Embrace diversity. Unite—Or be divided, Robbed, Ruled, Killed by those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity or be destroyed.
Parable Of The Sower
Written by Octavia Butler
I had this book marked as “to be read” for a while before a reference to it in the show Abbot Elementary, finally convinced me to read it. I am familiar with Octavia Butler’s other work Dawn and should have guessed that I would appreciate this book too. I knew going in that the Parable of the Sower involved survival in a collapsing society, and I braced myself to read a dystopian speculative fiction set in the far future.
Imagine my surprise when I opened the book and read “Saturday, July 20, 2024.” I scrambled to look towards the top of the page. Surely this was forward written in 2024. After all, this book was published in 1993, and a new forward or editor's note written for a reprinting wasn’t out of the question. No. This was chapter one. I had somehow managed to start reading this book in the year that it was set. And I wish I could say Octavia Butler was off the mark for what 2024 would be.
Now 2024 isn’t as bad as the world Butler built, but it had enough eerie similarities. I started this book soon after the 2024 election before having to return it to the library then rechecking it out in January 2025. Butler's 2024 had a straw man president, absurd inflation, a canyon between the rich and the poor, of-the-chart violence, pollution, unhelpful police, useless insurance policies, racism, and distrust. Take that how you will.
Lauren Olamin lives in a neighborhood enclosed in walls and barbed wire put there to keep thieves and violence away. The wall has worked so far, but people are getting desperate. While the adults keep saying the country will go back to the good ol’ days soon (I swear I’m not making this parallel up). Lauren, at age fifteen, thinks things will get a whole lot worse. She preps for survival for when the walls will fall one day and journals her perspective of the world. She finds the truest things that she knows and creates her own scripture that she names Earthseed. Though if you asked her she would say she didn’t ‘invent’ this religion, she found it.
“God is change.”
When the walls do come down and Lauren loses her home, she sets of north and makes allies that may become the first followers of Earthseed.
I’ve read many books with a social collapse. This one felt the most real and possible, but so did the hope. Station Eleven is another speculative fiction with social collapse, and it shows hope in a different way. “Survival is insufficient”. Dawn by Octavia Butler is a foil. Humans are taken to the stars and the only way to go on is to change and wonder if they are too changed to be human anymore. Parable of The Sower doesn’t shy away from the atrocities that humans can bring, but it also shows how community can be built and change can be shaped.
This book inspires us to embrace diversity, uncertainty, and change. I can think of no better mantra for us living now in 2024 and beyond.
“A farmer went out to sow his seed.
As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up.
Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow.
But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.
Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants.
Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.
Matthew 13 3-8
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