{"id":8427,"date":"2020-05-07T11:42:19","date_gmt":"2020-05-07T15:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8427"},"modified":"2020-05-07T11:42:21","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T15:42:21","slug":"the-parable-of-the-sower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/07\/the-parable-of-the-sower\/","title":{"rendered":"The Parable of the Sower."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve read a lot of science fiction authors, including at least one book by every winner of the Hugo for Best Novel, but had never read anything by Octavia Butler until I read The Parable of the Sower<\/a><\/em> last month. Butler, the most prominent woman of color in sci-fi and a direct inspiration for the highly decorated author N.K. Jemisin, was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “genius” grant, and published 14 novels in her career before her untimely death at age 58 in 2006. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing often absent from science fiction novels and short\nstories, especially those written in the first few decades of the genre, are\nrealistic women characters, something that inspired Butler to start writing her\nown stories. The Parable of the Sower<\/em> is narrated by a young woman of\ncolor named Lauren who is a “sharer,” born with a condition called\nhyperempathy syndrome, so when she sees anyone else suffering physical pain\nshe’s hit with the same pain even though she didn’t suffer the injury. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set in the United States in the 2020s in a post-capitalist\ncollapse that seems like it might have inspired the Purge <\/em>movies, The\nParable of the Sower <\/em>follows Lauren from her poor but protected compound in\nsouthern California on her flight north while she develops her belief system,\nwhich she calls “Earthseed.” Her father is a pastor, which is a rare\nsource of guaranteed income in this dystopian economy, but she finds herself\nunable to believe in his traditional Christian religion, or even in its\nconception of God, instead writing down verses and descriptions of humans as\nEarthseed, driving towards a heaven in the stars where man colonizes new\nplanets now that he’s destroyed this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Parable of the Sower<\/em> is grim and unflinching,\nespecially in its depiction of women as an oppressed underclass in this\nstill-patriarchal facsimile of a society. If you leave the protection of the\ncompound where Lauren and her family live, you put your life at risk; if you do\nso as a woman, especially alone, you are extremely likely to be sexually assaulted,\nand Lauren sees multiple women who appear to have been victims of brutal rapes\nwhenever she heads outside of the commune’s walls. In a world where so many\npeople have too little to eat, and very little to lose, and the police are\nworse than useless, theft is almost expected, and everyone is armed to protect\nthemselves and their property. Butler also adds the wrinkle of a new drug,\nnicknamed ‘pyro,’ that causes addicts to light fires so they can be mesmerized\nby watching the flames. This isn’t our world today, but Butler’s prescient\nwriting about the impacts of increased income inequality and food insecurity on\ntop of a country already armed to its teeth feels a lot more possible right now\nthan it would have when she wrote it in 1993 – even before you layer on a\nglobal pandemic and the rise of an entire political movement ready to discard\ntens of thousands of citizens just to goose the stock market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Earthseed belief system, which revolves around the idea that\nGod is change and holds that man’s destiny is to colonize the stars, gets some\ntreatment within this book, but the specific tenets are less important than\nLauren’s development of the system, and how she uses it to try to build a\nfledgling community around herself while in flight to northern California. The\ncore idea of Earthseed that God is malleable, and humanity can shape God,\nconflicts on some level with its idea that God shapes the universe, which I\nassume Butler would continue to address in the sequel (The Parable of the\nTalents<\/em>); even within this book, Lauren is challenged by the people in her\nragtag band of followers, who range from ardent skeptics to curious adherents,\nto explain this and other paradoxes – or even explain why anyone should believe\nat all in the face of such widespread misery and existential dread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts<\/a><\/em> about a year and a half ago, and was constantly reminded of that book, which also has a young female protagonist struggling against multiple levels of oppression in a dystopian environment, while reading Parable<\/em>; searching now, I see multiple references to Solomon and their novel as a ‘successor’ to Butler’s work. The connections are undeniable, but it also seems like a reminder that voices like theirs and Jemisin’s remain uncommon in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy writing, and thus these themes of sexism, racism, inequality, and othering are also underrepresented, even as they become so much more prevalent in mainstream literature (e.g., with Colson Whitehead<\/a> winning two of the last four Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction with novels about race and racism). Butler also wrote with a gritty, unflinching realism that existed in that era but was, at least, outside the more genteel strains of sci-fi that won awards and garnered more attention, a style that probably put her twenty years ahead of her time. It’s a particular shame that she died so young when, if she were alive today, she’d have seen her influence spread so far, and have seen the world of science fiction expand to include voices and styles like hers become not just accepted, but lauded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Still reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid<\/a><\/em>, by Willie Mays and John Shea. John will be on my podcast next week to talk about the book. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve read a lot of science fiction authors, including at least one book by every winner of the Hugo for Best Novel, but had never read anything by Octavia Butler until I read The Parable of the Sower last month. Butler, the most prominent woman of color in sci-fi and a direct inspiration for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31,36,109,327,524],"class_list":["post-8427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-african-american-literature","tag-american-literature","tag-dystopian","tag-feminist-literature","tag-science-fiction","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8429,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8427\/revisions\/8429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}