There are spoilers cast about this post like seeds in the fields, so be aware.
Parable of the Sower is my first foray into Butler’s works, and it took me two efforts to get past the first 50 pages, though that is due more to an accident of life than to anything in Butler’s novel. The book, first published in 1993, is placed 30 years in the future, 2024. I’m sure that future felt fantastical to readers in 1993, even though they could draw a line from point A to point B. Here in 2021, Butler has proven to be disturbingly prescient. Ecological disasters are on the horizon, economic disparity has only grown, and the Trump presidency has shown exactly how reactionary and oppressive conservatives and middle-of-the-road white liberals are. I first picked up the book in late 2019 or early 2020, and what I read was too real for me to enjoy. Yes, it’s plenty fantastic, but the distance from here to there didn’t seem large, certainly not large enough. I had enough keeping me awake at night; I didn’t need my fiction to contribute to that sleeplessness.
Breathing ever so slightly better in April and May of 2021,
many months into Biden’s presidency and in the wake of the attack on the
capital, we took another stab at it. The
beginning was as difficult as ever, but my internal fortitude was much stronger
than before.
Parable of the Sower is a wild read, and while it
reminds me of a handful of other books, it is unlike anything else. There are obvious comparisons to be made
between this book and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was obviously
written much later than this, and possibly influenced by it. But having just read McCarthy’s book, being
on a road full of unknown and hostile threats felt familiar. Of course, Butler’s road is much more packed
with foot traffic as the throng of people are refugees, looking for a place to
live, which brings me to the other book I immediately compare it to: John
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. I
think this parallel is purposeful on Butler’s part and nodded to by the
encounters they have on the road. When
we meet Emery, Tori, Grayson, and Doe in the final part of the novel, they are
escapees from types of prison farms, where they are working off impossible debt
created by the corporation that “employs” (read “enslaves”) them. They are in the exact situation we see the
Joad family attempt to avoid and then finally find themselves in near the end
of Steinbeck’s book. The reason Butler’s
future feels so real and dangerous is because it is merely a more advanced and
terrifying version of what has already happened. As the government becomes more and more
uninvolved in citizen’s lives, corporations are leaned on to hold up social
order more and more, and of course they will do so in their own interest, and
their own interest will always be financial.
The evils of capitalism are on full display in the novel,
which presents a kind of libertarian dream-future. The police and fire departments now pay for
their individual services, no longer pretending to serve the public good. The people are entirely abandoned by
institutions of public good and are left to themselves. If you’re rich enough to afford a strong
walled community and use the police as your own personal brute squad, you won’t
have a problem in this world. If you
aren’t, then not only are you vulnerable, but there is no path available for
you to travel from your current condition to a better one. Like all good science fiction, that’s not a
glimpse at the future; that’s a re-presenting of the present. This was true in 1993, and it is even more
true in 2021.
There are two hopes presented by Butler, and both are
riddled with perils. The first is
people. We can rely on each other, and
the extent to which we can do so is the extent to which we have hope. First, Lauren and her families have their
literal neighbors in their neighborhood, and later, on the road, they have
those people they choose to make their neighbors. As they increase their numbers, they increase
their safety. But of course, no one can
just be trusted, in this world or that one.
Any half-ally is an open threat to everyone, so trust needs to be
treated as a priceless resource. Lauren
is resourceful and clever, but her more important skill is being able to turn
strangers into reliable allies.
The second hope is Lauren’s philosophical religion,
Earthseed. I can’t remember reading any
apocalyptic fiction where religion factored into the revolution and the
hope. A version of Christianity is at
the core of The Grapes of Wrath of course, one that cuts out all the
stuff used against the refugees, one that boils down to thing: we need to treat
each other right. Butler instead reject
Christianity as being beyond salvaging.
It has been so warped and twisted by conservatives, that it is a tool to
support the status quo, a tool to control people. Lauren’s father tries to use it to its proper
end, and while it hold the neighborhood together so far, it is of a dying world
and cannot bring them forward. Earthseed, instead, is deigned to be eminently
practical. It is a religion of action
and empowerment, not about who or what your worship, but about how you can turn
what you see and know into something that can help you. Change is shapeable,
but you need to see it, recognize it, and have a plan for it. Seeing it,
recognizing it, and developing a plan for it is the lesson Lauren exemplifies
for us again and again in the novel. The
older generation, and through their influence, many of Lauren’s generation,
think that the times will go back to the way things were, but Lauren sees that
they won’t. She sees the future coming
and plans for it. You can’t fight the tide, but you can be prepared to ride
it. That planning lets her survive the
attack on her neighborhood and gets her moving north. But Lauren is thinking much farther than the
next step. She’s focused on the long goal, the eventual leaving of Earth to
start a new civilization, and if that civilization is going to be worth
founding, we will have to rebuild society as we know it, to shape it into what
it can and should be.
It’s funny that I haven’t even touched upon the most
sci-fi-y aspects of the novel, which are Lauren’s “sharing” and the drug that
turns users into pyromaniacs who pain their faces, ‘ro. Those elements are both really cool, and
central to the book both in terms of plot and thematics, and yet they are the
parts that stick with me the least.
Lauren’s hypersensitivity is an invisible disability, one that makes her
life harder but never impedes her fully.
Thanks to the help and support of the others (and thanks to her own
determination and care, of course) she is able to work within the confines of her
abilities to do what she has to do and be who she has to be. The use of ‘ro seems tied to the way that
crack was introduced into Black American communities by the CIA. Because of the
societal structure, ‘ro serves to destroy whole portions of society without
ever threatening the wealthy and powerful.
The shrinking middle class is made more desperate to concede to
corporate promises of protection at the price of the people’s freedom.
I was not smitten by Butler’s writing, but I was smitten by
the ferocity of her thoughts and the unflinching gaze she holds on the
world. In a lot of ways, this was
exactly the book I needed at this point in my life, looking ahead at the mess
that America is in. There are lessons to
apply here, even as the book isn’t written to be a handbook. I will certainly be exploring more of
Butler’s books and mind because she feels important and relevant.
