on a regular basis. As a teenager, Lauren is also consistently underestimated and overlooked, which allows her to emotionally detach from her community. And detaching from her community allows her to see her friends and family as they are: as scared as she is, but in denial.
In Octavia Butler’s 1993 vision for 2024, a drug called “pyro” makes its users inclined to set fires to anything in sight – most often, homes and people. Considering how widespread drug use and abuse is in America, I thought this was an apt prediction, and a cause for apocalypse that I had never considered. What if the human race went extinct just because a drug got into the wrong hands? The homeless people on pyro in Parable of the Sower slaughter innocent people in gory and animalistic ways – an imagined situation that has ties to our current society. In another aspect of Butler’s 2024, the rich have gotten richer – to the extent that they drifted into economic slavery. By chipping away at democratic values, the large corporations of her dystopian America pay in food, water (an otherwise scarcity in a climate-changed world), and housing. Similarly to sharecropping in Reconstruction America, the “workers” of Lauren’s society rack up debt to the point of indentured servitude. Moreover, Lauren has “hyperempathy,” a condition caused by her mother’s drug abuse while she was in utero. In essence, she feels the physical pain of people she injures or sees being injured. This is one of my favorite (and one of the most effective) parts of the book. I think it’s so telling that empathy – the crux on which our society runs – is seen as a vulnerability in Olivia Butler’s vision of the future.Â
What’s most striking about this pseudo-prediction for 2024 is how realistic it is. There aren’t zombies, there was no nuclear war, the Yellowstone volcano didn’t erupt. As a blog I read put it, “Parable of the Sower… lacks the usual catastrophic single event that you would expect. Instead, it is a gradual disintegration of society as the result of specific forces that were obvious back in 1993 when Butler wrote the book, and even more so now.” The catastrophe in Butler’s dystopia is greed and blame-shifting. Large-scale manipulation. Corporations controlling the media. Public health crises and corruptible law enforcement. An economy-forward and justice-ignorant president. Loss of women’s rights and appropriation of sexual assault and rape. Water scarcity and climate change. And don’t we already see that in our 2024?
We elected a white billionaire. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can legally be considered citizens. Roe v. Wade was overturned. Our greenhouse gas emissions, water scarcity, and temperatures are at record highs. The Doomsday Clock is at 90 seconds to midnight. Butler’s cautionary tale is automatically effective just by its sheer realism. Likewise, the adult characters in the story are in realistic denial. Lauren notices that the adults in her community “never miss a chance to relive the good old days or to tell kids how great it’s going to be when the country gets back on its feet and the good times come back” (Butler 8). Terrifyingly, I could see myself saying that. By negating Lauren’s parent’s rationalization, she’s negating ours. What if the good times don’t come back? What if the damage we’ve already done is irreversible?
However, just like in our 2024, there is hope. Much of the story revolves around Lauren reimagining religion in the context of the apocalypse. Throughout the four years the story covers, Lauren develops “Earthseed: Books of the Living,” which is a Bible-equivalent in her religion. As she describes it, “All that you touch, You change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change” (Butler 1). As an atheist, Lauren’s logical take on faith felt genuinely spiritual to me. While Olivia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower as epistolary fiction, the religious elements are applicable even outside of the context of impending doom. Something I really like about Earthseed was how it catered to the “hope winning out even in the worst circumstances” trope, but it wasn’t overly optimistic. Her spirituality never cured the horrors of her post-apocalyptic reality. Rather, writing down truths about her society gave her purpose and empowerment.Â
In short, I think Parable of the Sower is not only increasingly important to read in modern-day America, but also extremely refreshing for people like me, who feel like they’re the only one worried enough about our society’s collapse. As dark and alarmingly prophetic as she is, Olivia Butler gave me hope about our future, just by acknowledging that it’s seemingly grim.Â