[Werthead]

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

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Los Angeles, 2024. The United States is dying a slow death. Law and order is confined to isolated, walled-off communities and city centres. The suburbs are warzones of inequality and crime, subject to warlords and corporate exploitation. Police and ambulances won't leave protected areas without hefty fees. Rising sea levels are swamping coastal communities. One community on the outskirts of the city has become a haven of kindness and safety, a refuge founded by a preacher who wants to protect his family and neighbours. His daughter, Lauren Oya Olamina, a "sharer" who can feel other people's pain and suffering, making her empathetic to their needs. When their safe haven is no longer safe, the inhabitants have to consider a dangerous journey to try to escape.

Parable of the Sower was originally published in 1993 and has become a widely-acknowledged classic of science fiction. Inhabiting a similar space to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, it describes the collapse of the United States. Unlike that novel, the cause is not infertility, fascism or religious fundamentalism, but apparently simple overload. The country is no longer able to cope with the assaults on its foundations from multiple directions and it flounders and sinks, almost permitting a decline and an assault from within and without on its values. There are echoes of the fall of the Roman Empire here, with the idea of such a mighty superpower laid low not by a headline-leading single event, but the accumulation of lots of small issues over decades.

The novel's success is not in presenting this collapse - a quiet apocalypse - as a spectacle, but as background to the everyday life of its protagonist. Lauren is concerned about the big picture of how events are falling out and has a dream about how to confront it, but is more consumed by day-to-day life in her community. She and her friends can only go out in groups where some of them are armed, and maintaining supplies of food, water and essentials is difficult against a backdrop of seeming governmental indifference to the spreading chaos. The attention to detail is superb, with Butler painting Lauren's life as one under extreme pressure but under which life continues: she has boyfriends, she has friendships and she maintains her family relationships despite the dangers of the world around them.

Later in the book the story shifts to a road trip where parallels to post-apocalyptic stories like The Road and even The Walking Dead can be made, but all the more powerful here because there isn't a supernatural horror stalking the characters or some vague massive holocaust. Instead it's just people, people who have broken the world and other people wanting to put it back together and others who want to build something better, something new and enduring. Strangers are to be treated with caution, as some are dangerous and only want to rob or harm you; others are good people who just need a reason to show their good side.

Butler's prose is poetic and raw, capturing the mood and thoughts of a teenage girl frustrated by the world, one who uniquely understands its pain because she can feel it in the thoughts of other people. Her grasp of characterisation is strong, with each character painted vividly through Lauren's eyes, sometimes wrongly, with early impressions that a character might be trouble or a hero later shown to be the reverse of what is actually the case.

The book's strength might be its tone and suggestion that things might actually just fall apart due to pressure. There might not be an asteroid strike, or a nuclear war, or a global pandemic to bring things crashing down, it might just be that the collective will to make a society work fails. But there's also a line of hope running through the novel, a note of hope, that people can better than they sometimes are, and humanity is, for all its flaws, worthy of being saved.

Parable of the Sower (*****) is a rich and compelling novel from one of science fiction's master voices. It is available in the UK and USA now. A sequel, Parable of the Talents, was published in 1998.

[worry]

Read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents this past summer and they hit a little too close to home. So good, but too scary by half.

[Werthead]

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

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California, 2032. Lauren Oya Olamina has founded a community, Acorn, in sheltered mountains near the coast. Acorn is a home, a haven and also the wellspring of an idea: Earthseed, a humanist philosophy that will, Lauren hopes, one day carry humanity to the stars. But the chaos-ravaged United States doesn't want humanist philosophies, it wants strong and determined action. When the battered population votes into power a populist demagogue who preaches fire and brimstone and puts the blames for the country's ills on outsiders, non-Christians, and anyone with strange ideas, Lauren finds her ideals and her resolve will be tested more than she thought possible.

Parable of the Talents is the sequel to Octavia E. Butler's classic 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower. That novel was a more immediate apocalyptic novel, focusing on the societal collapse of the United States not from any of the usual suspects (nuclear war, a pandemic, climate catastrophe) but simple overload, assaults on its foundations of democracy and decency from almost too many directions to counter. Like the Roman Empire, the United States falls not from a single root cause but foundational cracks levered by the tyrannical and by opportunists into fissures. That book saw Lauren gathering a fellow band of survivors and setting out from the chaotic morass of Los Angeles (thematically sinking into chaos and literally starting to sink into the sea) to find a safe haven elsewhere. So far, so standard, though Butler's raw, poetic prose puts it much more at The Road end of the literary post-apocalyptic spectrum than the Walking Dead one.

Parable of the Talents picks up several years later with a more nuanced and interesting idea: riding out the post-post apocalypse. The world may feel like it's ended, but it's still here, and new societies will emerge out of the ruins of the old. In this novel the tension is ratcheted up between new movements wanting to take advantage of the opportunity to break with the dogma of the past, and those who believe that only be wholeheartedly and fanatically embracing tents of the past can they restore order...with themselves in charge, of course.

The novel has no interest in to being the first novel retrodden. This is a longer, more sophisticated book with a lot more going on. As well as Lauren's story, we have POV sections from decades further in the future written by her daughter, and some asides written by other members of the Earthseed movement. These reflect back on Lauren's life and achievements, and Butler does a good job of balancing this character reflection without spoiling the end of the book. The novel also varies its pace. The post-apocalyptic survival tale of the first book is here replaced by a book about surviving in civilisation, or what passes for it, when it is subverted by brutal fanatics. Sequences where the Earthseed community is overrun by the new President's more fanatical followers read like one of Stephen King's better horror novels. Later sequences, as Lauren's ideas take hold and civilisation fights back against the brutality of the new regime to put into place a new order, feel more like a Kim Stanley Robinson book.

The Earthseed philosophy and debates over its validity take up a fair bit of space in the book, more than in the first when the idea was still nascent and not fully-formed, and leads to intriguing and never-more-timely debates about whether humanity trying to become a spaceborne civilisation is a good idea when there is so much to do here on Earth. The counter-arguments - the technological benefits to civilisation from the space race and the importance on giving humanity, as a collective, a goal to aim towards lest it fall into decadence and regress - are interesting, if not hugely original. What is surprising is that the novel's structure means that it is mostly concerned with the immediate events surrounding the capture of Acorn. The larger, even cosmic themes of the novel unfold more through the looking-back framing device and through Lauren's long-term view of the future, as well as an epilogue that skips forwards through the decades.

Parable of the Sower was a post-apocalyptic masterpiece of raw emotion, intelligence and beautiful writing. Parable of the Talents (*****) might be even better, a story about human nature from its most brutal and repressive to its most hopeful and uplifting, centred on three-dimensional, flawed characters and eerily prophetic in its depiction of the early 21st Century being a less certain time then when it was written. The author considered writing a third book, Parable of the Trickster, to complete a trilogy but ultimately decided that the second book rounded off the story well enough, which is true.