Parable of the Sower

I’ve long been inspired by Butler’s writing, which features BIPOC characters front and center. As a multiracial person, I seldom saw people who looked and thought like me in the older fiction I read.

The notable thing about this book is that it’s technically science fiction, not alternate history, since the novel's beginning in 2024 (this year!). However, much of what Butler wrote has come to pass, raising one question: Has her vision of the future become an alternate version of the past? I love trying to wrap my head around that conundrum.

This is the first book I ever read by Butler and it remains my favourite. Butler’s vision of near-future America is one of climate crisis, economic collapse, and social anarchy. The scenes of violence and degradation are terrifying.

What I love about this novel is how Butler creates a true hero – visionary, determined, and inspirational – in Lauren, a teenage girl. Written as a journal, the protagonist’s youth can be heard in her language ("I hate being a kid," she complains), but Butler has every faith in her as an extraordinary leader. In many ways, it’s a classic quest… show more.

I love some books for their stories, characters, or writing; I love others for what they do to me. This is one of the latter. Whenever I thought I understood what this book was doing, it opened up another new idea–often one I found both interesting and challenging. I live my entire life immersed in books, both for work and for pleasure, so I’m always delighted when one takes me by surprise. 

This book changed how I think about the small but lasting effects I have on the world around me and shaped the stories I tell myself about the… show more.

The recent Octavia Butler renaissance means that the book needs no introduction. It remains a prescient, gripping, ominous, yet inspiring narrative that transports us into a future ravaged by climate change and neo-fascism.

The book is ruthlessly brutal in its account of what a collapse trajectory would look like in a future “United States” (existing in name and memory only). It anticipated a Trump-like figure coming to power well before this was remotely considered by mainstream American political scientists.

While dark, the book is also inspiring in that it shows how the breakdown of our current world could seed the… show more.

I didn’t read this amazing 1993 novel until 2016 when its seeming prescience about an America wracked by climate change, economic collapse, and social dysfunction became more evident.

This is maybe the best example of the kind of American novel I like to call dystopian realism—using the tools of speculative fiction to put a dark mirror up to real life and show truths conventional literary fiction cannot.

The story is told from the perspective of a girl, a Black teenager who has a rare gift of hyper-empathy, literally feeling the pain of others around her. It’s a brilliant device to… show more.

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.