First impressions reviews: Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 book is set in a 2020s California facing climate change and social breakdown and features a teenage female protagonist who responds to these challenges by founding a new community and religion. It has been widely praised as a prescient classic, and there was even a book clubs of ecologists who set up to read it this summer. The timing wasn’t right for me to join, but I vowed to read it on my own when I had the chance. Unfortunately, I found it a bit overhyped. It isn’t a bad book at all, and I certainly respect what Butler was trying to do with it. But I have some issues both with the depictions of climate change and society and with the characters.
When discussing this book and its sequel, ‘The Parable of the Talents’, Butler said she had two main goals. One was to extrapolate on current social and environmental issues: “I considered drugs…I looked at the growing rich/poor gap, at throwaway labor, at our willingness to build and fill prisons, our reluctance to build and repair schools and libraries, and at our assault on the environment. In particular, I looked at global warming and the ways in which it’s likely to change things for us.” The other was to tell a fictional autobiography of someone who, after her death, could become revered as a prophet or a god. “I wanted her to be an intelligent, believable person. I didn’t want to write about a hypocrite of a fool. I wanted her to believe deeply in what she taught and I wanted her teachings to be reasonable.” Ambitious goals, and ones I highly admire! In fact, this is the first major SF novel to tackle climate change. In this interview (quoted in the back of the book), Butler shows that she understands many of the complexities of climate change, like CO2 fertilization effects on plants, or how different species have different responses to the climate shifts, or how higher temperatures could lead to the spread of tropical diseases.
Unfortunately, the only part of that we see in the story is a shortage of rain: Lauren Olamina (the main character) says it can go without raining for 5 years at a stretch which, of course, makes water something people fight over even more than they already do in California! However, there are still wild trees and plants growing – where are they getting their water if there has been zero rain for five years? Also, even in the ‘90s climate scientists knew that warming temperatures would intensify the water cycle, actually increasing total global rainfall, but changing its distribution and making it more likely to come in extreme flood-drought cycles. More importantly, it was already really hot in California and is getting hotter, but direct heat effects are not mentioned at all. Lauren, her growing Earthseed family, and hundreds of other travelers walk the mostly car-abandoned freeways in the middle of the day in August…and no one keels over from heatstroke! Summer temperatures here have only warmed a little bit over the past century - most of the increase has been in winter temperatures - but even so people tend to walk on the shady side of the street and there are billboards reminding Central Valley farmworkers that their employers are required to give them water breaks so they don’t die! Butler was right about California being on fire much of the time, but it turns out you don’t need roving gangs of pyromaniacs for that, just hot conditions drying out vegetation so that any stray spark (or ill-advised gender reveal party) can start a wildfire. Even though the characters do find the coast at one point, rising sea levels aren’t highlighted either. Perhaps the second book delves into this aspect more, but I can’t say ‘Parable of the Sower’ really does what it promises in terms of exploring climate change impacts, even in the context of the research Butler clearly did.
So, what about the social aspects? Well, in terms of the actions of governments and big businesses as depicted in the book, I have no real complaints. There are countries and states closing their borders against climate refugees (check), American politicians arguing that we need to cut regulations protecting people and the environment to boost the economy (check), and businesses taking advantage of this to set up company towns that pay their workers in scrip and create debt slaves or to literally enslave people (not yet legal, but certainly plausible). Where I have an issue is the behavior of everyone else. On the one hand, Butler clearly believes in the importance of collective action, of regular people banding together to protect each other and get things done – which I totally agree with. On the other hand: People need a teenage girl to tell them this? I thought modern zombie movies had a dim view of human nature, but this book reminded me that a lot of 1990s Sci-Fi was even more pessimistic. ‘Demolition man’, ‘Robocop’, ‘Mad Max’ - a lot of people going eat-the-weak feral if the government falls down on the job of providing jobs and security and such1. In this book, the only way to safely move through a city on foot is with an armed group. People who have obviously just been beaten up and robbed and/or raped are just allowed to wander, with no one trying to help. Travelers hiking the freeways to look for work are afraid to talk to each other.
The thing is, even desperate people don’t really act like that – not as a broad, species-level generalization, anyway. Slums are certainly more dangerous places to live for many reasons than a gentrified suburb, but you aren’t guaranteed to be murdered just for walking through, especially if you look like you belong2! What we see in this book resembles more the way people behave during, say, the violent sack of a city, more than the typical response to a natural disaster or chronic hardship. Slums form societies with their own rules relatively quickly; the rules may be rather harsh and “medieval”, but even drug lords would prefer not to have chaos on their doorstep. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, residents of Brazil’s favelas have been largely abandoned by the government, and many have organized their own responses, with street ‘presidents’ providing ambulance services and drug gangs enforcing curfews and mask requirements! If travel conditions are risky, strangers also tend to exchange information about the situation. Although the use of a well-developed vocabulary of “hobo sign” among American homeless travelers from the 1860s to the 1920s may be a myth, unhoused people do very often share information about where it is safe to rest or where food can be found by word of mouth. When they build shelters, they often build them close together, as with the “Hoovervilles” of the Great Depression, rather than separate camps vulnerable to thieves or police. Granted, these don’t fully substitute for a well-funded government action, and people can use the power of collective action in unhelpful ways – demonstrating against vaccination, for instance3! Even so, while the depiction of how Lauren gradually gathers up a group of people who at least mostly trust each other is great, it seems weird to imply that they would be the only people other than drug gangs to do this!
1. This sort of makes sense, since the homicide rates in the US had been on an upswing from the 1950s to the 1990s. However, both violent crimes and property crimes have been declining on a decadal basis ever since. See some graphs here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
2. There’s an assumption of disapproval of interracial relationships in ‘Sower’ as well, which doesn’t seem to be how real 2020’s racism mostly manifests – possibly because around 10% of the US population now identifies as multi-racial and 7-15% as “some other race”.
3. Butler assumed measles outbreaks would occur due to people not being able to afford a vaccine. I wish – that would be a simpler problem to solve!
Content warning: There is a lot of rape in this book! That isn’t unrealistic, given that sexual assault rates are already way too high and tend to increase further in chaotic conditions. But so much time is spent detailing how no woman of any age is safe that A) I was thinking “All right – I get the point! Please shut up!” a third of the way through the book and B) I couldn’t help but notice that only cis women seem to be the victims, which isn’t realistic. The one exception is that a formerly enslaved woman who joins Lauren’s group had her two young sons taken from her; Lauren and Bankole (more on him in a sec) speculate between themselves that it was probably a sex trade thing, since they were too young to be good workers. Not that it would be fun to have the book dwell on that either but, as I mentioned in my Song of Achilles review, it always seems weird to me when a book focuses really heavily on one segment of a society’s sexual consent issues - usually the treatment of women - but ignores everyone else who would be affected by those attitudes4!
Speaking of misogyny, this fictional 2020s society has definitely gone a bit retro on gender roles. That is the assumption a lot of post-apocalypse-like stories make, and I suspect there would be some truth to it. One instance from ‘Sower’ that is worth mentioning is the man in Lauren’s birth neighborhood who was trying to to set up his own little patriarchal compound. He “married” three pretty young homeless women – teenagers, in fact - and seems to exercise a lot of control over them and the kids, not allowing them to join in activities where they might learn to use weapons, for example. Lauren’s father and some of the other community leaders don’t approve, but because they think they need his cooperation they don’t seriously challenge him. However, although this is painted as bad, we then have the depiction of Lauren’s romantic activities; I have very mixed feelings about the choices made there!
Lauren is hyperempathic, feeling echoes of what other people around her are feeling. She notes early on that the only advantage to this condition is that you get a double dose of pleasure during sex, but that as the pastor’s daughter she can’t get away with too much in that department. This was the first point I did a double-take. Lauren is fifteen! - It’s a little unsettling that she apparently doesn’t consider that a factor at all. And yes, her boyfriend is also a teenager, which we usually accept. But then she takes up with Bankole, who is 57, when she is 18. Just…why? I get that with societal breakdown age gaps would probably not be people’s biggest concern – though Bankole is shocked when he realizes and declares that his sister would not approve. The only narrative purpose I can think of to making him that much older is to make it more plausible that he owns land that the group can travel to and settle on. Surely, though, the person who owns the land and the person the very young main character is banging don’t have to be the same - unless Butler is implying that Bankole wouldn’t have let them stay otherwise! But that doesn’t seem right, because he is more consistently depicted as a good person than anyone else5. Lauren is the sole narrator of the is book, and she sees herself as having sexual agency and making good choices. The thing is that teenagers generally do think that, but that doesn’t mean they have the life experience to correctly judge how age and power dynamics might make them vulnerable in a relationship! Lauren is (barely) at that legal age of consent, but the thought that maybe she was paired with this guy because he has more resources than anyone else (but neither will acknowledge that) makes me uncomfortable6.
4. From what I hear of the second book, it takes a slightly broader view. But ‘Sower’ itself doesn’t.
5. Even if Bankole were entirely selfish it should be obvious that as an aging person he needs help defending and working his land, and so should be happy the group wants to join him.
6. I feel a little rude to my own grandparents, since they had a similarly huge age gap and were, by her account, happy. But that was in 1930’s Cuba, they didn’t get married until she was 20, and her family still thought she might be making a terrible mistake!
I should also note that I read this after ‘Fledgling’, in which the vampire main character looks like a child but is actually much older, including mentally (think Claudia from ‘Interview with the Vampire’)…and seduces people who are not otherwise pedophiles with her pheromones. That also had me going “Dang it, Octavia! Is this really necessary to your story?” - so I was perhaps primed to be suspicious here!
All that you touch
You change,
All that you change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is change.
God
Is change.
The best part of this book is the idea that imagining a better future is important, which is shown through the development of Lauren’s “Earthseed” religion. We get the impression that trying to recreate the past or hold onto the present in a world of change can lead to stagnation or degradation – and that is probably correct! A constant criticism of recent science fiction is that it shows a lack of imagination regarding how the future could be better. I don’t think that’s quite fair; it seems to me that quite a few books are positive about change, but also realistic about how hard it can be. But it is true that a lot of modern people are pessimistic about the future and/or looking to recapture something from the past that often wasn’t that great to begin with. Butler foresaw that: In ‘Sower’ we see the residents of Lauren’s neighborhood trying to cling onto a “normal” suburban life that no longer makes sense, while in ‘Parable of the Talents’ she reportedly included a president who wins on the slogan “Make America Great Again!”
I related to Lauren quite a bit - which is why I can’t actually see her as the founder of a religion. If coping with your own emotions through logical analysis and having the urge to tell people what the rational thing to do is made you a prophet, I’d probably have my own religion already! Unfortunately, a lot of people just seem to find those INTJ-like habits annoying and even insensitive. Lauren even openly admits that she’s had no mystical experiences: The idea that God = Change is just what she ended up with because every other version of God didn’t make sense to her. The ability to sound very confident in your logical plans, however, can lend itself to leadership when no one else knows what to do. I can definitely see her as the leader of a community, just not one that inspires religious reverence. But who knows: Maybe that could occur based on her books after everyone who actually knew her is dead!
Overall recommendation: There are other, more recent books that I think tackle some of these topics better: ‘The Windup Girl’, where the titular character is a literally illegal genetically-modified woman struggling to survive in a sweltering future Bangkok that must constantly hold back the sea with walls and pumps, for instance. But those books owe this one a debt for paving the way and showing that that kind of Sci-Fi is possible. If you’re interested in Science Fiction history or want a glimpse at a 2020s world that is WAY worse (and no one’s exactly thrilled with what we got, so some perspective is nice!) ‘Parable of the Sower’ is worth a read.
