David Roth: I will start by saying something nice about Parable Of The Sower, which is that it really is as prescient as advertised. So much so, in fact, that I found it pretty punishing to read. I wasn’t expecting escapism, obviously, but I found it difficult at times to appreciate how well Octavia E. Butler anticipated what America would be like after three decades of social and political atrophy from my vantage point here in the future that she anticipated.
Brandy Jensen: I have to say, this was not exactly a pleasant reading experience for me.
Rachelle Hampton: When we first decided to choose Parable of The Sower for this month’s DRAB, I remember thinking: oh yes, I loved Kindred. What I seemingly blocked from my memory of reading Kindred was how deeply (and intentionally) unsettling the whole experience was. Butler has this ability to create worlds that are just a few degrees of difference away from our current reality. In Kindred, that degree of difference was an unexplained ability to time travel, a superpower turned into a curse for a black woman who keeps traveling to the antebellum South. Every other gruesome detail of chattel slavery remains unchanged from history.
In Parable of the Sower, the degree of difference largely feels like a matter of time. That unsettled feeling that I now remember from Kindred came flooding back within a few pages of Parable’s opening chapter and I’ve found it hard to shake off despite finishing the book on Monday.
David: It has also stayed with me. Not just how harsh the harsh stuff was, but the dread and peril of it all, the feeling that help is very much not on the way.
Brandy: I tend to get irritated when people judge works of speculative fiction based on the accuracy of their predictions, since I think that’s a kind of impoverished way of understanding what these writers are about and has very little to do with why I like reading this genre. However, that being said, Butler really did call it. You gotta give it to her on that front.
Alex Sujong Laughlin: I know people have said this a lot but it absolutely added to the surreality of the reading experience to have the days we’re currently living through be covered in the span of the novel. I felt really aware of Butler’s casting forward through time in the early pages of the book, especially, which cover late 2024 and early 2025.
David: An abstracted and sadistic politics, wariness and fear suffusing every social interaction, privatization gnawing away at everything that used to be understood as a common good, climate collapse, the predatory uselessness of the police—she covers all the classic things we love to think about every day. This made it a little more frustrating to me that the rest of the book was…I don’t want to say not-interesting, because it was that, but kind of straightjacketed to some extent by the storytelling choices. It picked up for me once it became more identifiably a sort of post-apocalyptic adventure/horror narrative, but the social commentary was sort of subsidiary to what was mostly a sort of brutal and decently conventional plot. Or not subsidiary so much as it was just the background, or the context, or the thing through which every endangered character in this book has to fight.
Alex: I was pretty surprised by the novel’s shape. It made sense in retrospect that it’s titled as a parable; as I was reading it, I kept expecting to see a more conventional plot shape arise and it didn’t, it just kind of unfolded more and more toward the formation of Earthseed.
David: Brandy, you’d read this before. What did a re-reading offer for you?
Brandy: I first read it quite a few years back, and I remember being struck by how right it felt that the apocalypse she describes wasn’t a discrete event, it was a matter of catastrophe compounding. Re-reading it while firmly in the midst of some compounding catastrophes was less fun.
David: I feel a little bad harping on how not-fun it is. Not every book has to be fun. But it’s a lot of sheer surfaces for me, in terms of the texture of the story, starting with our main character and narrator being this very brilliant and confident teenager. I have no problem with brilliant and confident teenagers—in books, mind you, I do not want to encounter one in my day to day life if I can manage it—but so much of Lauren’s vision for her religion, which I feel like should be central to her character and the broader question of maintaining faith in a world of crumbling institutions and collapsing humanity, is pretty well worked out from the start. Which, again, I get that a brilliant teen might not be brimming with ambivalence or self-critique; prophets aren’t necessarily known for that. But the dryness of not just the language but the intellectual underpinning was challenging for me. The ideas are very interesting but I wanted to see them getting worked out, questioned, tested, improved; it felt to me like a faith grounded in the centrality of change, as Earthseed is, shouldn’t feel this static.
Alex: Going back to this novel being told as a parable, or an origin story for this religion, I felt a bit less compelled by Lauren as a protagonist because of her consistent confidence. There’s a sense of predetermination that I think exists in most religions’ origin stories that serves the story of the religion within the world it exists, but less so for a reader of a novel.
Rachelle: There is a sort of spareness, almost ease, to Lauren’s religious journey, Earthseed: to how quickly she comes to understand it and how easily it seems that she converts her followers. It made me curious about the sequel to Parable of the Sower, which is called Parable of the Talents. Butler apparently planned for at least four more Parable novels but ran into writer’s block which #relatable.
Parable of the Sower is told entirely from Lauren’s perspective while Parable of the Talents includes three narrators: Lauren, her daughter, and her husband. Without reading Talents, I can’t tell how much of the straightforwardness of Earthseed’s development is a reflection of the sort of moral clarity of the prophet, a clarity that’s usually experienced far differently by the people around the prophet. From the Wikipedia description of Talents, it seems like Lauren and her daughter experience a lot of strain in their relationship due to Lauren’s focus on Earthseed. Still, I’m not curious enough to read it, not for a long time.
David: I had a similar thought, and had to sort of remind myself that this was the first part of an unfinished epic. But I agree that it’ll take a minute before I want to re-enter this particular world.
Alex: Absolutely. I am very curious to see how the sequel (and nonexistent subsequent novels in the series) would complicate the narrative we got here.
Brandy: I think it’s also important how much of the conversion happens not through words but through deeds. It’s by caring for each other that all these people are brought together.
David: It’s not like there’s less cannibalism or violence or sexual assault in the book’s back third, the part of the story Lauren and the survivors of the destroyed Robledo community hit the road, but the book does open up at that point. Not just becoming more identifiable as a sort of genre experience, but because the story makes that faith real from one test and crisis to the next. I guess it fits that this is the test—not a teenager working it out in her journal, but people who can count on nothing but change learning how to wrestle with a deity like that.
Rachelle: And importantly the book is diaristic—I’m sure there’s theological theorizing being done that Lauren just didn’t have time to record in between dodging cannibals and automatic gunfire and real fire and green-painted bald people high on fire.
Can I ask: would y’all try the drug that makes setting a fire feel as good as sex? Candidly, if I wasn’t a rule-following people-pleaser, I wonder if I’d be a pyromaniac in this timeline; I love fire.
Brandy: It has long been my position that I have absolutely no desire to live in a post-apocalyptic environment. Too much running, everyone smells bad, I have no real skills to offer any kind of community I might encounter. Once the Juul pods run out I’m trying whatever drugs are around and then walking off a cliff.
Rachelle: I definitely thought at multiple points: I’d have killed myself by now.
David: Yeah like when they had to go into Sacramento. Can you even imagine?
Brandy: The darkest timeline.
Alex: Maybe this is because my adolescence and young adulthood coincided with a boom in apocalyptic young adult literature, but I have recurring dreams about packing all my stuff into bags and setting out on the road to somewhere. So Lauren’s preparation and then the way she talked about actually being on the road felt almost familiar to me. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I know I’d be cooked as soon as my SSRIs ran out. If I managed to survive withdrawal, I would absolutely not risk it trying any other drugs.
David: So in reading about the book, before actually reading the book, much was made of when and where Butler worked on it, which was in Southern California around the Los Angeles riots of 1992. I think part of what made this vision of the future a tough sit was that it was effectively premised on the idea “what if it just keeps going like this and doesn’t get any better,” and while it’s glib to say that is what actually happened, there’s something kind of bracing to me about Butler’s refusal to apply that much speculative imagination to the context of the story. You get the drug that makes fire better than sex, and there’s Lauren’s supernatural hyperempathy, but there’s no outside intervention that made society like this; it was just letting every self-inflicted wound in the culture get more urgently infected.
That matter-of-factness is part of what makes the book so unsettling. Wherever she can do it Butler is grounding the action in ordinary things—what kind of guns they carry, where they shop and what they buy, how people get from one place to the next. Again, it didn’t always make for thrilling action but it did bring home how much this world 1) sucks and 2) could suck so much and so brutally while some degraded version of normal life just went on happening alongside it. What, of the stuff that Butler invented, struck you as most effective? I wanted to know more about the condition of hyperempathy—she literally feels the pain of other people as her own, which complicates things significantly once she has to fight and kill to protect her own life. It is a fascinating concept but, for Lauren, it is also just her normal life and gets treated as such in her journal.
Rachelle: First, I just want to +1 what you said, Roth. Part of what makes Butler’s work so unshakeable for me is those details she grounds her work in. The banality of finding food and water, the mundanity of love and sex—I think one of the reasons Butler’s worlds are so hard to shake is because we’re still griping about egg prices from the store while the logistics of ethnic cleansing are being debated. Even the end of the world might be boring, just in wholly gruesome ways.
But to answer your question, I think the hyperempathy also stuck out to me the most, especially when we learn more about how it’s perceived in the wider world outside Robledo.
Brandy: Butler’s treatment of hyperempathy is interesting because you can imagine a more vulgar approach to the question of what to do about a bad world, where the answer is some kind of feel-good bromide about empathy. We live in that world now, and oftentimes people do talk like this. But what’s very clear is that, for Lauren, the hyperempathy can be a real vulnerability. It places her in physical peril, and so long as people tolerate the worsening conditions of the world this will remain true. Feeling isn’t enough.
Rachelle: That’s totally right, Brandy. I really appreciated that hyperempathy wasn’t Lauren’s superpower. There’s even a moment when she says slave owners prefer those who have it because it makes them more effective chattel.
Alex: I have been thinking a lot about living within the bounds of chronic illness, and the negotiations someone has to make with themselves across time in order to prepare and even live through events when they have very real limitations on their bodies or minds. A quality that defined Lauren for me throughout the reading was her emphasis on preparedness. Throughout the novel, she’s thinking ahead, and whether that is a marker of her personality or the direct result of her working with her hyperempathy (what is even the difference, really?), that focus on preparing becomes her superpower so much more than this characteristic of hers that’s actually supernatural.
David: Once the fellow travelers enter the story and the specific depravities of the wider world enter the story, things…well they do not brighten, I do not want to say that. But there’s a sense in which all that revealed suffering and all those different ways to be exploited and victimized makes the case for the necessity of community without the need for any speechifying. Butler manages to make a point, without dipping into any sort of sentimentality, about the ways in which solidarity and fellowship is both essential and not necessarily sufficient. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Butler refuses to compromise—out of deference to what might make it easier to bear as a reader, but also in offering any sense that there’s any other way to survive.
Whatever future is going to be made in this world is going to be extremely hard-won and precarious, and is going to be made more so because it will be so dependent upon defending itself relentlessly against threats from outside. In a sense, the idea of recreating the doomed community of Robledo where the book begins—vulnerable but decently vital, walled off from the outside but kept afloat by various neighborly and familial connections—feels like a best-case scenario. I think this was part of what felt heaviest to me about the book, reading it in this moment. I’ve been thinking a lot of late about how things just are not going to be the way they were—the institutions that are being killed now are not going to be restored to robust health, although also I don’t know that they’ve been all that healthy for much of my lifetime. But I don’t sense that anything is ending, really, so much as the past and present that I took more or less for granted are no longer tenable, and are going to be replaced by something else. That’s as hopeful as Lauren can be at the end—that something might survive, “changed, but still itself.” Even as a sort of abstract thought, that’s a lot to get your head around. When you look the actual work in the face, it feels even more daunting. This absolutely cannot be the last sentence of this blog.
Brandy: Cheer up, Roth. There are still Juul pods and nobody is asking me to go to Sacramento. It’s not cliff time just yet.
Rachelle: Reading this did make me extremely grateful for hot showers and oat vanilla lattes. It’s true though, that it feels like we’re moving toward a future that looks nothing like the one we were once promised. But hey, they even had weed at the new Earthseed compound by the end. Some things will never change.
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