Darkness Brightening

Backlist Book #04: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Note: I wrote this during Christmas break, thinking to start the year with a book that acknowledges both the difficulties we face and the possibilities we can create. After the fires broke out in Southern California this week, I debated whether to hold off publishing it. But there’s no point in denying we’re in Parable territory now, and Butler has wisdom for all of us in navigating disaster and instability.

There are many ways to support the victims of the current wildfires, and if you’re able, I hope you’ll consider donating.

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IT’S 1993, AND a speculative novel is published to solid accolades, though by no means is it a bestseller. It opens in California, where it’s 2024 and climate change has caused severe droughts, extreme weather, and widespread environmental degradation, leading to food and water scarcity. This scarcity is exacerbated by enormous economic inequality. Large corporations wield immense power, and widespread societal collapse has led to mass displacement and fragmented communities. A charismatic, polarizing authoritarian figure is president, dismantling institutions and protections while promising to make America great again.

Some works are so prescient, you would think the creator is a soothsayer or a time-traveler¹ or both. No, I’m not talking about Matt Groening, although The Simpsons certainly seems to qualify. I’m talking about Octavia E. Butler, pioneering science fiction writer and apparent oracle (though she would say she simply read the signs that were right in front of us all). Widely considered the mother of Afrofuturism, Butler worked to untangle themes of race, gender, power, and survival in sparse yet evocative prose, my favorite of which is the book I’m recommending this week: Parable of the Sower.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993, 299 pp.)

In Parable of the Sower, Lauren Oya Olamina, a teenager who can feel the pain of others and who has startling dreams, lives with her family in a walled enclave outside LA. Eventually the neighborhood is attacked, and as Lauren migrates north, she develops Earthseed, a new religion whose defining tenet is “God is change.” Ultimately she and her friends end up creating an Earthseed community they call Acorn, a place of grief but also clear-eyed hope.

The novel may seem like YA when it opens, but make no mistake—it’s not just beloved but tangential characters who end up dead. Lauren loses her entire family, gradually and then suddenly all at once, and sometimes it seems nothing good will ever happen again. This book turned out to be a tough read in some ways, but by the time things got really dark, I was already hooked by the writing and by the vividness of the world and characters Butler created. According to my records, I read it in February of 2023 and gave it five stars along with the following note: “Couldn't put it down, the OG of dystopia.”²

I’m not a huge fan of dystopian writing; I prefer fairy tales, as we’ve already established.³ I’m a Sagittarius moon, so optimism is my jam. But that optimism has been challenged over the past decade, a combination of the times we live in and the midlife muddle that eventually comes for us all. What kept me from DNFing this book, what makes it one of my favorite books, is the brilliant way Butler juxtaposes grim depictions of violence and hardship with moments of connection and visionary optimism. There’s a moment early on when Lauren wakes from a dream and fades into another, a memory of looking at the stars in the night sky with her stepmother:

Darkness.

Darkness brightening.

Stars.

Stars casting their cool, pale, glinting light.

I’ve lived through an unprecedented natural disaster and experienced the utter destabilization, the trauma⁴ that comes along with it, especially when it comes deep in the heart of a pandemic. It makes you understand that a type of disaster you’ve never even heard of can sweep everything away in minutes, that “unprecedented” is the new normal, that this is the world we live in now. I’m not saying books can fix those kinds of problems. What I am saying is that they can help us process them and move forward—it’s no surprise Parable of the Sower finally hit the bestseller list in 2020 during the pandemic. I don’t know that God is change, but change is the only thing that’s certain, and there’s a glimmer of a path forward in this book, I think. Even as the world burns around you, you can still connect with the earth and like-minded people. You still carry the seed of new potential inside. Darkness brightening.

1. Speaking of time traveling, one of Butler’s most famous works, Kindred, follows a young Black woman in 1970s California as she is repeatedly pulled back to the antebellum South to ensure the survival of her white slave-owning ancestor. It’s also brilliant, though I found it more difficult to read than Parable.

2. I started using Bookriot’s reading log in 2021 and have never looked back!

3. I will confess that, as much as I love this book, I haven’t read the sequel, Parable of the Talents. I guess I have to be tricked into reading dystopian stories that don’t have the glossy sheen of YA or Hollywood.

4. Trauma is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but it fits the experience—even if you’re one of the lucky ones and didn’t lose your loved ones or home, even if the destruction is on the smaller end of the scale compared to some.