Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998) — Octavia E. Butler
(No spoilers.)
According to notes by author Octavia E. Butler at the end of Parable of the Talents, she originally intended to write one book of the fictional autobiography of the character Lauren Olamina. It became longer than planned, so she “found a way to end” Parable of the Sower and then to write the sequel Parable of the Talents. This was good fortune, for while Sower is faster and more fun, it is a formula zombie book, while Talents is a startlingly accurate prophecy of American politics gone bad.
To skip ahead, what could be more chilling than for Butler to write, in Talents, published in 1998, of a presidential candidate who wraps himself with Christian evangelical righteousness, campaigns on a platform of reviving America to some magical time of the past, and whose slogan is “Make America Great Again”?
To make matters worse – and more shameful for us non-fictional, real Americans of 2020 – is that this President Jarret was elected in 2032 when America was ten years into an era of the complete breakdown of society. The economy was a shambles, with barter or Canadian dollars as the only means of exchange, public education no longer available, and crime and extreme violence a way of life. At least in Butler’s fictional account, the despotic Jarret was elected by an electorate desperate for politics to restore law and order, as compared to our non-fiction reality show in which Trump was elected in a time of stability and prosperity.
These two books, written in 1993 and 1998, respectively, tell the story of American society 2024 from 2035. They cover the life of Lauren Olamina, beginning as teenager of suburban Los Angeles, through her maturity as the creator of a new social/religious movement. These years open in a dystopian nightmare of ultra-violence and depravity, and end, notwithstanding the one-term presidency of Jarret, with a society mending its way back to stability, albeit was horrible scars. This renewal permits new entrants of social belief, thereby permitting the growth of Olamina’s new perspective on God and human destiny.
But, back to basics and reading fun. Parable of the Sower is a simple, formulistic barrel of unhinged anarchy and violence, as we find an America in which society has somehow completely disintegrated. There are various hints of causation, ranging from global warming to budgetary imbalances and cuts to social and education infrastructures. However it occurred, the book opens with our recognizable American society – not some other science fiction world, or even some other country – in complete and violent freefall.
For readers, this rewards us with 329 pages of old-fashioned zombie revelry. Middle class neighborhoods, such as Olamina’s, construct walls to try to keep out the crazies. A new addictive drug induces an almost sexual euphoria for fire. The addicts, many of whom were once from the privileged classes, shave their heads and paint their naked bodies in vivid colors, and set fires. These fires draw scavengers who kill, rape and pillage. It is an anarchy of illiteracy and joblessness and unpunished crime.
Lauren Olamina eventually finds herself homeless, and along with tens of thousands of other homeless people, heads for the roads to walk north. It is widely accepted by all that somehow the north – the Pacific Northwest and, in particular, Canada – remains relatively stable and represents a chance for a fresh start. She gradually meets other refugees, and by the fierce power of her personality creates a large, armed group to defend itself on the journey.
The Sower becomes a road-trip book, with each new night and turn of the road revealing some new atrocity by predator criminals who bear a closer resemblance to zombies than murderers. Any vulnerable female is inevitably gang-raped. Any defenseless walkers are killed for the clothes on their back. The predators range from organized gangs to armed opportunists. And, of course, there are the painted addicts who revel in killing and burning. There is the requisite gruesome scene of starving children roasting a human thigh on a spit. A survival mentality is adopted by all, including Olamina, to scavenge any dead bodies or burned houses. There are countless instances where Olamina and her companions find recently dead bodies that they pilfer for clothing, weapons and money.
It is a fast-moving thriller, located deep within the American nightmare that thrills of unlimited and unaccountable violence. What makes Olamina’s survivor story different is that she is a young woman of command, who wants to more than just survive, and who believes – knows — that she has a path forward for the human species.
She is the daughter of a minister who protected his family and neighborhood for as long as he could, who raised her to be both literate and proficient with guns and survival techniques. At a young age, she discovers a different way of defining God and human destiny, and it becomes her inevitable mission to promote the truth of what she calls Earthseed. She writes a testament, passages of which are provided at the start of every new chapter in the Parable books. The truth for Olamina is that God is whatever we project, that God is change itself, and that we create an ever-changing God. God is like a law of nature rather than an entity, and is completely impersonal. Our existence is of no account, other than to the extent we create change and accountability for ourselves. And the cool twist is that the human condition is but a small blip on the evolutionary stage of Earth, unless we use our abilities to migrate to other worlds in other star systems where humans will have a longer opportunity to evolve.
In the Sower, Olamina seeks a homeland her group can defend and develop, as they build a new and better community founded on the philosophy of Earthseed.
Cue to the second book, Parable of the Talents. It is also violent, but it is much more interesting as it covers the creation and organization of Olamina’s community, the evolution of her understanding of how best to promote and expand Earthseed, and of particular interest to me, the development of a political movement under President Jarret to make America great again.
Even the violence is more nuanced. Rather than a chaotic landscape of murderous highwaymen, Talents plays out the consequences of physical servitude made possible by the use of electronic collars controlled by masters. The collars coerce obedience with severe physical pain. These masters range from pimps controlling their sex slaves to large corporations controlling their workers, to unofficial religious militias loyal to President Jarret’s church controlling the apostates.
Olamina goes through the grinder of collars and rebellion, and eventually develops a successful methodology to expand Earthseed based on decentralized missionary outreach and education, rather than the physical creation of residential communities.
Butler spends much time in both books on a condition called “sharer” that afflicts Olamina and several other characters. This occurs when a mother abuses certain drugs during pregnancy, and causes a permanent condition in which her children feel the exact pain they see in others. They likewise experience the pleasure, such as sex, of others. This condition obviously makes them vulnerable, because they are constantly at risk of debilitating pain by just seeing someone else in pain, and such empathetic pain undermines their ability to strike others in self-defense. And yet, as neat as this concept is, Butler never really develops it to significance in the story. If anything, she treats the condition inconsistently so it comes and goes as a convenience of plot development.
The significance of the book, for me, was Butler’s absolute prescience, in the 1990s, of a political no-nothing rationalization that provides the foundation of support for a president like Jarret. President Jarret cynically wraps himself with a religious mantle called the Christian American Church, knowing the value of dividing the population in order to conquer and rule. As Olamina says in Earthseed, “To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.”
I hereby personally predict that the most significant step by President Trump on the road to tyranny will be the formation of unofficial armed militias to intimidate his critics. The lack of a private paramilitary force is what separates our American experience from that of other democracies gone awry: the brownshirts of Hitler, the motorcycle-oriented vigilantes in Venezuela and Iran, and the silent quasi-military enforcers of strong-man rule in past years in various other South American countries. In Talents, Olamina’s first Earthseed community was attacked as heretics by the Crusaders, an unofficial and unacknowledged armed affiliate of the Christian American Church.
We are not so special that it could not happen in America. What was the Klu Klux Klan, anyway? When you hear in Trump’s second term of the unofficial formation of armed groups who train with military techniques, then you will know we have arrived. And, you know, for sure, that Trump will implicitly countenance these groups.
Bob Fall 