"I stared down the hill from our camp where just a glint of water was visible in the distance through the trees and bushes. The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there arent any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees."There is only one word to describe the world that Butler built in Parable of the Sower and that word isBRUTAL.I recently read a review of one of her other books, Kindred, in which the reviewer used the same word, and I was wondering if that really could be an appropriate description because, after all, a book is just words on a page right? What could possible be so bad about that?And then I started reading The Parable of the Sower, Butler's story set in California in 2024, where communities rely on walls to keep them safe from wild animals, robbery, rape, and murder. But of course, walls are made to crumble. Communities disperse or are erased, and all that is left is a dog eat dog world."Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation."What made this book special for me was its immediacy. The book was published in 1993, but is set in a 2024 that is not all that futuristic. There are no clocks striking thirteen. The only thing that has advanced are drugs. I was going to add 'human atrocities' but they have remained the same throughout time, they just disappear from focus, are kept outside the walls of social order. In this sense, The Parable of the Sower, tears down the illusion that social order is ever stable and that social constructs that are based on ideologies or intangible ideas are of any use to man when faced with a battle for survival.I guess from the setting, the description of looting and arson, and the depiction of the police as corrupt and untrustworthy, that Butler may have drawn some inspiration from the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Remembering the images of the time and having seen similar events unfold in more recent years, Butler really captures the volatility of society in this novel.Fortunately, however, in her motley crew of main characters, Butler also captures some of that human spirit that fights against this brutality and that has compassion for its fellow beings and draws strength from the support of and belief in mankind. There may be few of them, but given a chance they are set to thrive, much like the seeds that hit a fertile ground.I am sorry if I have waffled my way through this review but The Parable of the Sower was one of those books that just provides so much food for thought. For all its brutality and distressing scenes and descriptions, it was a gripping read and I am looking forward to reading more by the author.

Parable of the Sower?More like "Parable of the RAPEYRAPERAPERAPE!" What Gospel is this again? Where exactly is the good news? "A rapist scattered rape on a rapescape, and some rapes caused unending trauma, and other rapes caused unending despair, but still other rapes created Strong Female Protagonists, and they would never let any man take Advantage of Them Again." Mindnumbingly stupid and insulting to actual real assault victims everywhere. I stopped reading 40 pages in.Hooray, another "gritty urban fantasy," in which sexual assault serves as the gritty grit backdrop in the generic apocalyptic wasteland LA. Teh realism! Teh schock valyue! O look, a murdered corpse! O look, a naked rape victim! O look, now there's another rape victim! O look, a 7 year-old naked rape victim! O, remember my old lady neighbor, who was raped? RAPE! RAPE RAPE RAPE! No actual rapists are in sight, just their traumatized victims. Are you filled with horror yet? Are you properly despairing? Maybe I should describe some more, just in case you aren't! This is in no way exploitative or insensitive, by the way. Trust me, I should know, because I am a vulnerable teenage narrator. You will probably go through this whole book fearing for me, which is I guess the point of all this atmosphere of sexual threat. Of course we can't stop to help, EVEN THOUGH WE HAVE ARMED GUARDS WITH GUNS, because we might get attacked too, but we will still bicycle through this hellscape so I can explain it all to you in between my halfbaked religious views. Ugh. Just writing this review is turning my stomach. This book obviously did too, in case you hadn't noticed. There are not enough synonyms of "dreck" to adequately capture my response.

YA dystopian fiction (but written decades before that term was coined.) I am embarrassed to say I had never read Octavia Butler before. Im happy I finally corrected this glaring oversight. This novel set in the near future is so frighteningly prescient it is difficult to read. The year is 2026. American society is rapidly breaking down thanks to global warning, economic stagnation and wealth disparity. 18-year-old Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a walled-off middle class neighborhood outside LA, but she knows that their little island of relative safety will not last. No one can leave the compound without risking their lives. People are desperate and bereft of any hope. Police and fire fighters only come to help if you have the money to pay them, and even then they are more likely to arrest you than assist you. Few jobs pay money. Most people are slipping into de facto slavery as servants to the wealthy or employees in company-run towns. The new president promises to Make America Great Again, sound familiar? but does so by eliminating the space program and loosening all labor protections, which only gives large corporations a freer hand in cutting up the carcass of the United States.Lauren is born with a dangerous condition, hyper-empathy, which means she feels whatever pain she witnesses inflicted on others. When her neighborhood is finally breached and she is forced out into the harsh new world, this empathy is only one of her great challenges. Lauren has an idea for a new kind of society a new religion that will teach self-sufficiency and a new understanding of what God is but to realize her dream, she first has to stay alive and learn who she can trust.This book was written in the 90s. The scary thing is the 2026 Butler imagined twenty years ago could easily happen within ten years. Reading this book, I felt a growing sense of claustrophobia, as if I were already trapped in Butlers disintegrating vision of America. It is a haunting, powerful read, but not for the faint of heart.

For a long time I had naively held on to the notion that Octavia E. Butler is the African American counterpart to Ursula K. Le Guin - an assumption begotten out of the commonality that both their creations despite being shoehorned into the genre of science/speculative fiction epitomize realities of institutionalized sociopolitical inequities. Not only has my first foray into Butler's literary landscapes altered that idea greatly but compounded my respect for Le Guin's masterful way of letting the didactic veins in a narrative segue neatly with the plot pulse so that when one turns over the last page, the fatal blow to the gut has already been delivered along with the crucial message. Of course it is too early to discount Butler's calibre as a storyteller of grit but rest assured she is no Le Guin. By this time I have devoured enough post-apocalyptic fiction to remain inoculated against both the horrors of disintegrating social orders relapsing into caveman-era violence and the poignancy of surviving groups regaining lost humanity and optimism in the end. But this does not mean I can remain unmoved in the face of even the umpteenth combination of potent story-telling, layered characterization and extrapolations of current reality to very probable catastrophic consequences in the future. Rampant murder, mayhem, arson and pillage drive the plot ahead here. People get killed, raped, mutilated and cannibalized after every few pages. And yet none of the savagery of aforementioned actions registers with the reader. To cut a long story short, 'Parable of the Sower' shows all the finesse of a bull in a china shop while revealing its many thematic concerns.Lauren Olamina, the young adult protagonist, is a hyperempath with the ability to experience the physical pain of others and yet, ironically, it is her journal entries which are glaringly toneless and devoid of any discernible emotion. Even when she expresses her anguish at some tragic turn of events, only a resilient stoicism is palpable in her narrative voice. The occasional philosophical rumination that she rustles up hints at all the solemnity of fortune cookie sentiments. As is obvious from the blurb, there are issues of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, climate change and human conflict simmering beneath the surface of dystopian barbarity but they are all paraded one by one for the reader's benefit without a modicum of discretion. Sprinkling a narrative with sentences like 'So-and-so was also raped.' is hardly the ideal way to drive home the fact of pervasive misogyny.Negatives aside, the book still deserves brownie points for the insightful commentary on religion if not for designating the individual capacity for empathy as the glue which binds together conflicting elements in a civilization. Worship is no good without action. With action, it's only useful if it steadies you, focuses on your efforts, eases your mind.In course of circumventing a minefield of dystopian evils in search of a safe haven, Lauren inadvertently establishes a new religious order centered more or less around the idea of secular humanism, intending it to be a guiding force to shape the future endeavours of the survivors she helps unite as a community. As per the aphorisms of Lauren's 'Book of Earthseed' aka the new age Bible, God is change, and only by accepting change and embracing the notion of diversity can the welfare of the human race be a realizable prospect. This is old wine in new bottle no doubt but there's an oh-so-unsubtle implication that although all core religious ideas are grounded in survivalist logic at the onset, they eventually fragment into toxic ideologies misused by various groups to advance their respective sectarian agendas. The universe is God's self-portrait.I am not really holding my breath but here's to hoping my next brush with Butler's writing fares better than this one.

Parable of the Sower isn't the easiest book to read. The prose is clear and uncomplicated, but the content can be hard to take. This is a close-to-home dystopia, one which I found hard to dismiss as improbable. And the world that it depicts is cruel and ugly. Even the well-meaning must do ugly things to survive.This is science fiction only in the most technical sense. Sure, it's set in a hypothetical future, and the main character, Lauren, has an uncanny/(super)natural ability to feel the pain of others. But there is no reliance upon imagined technologies, alien races or superhuman heroics to move the plot along. The framework of this fictional universe is our own, moved forward in time to a barren future.Lauren is intent upon founding her own religion. Her ideas are represented by excerpts from her poetry at the beginning of each chapter. As the story progresses, Lauren explains her ideas to many (initially skeptical) people. I was a little bit unhappy with this (central) aspect of the book: the ideas, and Lauren's writing, felt to me a lot less deep and meaningful than Lauren intended.But what was Octavia Butler's intention? Did she intend these ideas, and Lauren's writings, to be full of meaning, resonance and depth? Was it supposed to be a bit naive and simple, but with potential (which is how I felt)? The answer isn't to be found in this book.When I finished the book, satisfied at its refusal to come to a pat conclusion or judgment about Lauren's ideology, I found out that there is a sequel. I look forward to it and to finding out whether Lauren's ideas mature once put to the test. Apparently, Butler had begun to work on a third book in this series, but sadly she never completed it.Oh, one warning: don't read the back cover. At least for the edition I have, the description on the back gives away a crucial, major turning point in the plot that occurs midway through the book. I hate knowing too much in advance, and I would have been really irritated had I seen that beforehand.