I love Octavia Butler. So much!! I think her Xenogenesis trilogy (also called Lillith’s Brood) is so creative and wonderful, and works on a special type of “organic sci-fi” that I’ve been unable to find anywhere else. I also really love her seed-to-harvest cycle; I read it years ago and those characters have still stuck with me.

It’s sort of silly that Parable of the Sower is my 9th Octavia Butler book. Liz and I read it together, for a book club at our local bookstore (Golden Hour Books!). It had all the hallmarks of a great Butler novel: a bleak setting, pessimistic narration, surprisingly brutal characters, and an incredible amount of perseverance. It was great.

My caveat here might be a reaction to the book club discussion more than to the book itself, but: I don’t necessarily want to give this book the credit for being as “prescient” as it’s usually portrayed. It’s full of deeply cynical, distrusting, fend-for-yourself type people and individuals, reacting to a world whose government and other institutions have repeatedly disappointed and attacked their members.

But I think it’s important to remember that that’s not the only reaction that people have to crumbling institutions. Another reaction is for people to pick up the initiative and connective work otherwise done by institutions, and simply do it themselves. Introduce themselves to their neighbors. Shovel each other’s driveways. Find something in common with someone new. I don’t think this pro-social (rather than anti-social) response to various forms of instability is any less likely to occur; and in fact there’s evidence that that is, in fact, how people behave: see this article entitled How Communities are Rallying Together in the Wake of Natural Disasters.

I don’t know that Octavia Butler was trying to “predict” and anti-social response to failing institutions when she wrote Parable for the Sower. And it’s a good story, regardless. Not for everyone, but if you like Octavia Butler (or N.K. Jemisin, or The Road by Cormac McCarthy), then you’ll love this book. But, perhaps due to the fact that there are some parts of Parable that feel very real, it’s worth noting that not all stories come true 🙂