While that might make it feel scarier, it also helped me connect better to these characters. This is the world as it is now, just slightly more awry. I think it helps that, as I mentioned, it actually feels very close to home in its setting-this is not some hypothetical world torn asunder by zombies, or another contagion, or an unforeseen natural disaster.

So take this for the huge praise that it is that Parable of the Sower spoke to me. I’ve largely been avoiding post-apocalyptic stories given that we are edging towards the third year of a pandemic. But trust and allegiance can be as scarce as clean drinking water in this world, and Lauren’s life is destined never to be an easy one. She starts to develop her own religion, which she eventually names Earthseed, and when events force Lauren out of her community to venture forth into the wider world, she takes the idea of Earthseed with her and begins to preach it to those she meets along the way. Lauren has Hyper-Sensitivity Syndrome, which means that she literally feels others’ pain (and pleasure, but as she notes, it is mostly pain these days). Lauren Olamina is the daughter of a Baptist preacher and lives with him, her stepmother, and stepbrothers in a walled but mostly poor community somewhere in California. So perhaps this was the perfect book to read in 2022.

(And that’s fine-science fiction doesn’t have to be predictive to be powerful.) Um, maybe someone should have told Butler that though, because her picture of California in 2023 is not too far off from where we are here in 2022, and honestly it freaks me out how prescient she was! Environmental crises, break downs of democracy and governance, the return of company towns and corporate slavery-all of this is occurring, perhaps slightly differently from how Butler saw it playing out, but it is present. Normally when science fiction authors set their stories in the near future, their chosen decade comes round and is nothing like what they have predicted. And so the message here is less about bringing down the dystopia and more about finding a way to create meaning in one’s life.īutler, writing in the 1990s, sets her book in the 2020s. This is not a dystopian novel, not really, for Lauren is not living in a dystopia so much as an even more dysfunctional society than our current one. I also enjoyed the ending for how it strikes the perfect note between optimism and realism. It combines some of the insistence on change that marks Lilith’s Brood with the discomfort and hardship of Kindred, yet it does so in a way that hits much closer to home in both respects.

Moreover, this might be my favourite novel of hers so far. Perhaps not the most uplifting book to start my new year with, but you cannot beat Octavia E.

Parable of the sower novel