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A review by thekarpuk
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
5.0
Even briefly looking through reviews of this book, I noticed a lot of people comparing this to our current political and social climate. I think books like these, about the world in decline, always function as a Rorshach blot from the reader. In general I think a lot of privileged people, in the back of their minds, never lose the feeling that the things they have could easily slip away, that the decline is coming for them.
Perhaps that's one of the messages of the novel, since the protagonist comes from a position of relative privilege, but not what most would consider outright wealth. To her it seems like the trouble is a thing looming on the horizon, but over the course of the story she encounters many people for whom these troubles have existed for years, and for some even a lifetime.
It would be easy for me, as a leftist white man of reasonable privilege to see the rise of fascism in our country, the looming crisis of mass homelessness, and the spread of crippling disease, and view it as something that could easily overtake us if we let it. But it doesn't take that much listening and reading to understand that these problems have existed for a lot of people for a long time. Minorities and the poor have been aware of police brutality for in America for most of its existence, the flu kills tens of thousands of people in America every year (many of those arguably preventable), and the US government has been overthrowing foreign democracies for a century.
Not to presume Butler's thinking, but it seems like part of the point of the story was that Lauren watched the privileged people around her act as though the bad things were coming, but stayed in a state of denial about it ever personally impacting them until it absolutely crushed them on arrival. The Parable of the Sower seems very critical of the idea that you can hold on to your privilege and just treat what happens to the rest of the world as theater.
I put off reading Butler for a long time, primarily because my first interaction with her work was Kindred, a book I didn't like on many levels. It's dialogue felt wooden, and its high concept premise felt unconvincing. It took reading this book to realize that Kindred was a poor introduction to her work, because the prose in this novel is so strong and the world so well realized that I'm tempted to immediately purchase the next book in the series.
And it was kind of shocking to realize it's an ancestor of a lot of fiction that I've read in the last few years. It seems like Butler inspired a sub-genre of fiction that I almost want to call post-expansion or decline fiction. It's less a dystopia or post-apocalyptic, the world simply gave up tolerating any further growth, and everyone is dealing with the consequences. I'm not sure how much of the work of Meg Elison or Paolo Bacigalupi would exist without Butler's work.
It's a powerful book and it's message is so timeless that people from many different eras will probably feel like it was written to predict their moment in history.
Perhaps that's one of the messages of the novel, since the protagonist comes from a position of relative privilege, but not what most would consider outright wealth. To her it seems like the trouble is a thing looming on the horizon, but over the course of the story she encounters many people for whom these troubles have existed for years, and for some even a lifetime.
It would be easy for me, as a leftist white man of reasonable privilege to see the rise of fascism in our country, the looming crisis of mass homelessness, and the spread of crippling disease, and view it as something that could easily overtake us if we let it. But it doesn't take that much listening and reading to understand that these problems have existed for a lot of people for a long time. Minorities and the poor have been aware of police brutality for in America for most of its existence, the flu kills tens of thousands of people in America every year (many of those arguably preventable), and the US government has been overthrowing foreign democracies for a century.
Not to presume Butler's thinking, but it seems like part of the point of the story was that Lauren watched the privileged people around her act as though the bad things were coming, but stayed in a state of denial about it ever personally impacting them until it absolutely crushed them on arrival. The Parable of the Sower seems very critical of the idea that you can hold on to your privilege and just treat what happens to the rest of the world as theater.
I put off reading Butler for a long time, primarily because my first interaction with her work was Kindred, a book I didn't like on many levels. It's dialogue felt wooden, and its high concept premise felt unconvincing. It took reading this book to realize that Kindred was a poor introduction to her work, because the prose in this novel is so strong and the world so well realized that I'm tempted to immediately purchase the next book in the series.
And it was kind of shocking to realize it's an ancestor of a lot of fiction that I've read in the last few years. It seems like Butler inspired a sub-genre of fiction that I almost want to call post-expansion or decline fiction. It's less a dystopia or post-apocalyptic, the world simply gave up tolerating any further growth, and everyone is dealing with the consequences. I'm not sure how much of the work of Meg Elison or Paolo Bacigalupi would exist without Butler's work.
It's a powerful book and it's message is so timeless that people from many different eras will probably feel like it was written to predict their moment in history.