Parable of the Sower (Parable, 1)

An apocalyptic story set in 2025 (the book was written in 1993) near Los Angeles. The world has been thrown into chaos because of water shortages, disease, drugs, economic uncertainty, and distrust.

Lauren Olamina is a teenager living with her family in a walled community -- walled in to keep them safe from predators, who will steal, rape, and kill to get what they want. She longs to get away and start a new life heading north, hopeful that things will be different up there. While she's still dreaming of this different future, circumstances force her out into the world on her own. She meets people along the way and slowly builds a family and a community with them in the midst of fear, desperation, and hopelessness.

The late American Writer Octavia E. Butler’s novel, Parable of the Sower was published in 1993. The Parable of the Sower is set in the 2020s in California. Economic change and climate change have led society in California to collapse. In Southern California, people either live in fortified towns where many homeless people or enslave people for a corporation in exchange for protection in a company town. The future slave system is not necessarily racially based but often falls within a racial hierarchy. The walled towns are protecting themselves from the hordes of poor people on the move who are following people on drugs that will make them want to set fire to anything. The poor people will do anything to survive. The people on the road and the poor people in town view people who set fire as redistributing the wealth from the people with houses. Lauren Olya Olamina lives in a house in a walled community. Olamina is the daughter of a Baptist preacher. Olamina wants to start a new religion that will suit people in the collapsing California. The religion is called Earthseed. Bulter says in an interview “Lauren Olamina says that since change is the one inescapable truth, change is the basic clay of our lives. To live constructive lives, we must learn to shape change when we can and yield to it when we must. Either way, we must learn and teach, adapt and grow” (Butler 336). The religion contains a defense of governmental funding for space exploration which I found interesting. Butler’s model for the writing about the religious text was the Taoist de Ching of Taoist literature. The title of the novel Parable of Sower comes from Jesus’s parable about missionaries from the Gospel of Saint Mark (Butler 343-344). I thought the novel, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler was a well-done post-apocalypse novel and sadly realistic novel. Works Cited: Butler, Octavia E. 2019. “A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler” in Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, pages 333-341. New York: The Grand Central Publishing. Butler, Octavia E. 2019. “Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion” in Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, pages 342-345. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

I read this book for book club. It was really good but reminded me a lot of “The Road.” There were a lot of good discussions about the hard socioeconomic things happening. This book for sure said a lot about society and our desire to be loved, accepted, and known.

Brilliant brilliant book! I normally love any sort of science fiction dystopian society story, and this one was no different in term of my love for it. I only rate it a 9 (really a 9.5) for the sometimes graphic-ness about inflicted pain and bodily injuries, but I know that they were kinda important to the story.

Dystopian and set in a time (2024-28) just a little too close to today for my comfort. This story of a young woman coming of age and simultaneously leading a rag tag group of others north to something better than LA can offer is at once horrifying and hopeful. Lauren is an inspiration in her preparation for disaster and her wisdom in dealing with human reality, cultivating loyalty and self sufficiency and fighting greed and abuse.