Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

I first heard about Octavia Butler in early 2014 on Twitter, I think originally from Danilo and/or Holly. I saw allusions to something called Earthseed, to humanity’s destiny in the stars, to the idea that “God Is Change”.

Two years later, with fascism on the rise and afrofuturism enjoying a moment of popularity, I went to a Fusion-backed symposium about Butler’s work. 1 At this event, I was delighted by the idea that all progressives, all activists, are engaged in acts of science fiction; they imagine alternate worlds that could branch off from this one in a plausible way, societies like ours except governed by different principles of the physical or psychological universe.

Sower and Talents, published in 1993 and 1998 respectively, look more prescient by the day. Butler saw the future with great clarity and with a sense of resignation to the hate, destruction and degradation our world would suffer. In the Parable series, environmental catastrophe and economic inequality have created a desperate underclass driven to violence and drugs, whose life is of no value to a police force interested in protecting the property of the rich. In this fertile ground a white supremacist Christian paramilitary organization flourishes with the winking support of Presidential candidate Andrew Steele Jarrett, whose ascendance tears apart the vanishing middle class between liberal values and a frantic need to protect their families and communities from the predations of those even a little less fortunate. Kashmir Hill has already written about the uncanny similarity of this campaign to Trump’s. By the late 80s our future was not murky  to a thinker of Butler’s diagnostic precision.

The series follows Lauren Oya Olamina, a teenage girl who shows us the imagination and empathy and ambition that we will need to survive this bleak world. As a teenager in a middle-class enclave in southern California, Olamina begins to develop a practice called Earthseed, rooted in strong communities, individual self-sufficiency and an embrace of the universe’s ever-changing nature. Earthseed demands resilience and adaptability, with a sort of scientific and moral pragmatism, and points humanity towards the stars for its own survival. As she develops her philosophy it is eventually collected into The Book of the Living, which is “excerpted” heavily in the two books.

In these two books we don’t see anyone leave Earth — we are not given the pleasure of Butler articulating what it would be like for a whole society to live by these principles. We see small communities struggle to adopt these practices. We see them try to integrate new members who are grateful for food and shelter and company but skeptical of any indoctrination. We see major setbacks and minor accomplishments.

When we are defeated by Moloch our devastation is global and absolute and permanent. Our victories are usually are messy and local and temporary, a momentary respite from an ancient foe that is only getting stronger. If we are to survive, we must connect our small patches of humanity into a resilient and adaptable network. Our power is weak and our time is short, but our destiny is in the stars.

 

  1. I learned about this from Alexis Madrigal’s newsletter Five Intriguing things which I’ve previously plugged. Alexis, formerly at the Atlantic and now Editor in Chief at Fusion, is one of the most interesting writers I follow. ↩