The parable of the sower and the parable of the talents

I am just finishing up the second in a series of science fiction novels by Octavia L. Butler, so amazing because reading them felt like being plunked down in the middle of, oh, maybe next year or the year after, if things keep going the way they are. Because of that, they are terrifying. The Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, and The Parable of the Talents was published in 1998. Butler began writing the series in 1989. I continue to wonder how she could have been so spine-tingling prescient 36 years ago.

She has, in fact, been asked that question and answered that in 1989 she looked around, paid attention to what she noticed, then projected her imagination forward to 2024, when the first book, The Parable of the Sower opens. Back in 1989 she saw late-stage capitalism (the 99%), climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence, and an explosion of the tech industry without controls. She saw a growing Conservative Christian movement that wanted to take things back to Biblical times and a political party that was pairing up with them. What happens when most people don’t have enough money in a broken system? She answered that question with this novel.

The protagonist is a 15-year-old black girl, Lauren Oya Olamina, who lives in a walled and gated community with her family who do so to survive. Just like now, there is drought and rising seawater and other effects from climate change. Those who roam the streets, the unhoused and the drug addicts, set fires because they take a drug called “pyro” that gives them sexual pleasure from so doing. Police do nothing and won’t come to help unless they are paid, and even then, they continue doing nothing. It’s even worse for Lauren’s community because they are Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Racism is rampant. There is little fresh, clean water. She and her stepmother teach school because there are no schools except for universities, where her father teaches. Each day his traveling to the school is a dangerous journey for him.  He is also the minister for the community and he teaches everyone old enough how to shoot. On their outings they must be on the outlook for dangerous gangs and stray dogs. Both people and the dogs eat dead bodies. She and her stepmother have taught people how to grow and preserve food and to save seeds for the next growing season. No one can afford groceries. The Presidential candidate is running on a platform to dismantle government programs and bring back jobs. 

As Lauren learns to shoot, she also studies how to use native plants. She reads maps because she knows someday their community will be overrun with a gang and she’s going to have to go somewhere else to live, if she survives. She develops her own belief system called Earthseed, which says that God is change because that is the only thing we can count on. It’s her hope to gather groups of people to believe, grow a faith community and eventually leave Earth to go live on Mars. One thing may hamper her efforts, and this is that she has a condition called “hyperempathy” where she feels both the pain and pleasure of people around her. Lauren’s mother took a drug when she was pregnant with Lauren, as did many women, and now their children have the condition, which to others is repellent. It puts all of them at risk because knowing they have the condition makes it easy to control them.

Of course, the unthinkable occurs, Lauren loses both family and community, and she must set off on her own, headed north like so many to what they hope is a safer place to live. Hardly anyone has cars because they can’t afford them nor the gas to power them, so they join streams of others on the roads, walking by day and hiding at night.

By the opening of The Parable of the Talents, Lauren, who is now called “Olamina,” her last name, is heading a community called “Acorn” on the land of her husband, Bankole. He is considerably older than she and a doctor, who does what he can to help the group with what he has and what he can find from foraging and native plants. The group must fight off roving bands of ill-doers. Outside their community there are those who use slave collars on the less fortunate because they can make them do whatever they want. The Conservative Christian group has begun to cut out the tongues of enslaved women so they cannot speak what the men do not want to hear. Technology has evolved to include “dream masks” which are like movies within dreams you can choose to experience. News comes in little bullet points rather than informed stories and is found on disks. The new President’s administration disdains science and scientific research. A new Presidential candidate, a Texas senator and religious zealot, is in the wings and he is running on the platform, “Make America Great Again.”

Just as their community is beginning to grow and function well and it seems Olamina’s hopes may come to fruition, trouble arrives and they are overtaken by the Christian Conservative zealots. Everyone who lives is put into a slave collar. All their children, including Olamina’s baby, are taken away, never to be seen again. There is little food, no bathing, no heat, and until they are made to dig latrines, no bathrooms. They are made to toil morning to night. The women are raped and tortured, sometimes until they die. Life is hell, and some choose not to go on living. The question is, does Olamina go on to rebuild an Earthseed group? How can she?

As the second book in the series is somewhat more removed from the present, the awful occurrences are easier to hold at arm’s length—but not for long, I fear. So much of what is in these novels is chillingly familiar. (see the items in bold above.)

These books are well-thought out, and prophetic, although she hadn’t considered them so. I recommend them, but only for readers who are strong right now. So many of us are fearing for our lives, our careers, our ways of being in the world. Butler meant this series to be a trilogy, but after the second book, she was too depressed to go on. Her next book was a vampire novel, something way less scary.

I am left to wonder why these two novels never made it to the big screen. Also, I am sorry Octavia Butler died in 2006. Perhaps her prescience could have told us how we are to proceed at present.

Here’s what Butler said about her books being prophetic: “This was a cautionary tale, although people have told me it was prophecy. All I have to say to that is: I certainly hope not.”

Paying attention to daily changes in our nation’s government at present, looking at the state of our states and of our daily lives, at our subtle and not so subtle climate changes, and at our growing unhoused population, I’d have to disagree with her. The similarities are chilling.