i started reading parable of the sower by octavia e. butler shortly after the pandemic shutdown hit. written in 1993, the story begins with a group of kids in the los angeles area in 2024, no longer safe to leave their homes for school, taking a risk to journey together to church for a rare public baptism. it was too much for me. unlike the millions who seem to comb netflix for movies about pandemics and riots, i get enough of that from my minute by minute newsfeed (aka my husband). from fiction, i’d usually prefer to escape what’s happening now. but after a few weeks, the book called me back to it. i wanted to see what butler had imagined had happened in the world between 1993 and 2024 to get these kids to that point.
unfortunately, her dystopian through line, even from the vantage of the early nineties rather than 2020, is pretty plausible. she takes the effects of climate change, corporate driven politics, increasing gap between rich and poor, the breakdown in governance and corrupt racist policing to one logical and chilling set of effects. ouch. i won’t tell you what those consequences are. suffice it to say that it’s not a vision of a world that works for everyone.
butler’s teenage african-american hyper-empathic heroine lauren, however, does have such a vision. circumstances force her to become a leader in a strangely compelling and terrifying journey with adults of multiple races, ages and talents.
by no means, by the way, should the existence of a teenage heroine lead one to hand this to their younger teen without reading it first. this is a very adult book with lots of violence including torture, rape and cannibalism (also loving consensual sex). most of the worst things that happen are reported or implied rather than experienced “on camera” or in any moment by moment detail but there’s a lot that’s terrible.
yet, the arc of the book is toward a guarded hope for the power of spirituality, community and diversity. the follow-up book is parable of the talents which i’m still looking forward to reading. by the way, despite the new testament reference in the title of this book, various characters repeatedly question the merits of religion including the new emerging spirituality perceived by the main character. this is not a religious polemic.
the book’s african-american author octavia butler, as any of her book jackets will happily detail, received a macarthur genius grant as well as winning both the huge science fiction prizes before her death in _____. she has been compared to margaret atwood and other feminist utopian authors.
for my money, i was most reminded of the fifth sacred thing by (pagan spiritual leader) starhawk, which is one of my very favorite novels ever (blogpost?). i’d strongly urge reading that as well. that book contains a similar view of the near future as viewed from the recent past (it might be set in 2050). both contain within them dystopian and utopian visions but in starhawk’s novel, the utopian version actually exists simultaneously with the vast dystopian. both are set on the west coast of the united states and have similar ideas about the inevitable corporate control and (un)livability of the southwest and inevitable attempts to migrate northward to wilderness and water supplies.
butler’s views the dystopian future from the point of view of a woman of color, which adds many compelling and specific issues.
i’m removing the 5th mask from butler’s book only due to its difficulty of enjoyment during our own dystopian experience. it would get 5 snouts up during any other time. some people might consider the opposite, that this is the time to read it. i get both. what is most fascinating about butler’s exploration of this scenario is the extent to which the victims of the world are in denial about what is happening.
that fact alone seems to be the truest parallel to what i am currently witnessing and experiencing in the world. the old boiling frog fable comes to mind whereby if you turn the temperature of the pot up one degree at a time, the frogs go into a stupor and don’t jump out. that seems to be what literally and figuratively is happening now. the temperature of the planet and of the body politic is being turned up one degree at a time. while millions are protesting, voting for bernie sanders and more, billions are simply going about their lives and adjusting over and over to the new normal. or worse, what brings them to the streets is to protest the wearing of masks, absentee voting or the very existence of climate change.
butler’s book shows us one terrible set of logical consequences to that behavior of going about our business adjusting to the apocalyptic things happening or protesting and trying to stop real political change that could save us all.
[note: there’s a good chance you don’t care or haven’t noticed that i’ve moved from a “snout-based” to a “mask-based” rating system during the pandemic. i reserve the right to revert to snouts at any time. at first i was just using masks for reviewing public in person things but then i realized, we also need to review our online content from a point of view of not only physical but emotional safety. so the masks are an indication that i highly regard the physical and emotional experience of what ever i’m reviewing from the point of view of me during this pandemic.
5 masks = outstanding, the best possible
4 masks = good
3 masks = ok but falling short in some respects
2 masks = poor
1 mask = awful]
