Parable of the Sower

I used to be paid to ponder the end of the world as we know it: I was a health editor during the early years of the COVID pandemic; at the same time, I was editing environmental stories.

What I loved most about this book is that the worst has already occurred, and the protagonist, a teenager, chooses her own new way to navigate what’s still to come. I was engaged by the concepts of resilience as a survival skill, reinvention as a necessity, and rebirth as an act of personal and global faith.

I am not a fan of… show more.

Nobody does bleak futures laced with racial politics in the way that Octavia Butler does them. This book is not something you read and forget; it burns a special place in your brain and lives there forever.

Through first published in 1993, it holds an astonishing relevance for today’s burning realities since one of its central themes is the calamity that climate change will bring. Match that with the funky, fascinating protagonist Lauren Olamina and the new religion, EarthSeed, and you have a novel that you can get lost in and never want to emerge from. I’ve read it three… show more.

Shifting gears into the adult space, Parable of the Sower is a dystopian Afrofuturist novel of survival and resistance that is, at its heart, about embracing a world of change.

Originally published in the early nineties, it’s a disturbingly prescient novel that tells the story of Lauren Olamina, a teen coming of age in a world of extreme societal unrest, inequality, and environmental catastrophe, where the wealthy live in protected compounds while everyone else lives in a destitute world of addiction, starvation, and fear.

The novel follows Olamina as she leaves the protection of her walled-in enclave, discovers her abilities… show more.

When writing about any apocalypse, the way society responds to the disaster is one of the most important worldbuilding aspects to address.

For anyone looking to develop an apocalyptic society—especially one in the midst of a collapse—Parable of the Sower is a masterclass in worldbuilding in which Butler creates a realistic world on the brink of ruin and populates it with real people who are doing their best to survive.

This was particularly helpful to me in later installments of my saga where the dominant society was much more isolated from the horrors of the outside world.

This book was uncomfortable to read, and disturbing. I nearly stopped reading it all together. But past the first half, I became engrossed. Wouldn’t it be nice if, in life, actions were clearly right or simply wrong, such as murder. In actuality, life can be complicated and ethics are sometimes grey, not at all black and white. In this book, what counts as morality is perplexing. In fact, the moral integrity of Lauren, the main character, comes into question. Hers is a crumbling world of anguish, suffering, and loss, where all that matters is survival. Even though I found it… show more.

Released in 1993, the dystopian story it tells begins in 2024. This grabbed me because back when I read George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1984 seemed like the distant future. I didn’t think anything in the book could happen in my lifetime. But history proved me wrong. Butler’s version of 2024 is overwhelmingly negative, and there are some elements that ring true now. But the plot is interesting and kept me reading even when the story was grim. I like Lauren, the main character, because she keeps looking for ways to survive and help others. She believes if we… show more.

It is difficult to go wrong with any of Butler’s work. Her work is poignant in its translation of real-life experience. In The Parable of the Sower, she uses the diary of the visionary main character to take the reader on a journey of an all too real battle to save the goodness of mankind even if it puts her life in danger. Journal you say?? I was immediately intrigued by this concept.  

Octavia Butler was an award-winning science fiction writer and formative influence on Afrofuturism. First published in 1993 and set in the mid-2020s, this dystopian novel tells the story of Lauren Olamina, a Black teenager learning to survive and thrive amid ecological and societal collapse. Between journal reflections on her life in a world of pandemics, urban wildfires, and rampant violence, she writes verses of Earthseed, a new religion in which "God is Change" and the living must learn to work with that change, to go with its flows, in order to participate in positive transformations. Raised by a Baptist… show more.

In Octavia Butler’s essential novel, the main character Lauren reveals a belief system she calls Earthseed, which departs from the religions she was taught growing up in an apocalyptic Los Angeles. When I first read Parable of the Sower years ago, I felt terror and grief for the characters as they traveled the landscape of my childhood—most of my stories now are set on the West Coast. I also felt in the Earthseed writings a sort of peace or balance, and only later learned how mythologies reflect their cultures of origin, that the stories can convey, literally or figuratively, shared… show more.

I’d been reading science fiction for many years when I came across this book. While I was already a big fan of Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, and others, Butler’s work showed me a new perspective through the story of empath Lauren Olamina, an African American teenager in a dystopian future California. Her struggles to survive a world in chaos, to manage her power, and to begin a movement to save the human race remain with me.