I find it quite bizarre how people act like this is a particularly "progressive" or "prescient" book. Ultimately, there are four things that bother me the most about the book at its core.
For those who are unaware, Parable of the Sower is a novel written by Octavia Butler, set in 2024-2027 (it was published in 1993), dealing with the breakdown of social order in the United States, in part due to climate change. It is an epistolary work, being told as diary entries of the narrator, Lauren Olamina, a girl growing up in a gated community somewhere in Los Angeles, California and starts constructing her own religion.
Naturally, shit goes to even worse shit, her family gets killed, and she has to flee north.
A big part of the problem with the story is really due to its structuring. I disagree with a different reviewer, who describes the framing device as "kneecapping," in that it's not inherently a bad thing to have the narrator be so limited. Following a specific character around and experience her hopes and dreams and ideas and all that can work fairly well to make the story feel intimate and grounded in a character's specific reality.
The problem is, there's all these issues with the narrative, where people gesture to there being an authoritarian dictator strongman president as being predictive of Trump, but the narrative is fundamentally so disconnected from the broader body politic that the office of the presidency doesn't really matter. There's how members of the group Lauren collects have various horror stories that get brought up to gesture at the reinstatement of slavery and company towns. The problem is that the story does not have it as the main focus- our perspective is Lauren, who lived in a gated community, who managed to avoid getting into any of that. (And I will get back to that in a bit, for other reasons.)
It's hard to say what the story could be saying in this regard, since we're so disconnected from the broader world and we're following around a character who lacks clear context or knowledge. This means it gets the worst of both worlds. We don't have the broader context of the world enough to know what's going on, nor is it intimate enough in the horrors it invokes. It'd be like if 1984 had a character tell Winston bring up some horrific war crimes The Party is doing in a different city, and expecting us to emotionally be invested in the war crimes elsewhere instead of Winston's personal story. Investment requires time and focus, and we just don't have enough of either to really hit home.
And, like several of the negative reviews have noted, there's all sorts of bizarre logistical aspects. One I'd note is that water is uniformly more expensive than food (but every bit of food requires exponentially more potable water than just plain drinking water in order to grow, unless you want to risk getting an infection like e-coli). People are resorting to fucking cannibalism, yet US money is still legal tender that still works? People have to pool money for a baptism water tub, but they have fucking oak trees and citrus (which are thirsty as hell, and it's a multi-year massive drought). Thieves trample everything else down whenever they steal instead of just grabbing what they need. People are still going to their normal day jobs at colleges and the kids discuss getting degrees... while there are roving gangs of evil monsters requiring gated communities walled off and covered in glass and razor wire and other such things and requiring armed guards. Somehow, literacy has completely broken down, too, so it's notable when a character can read, which raises all sorts of questions.
The reason I knew I was going to write a review was how this story is utterly awash in elite panic. While the term "elite panic" itself was coined after this book (in the 2000s), the research in relation to disasters, long before this book was published, made it clear that this was a serious phenomenon. Most people do not become roving gangs of evil or lose their minds in panic at the upset in society during a disaster.
For a quick summary, elite panic is a phenomenon during disasters where the rich and powerful (that is to say, the sociological meaning of elite) freak out about the loss of control and that society is being shaken up, so they take steps to strong-arm and control people, hide information, prevent peoples' free movement, etc. They actively undermine disaster response, caring more about maintaining property rights than peoples' lives, often killing people just trying not to die to prevent "looting" and the like.
In reality, most people during disasters help each other. They don't lose their minds and start purposely hurting each other in an orgy of violence, or accidentally hurting each other. They defend each other from harm when they can, too. The people who get violent and do stupid shit are, in fact, the rich, the powerful, the "elite."
And elite panic is the most consistent political throughline of the story, which is why I find it baffling that people act like this is a progressive work. It's such a shallow reading that I have to wonder just what it is that's going on here, why they think this. Specifically, the novel is not a work that's pointing out how elite panic actually functions, it's buying into the assumptions the elite make about how evil the poor, minorities, and the destitute are. That, without strong top-down controls on society, humans revert to a Hobbesian brutishness of all killing all. That most people are "looters" apart from the relatively well-off, who are actually productive with their land and resources. (Very Ayn Rand circa Atlas Shrugged, and just as stupid.)
It's quite strange, considering the "hyperempathy" stuff, too. A work where empathy is supposedly so key, one would think, would involve actually considering another perspective instead of merely feeling the physical sensations of someone else's pain or pleasure. (It's also inconsistent, where Lauren only feels pain like physical injuries, but she passes by the starving and destitute without being afflicted by that pain, and is affected by hunting animals. Which could be fun if it was about sharing the pain of who you see as worthy of life, if it went anywhere.) And, given Lauren's limited perspective and growing up in a gated community, her limitation could have actually been leveraged for the narrative- that she was taught to hate and fear outsiders as evil monsters because the gated community were all-in on elite panic.
The groups that are demonized throughout the entire book are city-dwellers, the poor, the homeless, the marginal, the destitute, and the drug-addicted. (Other negative reviews note how much it ties into the panic in the late 80s and early 90s about crime.) There are roving gangs of people who do drugs (called "pyro" or variations thereof) where they burn down gated communities and pillage their things and make people burn shit to the ground because watching fire gives an ecstasy better than sex. Somehow, Lauren never feels this ecstasy when around them. (Again, this would be fine if it went anywhere, but it doesn't, and the other shit is so inconsistent that I cannot rightly say there's anything about an unreliable narrator here with Lauren's abilities.) They murder and rape children and the elderly and get all hopped up on drugs and do it even more, burning everything to the ground. Cities are noted to be where food's cheaper (for some reason, which has further logistical implications involving supply chains) but also more dangerous.
There's something interesting to be said about the gated communities, if you look beyond the bounds of the story's framing. Ultimately, the gated communities abandoned everyone else who wasn't rich enough to be in the gated community, even if the story tries to frame it as "struggling barely middle class." They walled themselves off and built up their own prosperity. So when people get angry and steal from them, kill them, burn their places down, and scavenge the wreckage, it's not treated as a reasonable emotional response to being abandoned to die en-masse from starvation by all the more affluent. The story goes out of its way to not treat them with empathy, by making sure they do things like mass rape and cannibalism and doing crazy sci-fi drugs, because otherwise you might see the gated community (the people willing to kill fellow humans, to keep ownership of a few rabbits and away from the starving masses) as part of the larger festering evil. There's mentions of the use of radio where the people who light the fires are treated as heroes of the poor, but it's very clearly supposed to be some kind of "oh, they're not actually doing any good, this is just an excuse." Again, this would be fine if the idea is that Lauren is sheltered by prepper types, but the second half of the book exists and removes any possible nuance. They really are just that evil and stupid.
And the poor and destitute who don't join the violent arson-and-rape gangs are notably detached from each other. Lauren's group is unusual in that she's bringing more people into a grouping, and the nucleus of the group were members of the same gated community. It has the same classist scent as Lovecraft's discussion of some families in "The Dunwich Horror" keeping "above" the decay of the normal population of the area, but the framework he used there and notions of eugenics were also much more common/accepted even among liberal and left-wing sorts in the 1920s when that story was written. Seeing that mentality in a book from the 1990s, from a feminist black woman, is quite jarring!
Most people are too suspicious of each other to band together, leading them to getting picked off by desperate "coyotes" or the roving gangs. None of them show the foresight to work together and any altruism is viewed with suspicion. Nobody enforces any unspoken rule against accosting other travelers. Nobody comes to anyone's aid or defense. Everyone is just as wretched as the last, a faceless mob of individual morons who die horribly and masses to show that everything is fucked.
Every last character murdered in the story that we directly see is killed by the poor dirty homeless drug addicts, or else they're killing in self-defense while dealing with the aforemntioned poor dirty homeless drug addicts,or else they get killed by external circumstances like a forest fire or wild dogs. Not a one is killed by a jumpy cop. The cops are framed as being corrupt, taking bribes and often not doing their jobs, but they don't really do much of anything other than siphoning money. Nobody's killed by the authoritarian federal government coming in (and, indeed, we don't see any of the authoritarian government sorts like the military). There's mentions of gangs in other cities, including in the Bay area... but we never see any of the more organized gangs from cities directly, either.
We're told about corporate slavery and a nebulous dictator and about jumpy cops and guards and militarized state and country borders, but we're shown that the poor and destitute are evil and/or stupid, have turned feral and animalistic in the face of disaster. The elites have maintained their reasonableness to respond, somehow, but the average person is a beast or barely above a beast. And, indeed, the elites are responding proportionally to the actual situation, cautious to not expend extra effort, instead of responding out of unfounded fears and causing far more problems.
The world is essentially constructed like the deluded fantasy of preppers and rich bunker assholes who imagine the world going to shit, that they will "protect their own," that they'll get their guns and bug out to the middle of nowhere and start a farm or get in a bunker and shoot whoever gets too close, because everyone that doesn't join their particular flavor of prepper cult is really just out to stab them in the back. Bankole's even got a homestead that the Earthseed group get to.
I'd also note the issue of grouping together. The only groups that actually stick together are rural farmer sorts (who are leery of strangers, but don't start shooting, and are barely touched upon), groups with rich and powerful connections (such as certain stores), and Lauren's Earthseed group. This fits into a very conservative, reactionary body politic. The cities, urban areas, areas that are generally more liberal or left-wing, are essentially degenerate hellholes and smoking ruins, with the moral and social holdouts within the cities being conservative, religious, and more affluent than the masses in the urban core.
Earthseed as a religion reads very much as a religion constructed by an atheist. Which is fine, I suppose, since Lauren seems to vaguely be atheistic. Now, I don't know what Butler's personal views about religion were, or what her religion was, but one interview where she discusses Earthseed's construction for the work brings up the Tao Te Ching and Buddhism's focus on impermanence.
Taoism has a very long list of gods and spirits. Buddhism, likewise, with its gods and saints. To ignore that in favor of focusing solely on one part and one text of the philosophy is kind of... missing the point of both of them and is trying to do a sort of framing that Christianity routinely does both to others (the church fathers mocking the increasing number of Roman deities or Christians' disdain for the Talmud for Judaism) and to itself (Protestants decrying Catholics' buildup of traditions, one of the functions of biblical literalism, etc.). It's a sort of Western colonialist approach when talking of non-Christian religion, too. All polytheism and all particular ritual is seen as "decadent" and "degenerate" and stuff made up out of either delusion or superstition or else deception of some kind, hiding what the group considers "pure" that is supposedly trapped underneath- either monotheism or atheism. It's also part of why Western "secular" Buddhists like Sam Harris suck, since they come in pretending all the non-secular Buddhists are a bunch of dummies and primitives.
It's also wild that she mentioned in the same interview that Yoruba practices involving Orisha was also an influence, considering that there's literally nothing I could figure would have anything to do with African Traditional Religions (ATR) and diaspora practices like Haitian Vodou in the way Earthseed is constructed. ATRs and their diaspora practices are religions where people routinely interact with spirits and deities. I'm not a practitioner of ATR traditions, but there are overlaps in religious practices with other groups, like offering favored food and drink to specific deities, celebrations on days associated with specific deities, and divine possession.
An important part of a lot of religions that function like that is that those beings are, in fact, external to humanity, much older than humanity, and have choices, and wills, and agency. You can persuade them to see your side or aid you (though how this looks may not be what you directly ask for), but they aren't something that you can just treat as a lump of clay to fashion as you see fit.
Earthseed is a religion in which the phrase "God is change" gets bandied about. It should be noted that the religion itself is much more connected to cultural Christian narratives. There is that assumption of monotheism baked into it and an active anti-idol/aniconistic aspect, the way pantheism functions as a way of trying to square certain circles, and the way Lauren catechises and tries to convert people on her travels and set up a cult.
But it's also atheistic.
By this, the idea is that humanity can "shape God" on the basis of forethought and work and so on. There isn't a relational aspect. It's instead the notion that humans make and mold divinity, which is an inversion of religions that actually believe in a deity or deities. It's the Western occultist approach, that humans are ultimately just making shit up and it somehow works, and that approach comes in part from Christianity's need to explain away other religions, since Christianity has to deny other deities' existences and special plead for itself. Earthseed doctrine just now subsumes Christianity as a religion as well, making divinity in all forms actually not divine at all, actually entirely materialist. (One could then get into the quip some modern pagans have made, that monotheism inevitably turns into atheism eventually.)
Which ties into the disconnected prescience. The idea of building a god to take us to the stars is more notable nowadays when you hear techbro nonsense. It's an atheistic religion built around building then shaping a god that's structurally just Christianity but with a God Computer, and creating a materialist/nonspiritual version of things like Heaven or humanity's destiny to do space colonialism. I say disconnected because there really isn't much of a reason for Lauren to believe some nonsense about escaping to the stars and it's ungrounded in the character's understanding of the world. She shows no interest in the stars or astronomy. She shows no interest whatsoever upon leaving the city and seeing stars sans light pollution, no wonder at the cosmic vastness of the universe. She doesn't have them travel at night, when it's cooler and when people are mostly bedded down, navigating by the stars.
There's also the implication mysticism as essentially bullshit, which is also very much an atheist thing. Bankole, Lauren's lover old enough to be her father (and he freaks out after sleeping with her about being a pedophile because she's still underage when they start, but then continues to sleep with her anyway, so I don't get what the point of that plot thread even was if it changes nothing other than "normal social mores are out the window"), mentions things about mysticism that read as mysticism being bullshit made to obfuscate and trick people. That all the "weird" stuff about religion is essentially chicanery to hide the ruse. This isn't how mysticism works in various religions. Mysticism is just hard to convey to outsiders. (It can get weird if you approach certain works with a strain of mysticism before and after getting involved in mysticism.)
Cis women really assume that passing themselves off as a man would somehow be a protective shield against violence and rape. That's... just not true.
Lauren assumes, because of the group composition early in, that she should cut her hair and pass herself off as a man in order to avoid being accosted. The problem is, she would thus be a young black man in peoples' eyes if she did pass, and that group is treated as more dangerous and would be a prime target for violence from people like the police.
This is something that reads as a work from a cis woman who just sees "man" as an easy button... which would be fine from Lauren as a character, since she's a sheltered cis girl who lived in a gated community, but that has to read as intentional, but I don't think it is intentional on Butler's part. Lauren's treatment doesn't materially change when perceived as a man compared to as a girl outside of a very few token nods of "a few unnamed strangers offering her some girl to fuck because they think she's a guy" and "she avoids bathing and changing clothes until after dark so people don't see her anatomy." But there's more to passing than just having short hair and people not seeing visible breasts.
If you are get outed after passing as a man and you're not typically "male" (such as being trans, or intersex, or a cis woman cross-dressing), you're running a serious risk of getting correctively raped and/or killed.
Cis women have a lifetime chance of getting raped at 20%, and people understand that that's a terribly high number.
Trans men have a lifetime chance of around 50%.
However, it's also kind of ridiculous (tying back into the elite panic shit), just how overwhelming the rape is tied to cis women and girls in this work and how many are described as being raped. Others have noted that there's a LOT of rape. Incorporating rape into a story on its own doesn't bother me. What does bother me is how overwhelmingly it's like George RR Martin's works, and others have also noted that both writers' dynamic (and I agree) is where rape is very much a "cis man perpetrator, cis woman victim" crime on the whole. Rape isn't nearly as one-sided as that.
It's a parade of victims' bodies used to point to everything being shit without those characters being the developed ones. They're just a signpost of how bad things are. But that parade of bodies also becomes a muddied mess in that, as you keep including the same thing over and over again without developing an idea, it becomes a blur and loses its emotional impact.
And, because that isn't enough for this work, most of the rapes we see the aftermath of are done by strangers to relative strangers. There are a few instances of incestuous rape or people selling off their kids into sexual slavery or what have you, but a lot of the rapists and their victims that get more directly shown in the story is "druggie homeless evil stranger predators rape random refugees." Rapes, statistically, are done by known and trusted people, not strangers in the bushes. (Not even during disasters, either, and that idea that everyone's gonna go out raping and pillaging and murdering then gets into that elite panic mentality again.) Some of the most realistic stuff would be something early in the book, in the gated community, where someone's uncle raped her and got her pregnant (and he got kicked out), but the framing of this is Lauren pitying the child of that union and seeing that entire extended family as just "crazy." This is depicted as an aberration of behavior for the gated community, unlike how the homeless rape arson gangs have rape thoroughly normalized and a lack of rape is the aberration.
In short, the work is a dismal mess, something deeply rotted and reactionary. I don't trust anyone who claims that this is how people would react in disasters, because that means they believe the lies of elite panic.
Return to Reviews Back to Home