Customer Reviews

Parable of the Sower (Unabridged)

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I started reading Octavia Butler's book when I was at school in Atlanta. A friend lent me a copy of "Wild Seed" and I was riveted from page one and could not put it down. Octavia Butler is one of the best science-fiction writers to come out of the 20th century. Her pages are filled with characters that are believable even though she often puts them in `out-of-this-world situations.' In "Parable of Sower" she introduces the reader to Lauren, a young girl with the unenviable ability to feel the pain of others. A "talent" her father has taught her to hide from others outside her family. The world Lauren is living in is slowly descending into anarchy and Lauren, is living with her family in a small enclave, protected by her Minister father, who thinks one day everything will go back to normal. Lauren however knows that the walls that protect them will not stand forever, and she prepares to leave before it is too late but it is already too late and her family and friends are raped, murdered and mutilated by a vicious gang of drug-addicts. With two fellow survivors Lauren sets off on a quest that will lead them halfway across America, gathering others along the way, such as two young prostitutes on the run from their pimp father, a middle aged Academic, an orphaned child but to name a few. A tentative alliance is forged, one that will enable them all to live through the dreadful times ahead. Lauren carries with her a strange new belief, that of Earthseed, a creed that will one-day lead to the stars and a life beyond a corrupted earth. As she and her slowly growing band of followers' search for sanctuary she preaches Earthseed to them, and soon begins to recruit coverts among her fellow travellers. "Parable of the Sower," is a haunting novel of a world in transition, where only the strong, the cruel and the vicious survive. The weak and the sick are either killed for enslaved. As Lauren and her followers' head for a farm where they hope to find a home, the young girl is witness to history repeating itself. Slavery is making a come back and people like herself who can feel the pain of others are being sought by unscrupulous men and women who have seen the benefit of such having workers that are in tune with the agonies of others. This is a dark novel of how easy it is for humanity to be bought to its knees, but it also a novel about dreams, desire, and the need for a new future. Earthseed might just be the answer to a dying planet's needs and Lauren could be the Prophet who makes it happen. Octavia Butler's writing is atmospheric, exciting, romantic and there is never a dull moment from the time you turn the first page. A marvellous book and I highly recommend it for first time science-fiction readers, as it is easy to get in to and understand.

I don't often read science fiction, but the recommendation of several readers and its inclusion on our local public radio "Readers and Writers on the Air" series caused me to pick up, with some trepidation, Octavia E. Butler's 1993 sci-fi novel Parable of the Sower. Set just twenty-five years from now, Butler imagines a California beset by severe global warming, with the government virtually collapsed and anarchy run amuck. Written in the first person, Butler's narrator, Lauren, is a young woman who begins the book living in a walled community with her family. Life outside the walls is total chaos, and much effort is spent keeping the "barbarians" - people who have been dispossessed of home or property - on the outside. When her town's security is breached and her entire family murdered, Lauren finds herself on the road, where she eventually gathers a group of people with her, all journeying to the north. Lauren is unique and memorable in a couple of respects: first, a preacher's kid, she sets out to define and found a new religion, which she calls Earthseed, and which takes both the moral precepts of Christianity and the unique creed that "God is change." Second, Lauren has "hyperempathy syndrome", which causes her to feel as her own the pleasure and pain of those around her. Thus, if she sees someone critically injured and in pain, she will herself feel that person's conscious pain. Not a good condition to have when living under circumstances where one must fight to survive, and kill or be killed!

While I found at times the Earthseed material to be a bit "over the top," overall this is a provocative and excellent novel. Butler writes extremely well, and she made the hellish world in which her characters find themselves absolutely believable. Parts of this novel are not for the squeamish. Although very dark in tone, the novel ends on a ray of hope when Lauren's group, after burying the dead from a recent battle, recall Jesus' Parable of the Sower. As the reader may recall, although most of the seed ends up dying, some falls on good ground, "sprang up, and bore fruit an hundredfold." Highly recommended.

Some writers have a talent for describing current reality in the guise of science fiction. Octavia Butler was one of the best at this. Her dystopia in this and the sequel Parable of the Talents is so close to our own reality that it is quite scary. It is also a quick read. Her work has always been good reading and this is no exception. Want to see the end product of rampant corporatism? Read the book. The way things are going in the US of A, we may well need a leader like the heroine Lauren Olamina Bankole but you can get some of Lauren's wisdom from reading Octavia's Parable books for yourself. You won't regret it. A few of her words below.

"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists that control the fool
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery."

I thought Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower was a decent science fiction novel and a poor philosophical one. It is a work of speculative fiction set in America in the year 2025. The novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of a young woman, Lauren Olamina. In the beginning of the novel, Lauren lives in a middle-class, gated community just outside of Los Angeles. Civilization has drastically declined due to a combination of global warming and the loss of resources like clean, potable water and petroleum. No one except the very wealthy use gasoline powered automobiles, and food and water are hugely expensive commodities. Outside Olimina's enclave, the streets are filled with violence and chaos. Butler pointedly never quite spells out exactly how the world came to be this way, thus clearly implying that we are already moving in that direction - hence the genre categorization of speculative fiction. Butler uses the novel as a warning to the world. At the same time she's writing this speculative science fiction, however, she is designing a philosophy called Earthseed, which she expounds upon using her protagonist. In the story, Olamina has invented the religion Earthseed and it is the main focus of her life. She is determined to escape the enclave and spend her days refining and then teaching the canons of Earthseed, the most central of which is that "God is Change." In the back of the Grand Central Publishing edition of novel, Butler explains how she decided to make this the basis of the religion. "I put Earthseed together by asking myself questions and coming up with answers. For instance, I asked what was the most powerful force I could think of? What one thing could we not stop no matter how hard we tried? The answer I came up with after some thought was `change'" (335).

It's certainly not a unique tactic to use a dystopian view of our future to exemplify the parts of the true human spirit we're in danger of losing if we continue on in our greedy, selfish ways - think Brave New World. But honestly, the biggest downfall of the novel is the fact that it seems like the actual concept of Earthseed, with all of its philosophy should be the thing the reader walks away with. It seems like Butler probably wrote the novel around the religion, but it does not end up working out that way. Few reviewers had much to say about the passages in the beginning of each paragraph, which apparently come from what will be Earthseed's bible, and truthfully I felt the same way. The story was interesting and I can even see it being a good warning or lesson for Americans and our "gimme gimme" mentality when it comes to water and food and oil, but the "God is Change" and the "Take to the stars" concepts didn't stick with me. While I by no means hated the book, I was decidedly unimpressed with it. It is a cross between a Lifetime movie and George Orwell's 1984. I could have done without the former, so I leave you with the recommendation to just go for the latter.

Parable of the Sower is a vivid, often harrowing, story of survival, loss and companionship, set in a United States in the near future, where the environment and society have degraded to the point of breakdown. An account of a young woman's journey away from the dangerous neighbourhood of her childhood, and of the perils and the people encountered in the search for a safe haven, this novel is about the triumph and resilience of the human spirit. Although I felt it would have been just as good without its religious element, reading this story was ultimately an uplifting experience.

I read this as part of reading Butler's entire oeuvre in preparation for an essay that I was writing about a common theme in her work. With some authors such a task would be daunting, either because of the volume of writing or the disparate nature of their output. So far, as I can tell, Butler's limited publications fall into four distinct groups: her early novels in the Patternist series; Kindred, a standalone novel of time travel and slavery; the Xenogenesis trilogy; and the current group of books, likely to go by the heading of Earthseed. The new novel, Parable of the Talents, is the second in the series, which I have on my shelf to be read, but I wanted to make sure I started at the beginning.

In 2030 the U.S. is a nation under siege from within. Violence and new drugs have combined to make the cities war zones, where the citizens live in suburban walled enclaves and must go out in groups or well-armed to shop or work. One drug in particular, which causes the user to find fire so fascinating that he or she immediately turns to arson, wreaks total havoc. This is a post-apocalyptic society, but instead of following a nuclear war or a plague, it is an implosion of the tensions that we have in society today magnified enormously.

I don't care much for post-apocalypses, and it really doesn't matter if it happened because of war or drugs or plague. It is a setting that seems as if ordered from central casting. I've read it so many times that there is nothing new about it. Unfortunately, Butler does not change my opinion with this book. However, her characters and their concerns were somewhat new--especially the idea of creating a new religion that would help people live in these rough times and deal with the change, as well as her creation of a psychosomatic condition that causes empathy as a side-effect of a total cancer cure.

Still, it was a rough 300 pages for me, made all the more so for its obvious set-up of a longer series. Butler's writing is accomplished and her characters believable. While I was not too excited by this novel, I am interested in seeing where she goes from here, now that all the set-up is complete.

A very heavy read. Octavia Butler launches the reader into the America of the future. The story is set in southern California during the years 2024 through 2027 where, through the journal entries of Lauren Olimina, we learn of the savage and degenerative state of the nation. A nation where the ability to feel the pain of others is a disease that could lead to death; where communities and neighborhoods are walled off for protection from the less fortunate. Violence is rampant. Citizens are armed to capacity. Fear permeates your every thought and action.

"Parable of the Sower" is an engaging read on so many levels. The narrative is highly symbolic and open. The story is framed in the biblical tradition yet it calls to question our notions of God and religion as they relate to the survival of the individual spirit and community. Although futuristic in setting, the story renders an immediacy that was at times uncomfortable for me to fully digest. In the year of 2003, 2025 doesn't seem that far off. Although I found the prose clear and concise, I wasn't able to devour the book with the eager anticipation that I would typically apply to a novel as well developed as this one. I didn't understand this self-imposed resistance to surrendering myself completely to the story. It became clear to me midway through the text that - unlike most really great novels that I've read - with "Parable of the Sower", I didn't necessarily want to know what would happen next. The unfolding of the story generated more angst in me than curiosity. On a subconscious level, had I slipped into a comfortable denial of what could occur to a people who have been failed by their religion, their governments, family, neighbors, and friends. As America stands at the ready for war with Iraq, had the future of the nation as imagined by Butler become too close to reality?

Any novel that causes this type of internal reflection deserves wide spread readership. Published originally in 1993, "Parable of the Sower" spans the past, present and future as it depicts a nation that has lost its connection to everything. This is my first read by this award-winning author. I have a lot of catching up to do. Highly Recommended!

Reading through these reviews, I see a lot of people saying that the novel is warning of things to come. Personally, I don't anticipate such a radical collapse of American society in the time frame Butler presents, but I don't think that is the point.

The first part of the book, in the enclave, struck me as an interesting dystopian take on the burbclaves of Snow Crash. I was really caught up in it, imagining what it would be like to live in a place like that. Then, I realized that their world exists today in America, in several inner city neighborhoods -- she only moved it to the suburbs to make it hit home with middle class people. Brilliant move.

Once Olamina leaves the enclave, she begins a journey through even more horrors. While I doubt the range of hardships they endure have been experienced by any single group of people, there is nothing that happens in the book that hasn't happened to real people in the recent American past and in the present world (look at the genocides in Africa, and at famines and government collapses around the world).

I may be reading more into this part than Butler intended, but I saw the experiences of Olamina's group working their way backward through American history. The enclave is an inner city hell, then she meets travelers on the road, looking for work (Dust Bowl/Grapes of Wrath period) and the temptations of factory towns (turn of the century mill and mine villages). Then she meets people who were outright slaves (American slavery) and endentured servants (like many unwilling American immegrants). Finally, the band rediscovers the frontier at Bankole's land and has an opportunity to begin again and, hopefully, not make the same mistakes.

Did anyone else get this impression?

And I mean that. So much of the tragedy in this book struck me to the core...mainly because it was set in Los Angeles, and I lived in LA for a long time. Butler creates a pausible world which is being systematically eaten alive with corruption, poverty, politics, to name a few. I couldn't put this book down - it was that engrossing. It's one of the main things I love about Ms. Butler's books - her ability to create detailed worlds teeming with life and destruction...and in this book there was much destruction.
I am not devoutly religious and was never raised religiously, so Olamina's 'discovery' of 'God is Change' resonated with me. It doesn't matter whether you are religious or not in this case, because the whole concept of re-inventing god in this book was interesting because it showed a world which was in such chaos and turmoil, that even religion was subject to change (thus making change itself a religion). This did not bother me, and again, I found the theory actually drove home the point of how disasterous the environment was.
But I still have a couple of complaints:
I was a little annoyed with the character of Olamina, or maybe I was just annoyed with Ms. Butler, because I never felt this protagonist ever really 'grew' into the story. Olamina's world falls apart and yet despite her god of change, she remains the same. It's as though she walks around with blinders on, and grasps onto her neo-religious convictions. I've read Parable of the Talents (the sequel) as well, and found that Butler spends a lot of time bashing Christian Fundamentalism, but in truth, her character's stubborn hold on a new form of religion is just as ruthless.
One thing I noticed was that Olamina was obsessed with 'converting' the people she befriended, or I should say collected, along her journey... and I found something a bit one-dimensional in this. I also didn't care much for Olamina's insistence of 'Earth Seed's destiny is to take root among the stars'. I found this character to be a bit of a nutcase actually, and never really got to the heart of why. It's as though the inner conflict never came to light, but was always expressed outwardly, by a series of destructive events. Yet the two worlds (inner character's world and outer environment) never intersected, instead running parallel, right next to each other, until I had the distinct feeling that I was losing interest in Olamina's well-being and didn't really care for her at all.
I want to care for my protagonist, even if she's not all that admirable, and I didn't have much reason to like her at all after a while. She acts rationally, she is dependable, but she is a stubborn, bossy young female character living in total denial. And we never really get to find out why, either, which leaves me feeling incomplete and unsure. I think Butler puts a lot of her personal beliefs into books ... which is only natural. But something in me felt like there was nowhere to turn in the story, and the only Change in the book was the destruction getting more frequent as the other characters learned to deal with it.
All the other characters, again, but Olamina.
I just didn't find this character very believable or adaptable, and even though she was a mass of paradoxes and contradictions, Ms. Butler never bothers to explore her depth...and I'm left with the conclusion that it's because Olamina doesn't have any depth at all.
However, this is still an excellent book, and the story is simply brilliant. It broadened my world a little bit, and that is always priceless.

Parable of the Sower may be among the darkest, most disturbing view of post apocalyptic America that I have read in a long time, partly for the countless horrors, death, heartache and the non stop struggle to survive for those left alive. There are almost no redeeming virtues left in society in this vision of a post apocalyptic nightmare, where the rag tag band of survivors who comprise the story have to sink to unthinkable depths themselves just to be alive to see another sunrise. In this supremely bleak future, the have nots murder the haves for their belongings, nowhere is safe, the cops are little more than thieves and murderers themselves, drug induced pyromaniacs burn down anything and everything, corpses are picked over for anything valuable, debt slavery is the new fad and through this true nightmare travels Loren Olamina and her group of desperate and hopeless followers.

Octavia Butler has also added some extra ingredients, perhaps mystical and perhaps religious in nature, that give the book and the story a bit of something new. For starters, Loren is an empath, personally feeling the suffering or joy of those around her as if it were happening to her. Also, Loren has a unique take on the world, crafting her own "religion", to put it one way, that equates God with the force of change in nature, an odd philosophy that even now is slightly confusing to me, but still works within the story. It works primarily because her philosophy shifts the role of God from someone you pray to in order to get help from your suffering and places that responsibility on you yourself. You want to make it? Get your rear in gear and do what you have to do. Whatever that is. The nature of God is the nature of Change in the world, and that is something you can actively control and shape. Change your future, shape your future, take hold of the changes in the world and be active and not passive. At least I think that's the gist of it, confusing as the argument seemed to me.

This book deserves to be on the reading list of all apocalyptic fans. It is truly chilling and the unspeakable things that happen throughout, chapter after chapter, will keep you glued to the page. On a deeper level, though, there is a glimmer of hope for the future of humanity within the belief system of the main character that should have you reaching for the sequel (Parable of the Talents) to see how things turn out. Buying into her view of the nature of God was not that important to me, although some may argue that point and downgrade the book for it. Regardless of that odd philosophical undercurrent, however, Loren and her small group of "followers" are worth rooting and praying for, and that carries the story through to the end and makes it compelling reading.