I want to talk to you today about Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. This book is from the early or mid-90s (somewhere in the 90s!) and I’ve heard about it for three decades, but I’ve never gotten around to reading it until now.
Part of the reason is (shame on me, judging a book by its cover) the cover that’s traditionally been printed on Parable of the Sower. Every time I look at it, even now, I’m thinking, “What is that supposed to be?” That is the least engaging image ever. I get it’s supposed to be symbolic, but especially when we get talking about the book, you’re going to see that it makes no sense. But for me, I was always like, I don’t want to read it. I don’t care. It just does not look like my kind of book.
I heard Butler was great over and over again, especially when I recently published my top 20 science fiction books for literature lovers list on Substack. A lot of folks wrote in and said, “Hey, what about Octavia Butler? Parable of the Sower?” So I finally gave it a shot.
The Story
Octavia Butler is giving us a near-future story, a pre-apocalyptic vision. She wrote in the 90s, but it’s actually set right now—like in the 2026-2027 kind of timeframe. So that’s kind of eerie (but fortunately we’re not in the state that she has in the book!)
This is the story of a girl whose name is Lauren, and she lives with her family in California. (I think it’s in Los Angeles, but you can correct me if I’m wrong on that.) And they live in a walled community, but it’s not like the elite sort of “communities” we have today. It’s like, holy crud, we need walls to keep out all the danger.
Because in Octavia’s version of the future, street gangs run rampant. Drug-induced crazies kill people. There’s death in the streets. People still have jobs, they still pay their utility bills, but things are just falling apart. Even in Lauren’s little community, thieves hop over the walls and steal their crops, break into houses and murder people, things like that.
Lauren feels things are not getting better. She wants to get out. And she’s heard that up north, maybe in Washington, maybe in Canada, things would be better. So she decides that she wants to leave (eventually) and starts making plans for that.
Slight spoiler alert (though I don’t think this will ruin your enjoyment of the book at all): Lauren was right. She should have gotten out because her community is attacked, houses burnt, people killed, everything robbed… So she’s forced to actually leave and go north to find someplace better for herself. And it’s dangerous out on the highways and byways of future California.
I’ll leave the overview at that. It’s a bleak, bleak book. This is not a happy read. There’s very little humor, the events are serious and a couple of them are kind of disturbing, so keep that in mind if you’re kind of the squeamish sort; you wouldn’t enjoy this very much. But that’s kind of par for the course with dystopias written for adults.
Engagement
When I judge a novel’s quality, I have two fairly simplistic criteria. One is engagement: how much did it pull me in, keep me reading, entertain me, yes, but also just plain old draw me along with the characters, the story, the plot.
This other part is meaning. For me, it’s really important to have something more than just an entertaining story. I want something meaty that I can think about; I can see that the author’s got questions they’re trying to struggle through, they’ve got a vision of the world they’re trying to convey to me as the reader.
Parable of the Sower does one of these okay and one, in my mind, does not fare very well. (Butler fans, get your fingers ready on your keyboard to tear me apart in the comments, because there’s going to be a couple things we’re probably going to disagree with on this book.)
What it does well, I think, is engagement.
Lauren’s story, which is told through her journal entries, is engaging. I found her generally likable and sympathetic. I liked her family, her dad, her stepmom, her brothers. She meets some folks when she hits the road, and I like them too. I was worried about them all. Plus the world itself was fascinating and disturbing, as I said before.
So the experience was actually pretty darn good. I liked it and do not regret reading this book at all. And if that’s all you want out of a novel is a “good read,” bleak as it is, this would fit the bill.
It doesn’t reach “great” in my mind, though, because the writing is so... Well, this is commercially written with minimum attention to language. That’s not a bad thing, but for me a great novel has to be well-written and intentionally worded. The prose has to somehow sparkle—be strange. Something! I don’t want it so crazy that I can’t figure out what’s going on, of course (I’m just a normal guy, not a college professor or anything like that), but Sower was pretty flat. It explained events. It told how people felt. And that was good because the story was good. But other than that, it really didn’t do much.
I did make some excuses for it in my mind a few times, wondering if Butler was getting into character by writing that way. Like I said, these are journal entries from Lauren, who’s a 17-, 18-year-old girl. So maybe Butler was trying to write “simply”? And as the novel goes on, Lauren is kind of unemotional in many ways, so maybe this writing style would also fit her personality?
But honestly, I didn’t really care. Like, okay, it may fit, but it doesn’t mean that it’s great. There could have been other ways that Butler could have written it with more flair and interest.
Now, she did try to elevate the writing through the introductory passages to each chapter, in which Lauren was writing passages for the religion she was creating, called “Earthseed.” (And I’m going to talk about that more in just a minute.) There was a bit of each in the beginning of each chapter, but even those weren’t all that fantastic, poetic, or anything like that. They were okay. Kind of standard fare in my mind.
So... good novel, interesting read, but not fantastic for engagement.
Meaning
Now for meaning. This is where I really felt like Parable of the Sower was a bit lackluster.
When you read a dystopian or an apocalyptic novel, you expect to see something that you can take away and think about. How can we prevent this? What’s going on in our society that we can fix or work toward? What does the author see as our big problem? And for this one, set in a near-future America, that seems like it would be a no-brainer.
Butler gives us a laundry list of awful things happening. Everything from the government being ineffectual to our institutions such as police and firefighters, ambulances only working for pay. They don’t come right away. They might even shake you down or do awful things.
And there’s climate disaster because it won’t rain; chemicals are in the water. There’s roving packs of dogs who attack and kill people. There’s this drug—a drug culture gone wild—with a drug called “pyro” causing people who take it to burn places and people and things; they get high off of seeing the flames.
And there’s racism (of course).
And there’s corporations that take over entire towns and basically treat people—they plain old say it in the end—like slaves.
So there’s this huge list of horrible things going on in the world. And how do we fix that? Like, is this a warning to us that we need to fix all these things? Everything?
The meaning of the novel seems to be that we need to come together as a community despite all of our differences and do the best that we can. We saw this in the beginning with Lauren’s walled community. We see that with some small towns in the book. And then in the very end, it’s outright stated that’s what needs to happen. There are no guarantees because things could still fall apart, but that’s still what we should do.
So really, not much is made of that terrible future other than to say be careful (and be scared).
The part where I think Butler is trying to elevate things is with Earthseed, which I mentioned before. Lauren was raised by her father, a Baptist minister, but early on she very clearly says she doesn’t believe in any of that. There’s no real reason given as to why, which is kind of interesting. It’s just sort of taken for granted she doesn’t buy into it.
And she says she’s discovered that “God is change.” Her religion (Earthseed) is all about God not being personal, benevolent, a divine being or ultimate power. She says we must contend with ultimate reality, which for her is mere change.
Now, when I was about 18 I would have been all over this. I was huge into pop Buddhism, removing yourself from the world and “detaching” because everything is going to change and suffering is the ultimate reality. All those kind of ideas. Back then I probably would have really liked this… but I have the same objections to it now that I came to see when I ultimately converted to Christianity. But even before then I realized that the “God is change” idea is really pretty vapid.
Because think about what the moral imperatives rise from saying “God is change.” It basically means that impermanence is all there is. So why love? Why care for? Why strive? I mean, even sheer survival: you could say we have an instinct for it, but if somebody dies you could also shrug and say, well, they died… God is change, right?
Butler doesn’t (quite) go that far in this book, and I will give her credit, as she does not have everybody take to Earthseed hook, line, and sinker. Some characters go, “This is too simplistic.” Some even roll their eyes. At one point, a character said, when Lauren started talking about it, “Ah, not this Earthseed shit again.” (I have to admit, I cheered when that happened in the book. I was like, Yes, exactly!)
To Butler’s credit, again, this could be Lauren figuring it out. She’s only 18, she doesn’t have a great belief system yet, she’s just latching onto whatever she can in order to help her survive, even this kind of “principle” vs a true religion. And that’s well and good, right? Again, good characterization, just with the simplistic framework.
But it’s not very satisfying as a reader.
Especially—and this is mind-blowing—the book is called Parable of the Sower, (!!!) and the last lines are the actual parable itself from Christ. But all it’s used for is this idea that, well, we should go out and “plant seeds,” plant new communities, and try and do better, so hopefully “seeds” fall into rich soil.
And that’s really just implied, it’s not even said. The idea of God being a permanent, ultimate good is never grappled with in this book. Not even dismissed. It’s just plain old ignored. And to me, that was a huge fumble.
Contrast what I just said about Parable of the Sower with The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which is even bleaker than Parable of the Sower (if that’s even possible.) But there, the whole idea of permanence is worked through, not to mention love being the great uniter and keeping the “fire,” of struggling for relationships and hope,—all while using a lot of biblical symbolism.
Actually, okay, now I’m really getting on a roll: how about Steinbeck’ Grapes of Wrath? The Joads are kind of similar to Lauren, in that their home gets “demolished” and they need to go out and figure it out on the road, create a new home for themselves somewhere else (ironically in California.) But on the way, they discover we must care for other people in a deep and even spiritual way, not just how Lauren is saying it. We get Tom Joad giving his famous speech about whenever a child is hungry, I’ll be there; whenever somebody’s waiting for supper and they know it’s waiting, I’ll be there. (etc.) He’s become everyman. Plus in the end, Rose of Sharon breastfeeds a dying man? (!!) This kind of intimate, even shocking scene—that’s how much the caring for somebody else happens.
So my point is just that I really felt let down with where Sower ended up. I was excited that maybe it’s going to give some deep themes, but really it’s just one level deep, namely: we should care for other people because bad things can happen all the time, and life is impermanent, and change is going to occur.
That to me just was pretty unsatisfying.
And I haven’t even talked about one of the most interesting plot devices in the book, and that is that Lauren has a condition, I believe it’s called “hypersensitivity,” or “hyperempathy” (something like that). She just calls it “sharing,” because she’s biologically able to feel the pain and pleasure of other people. That’s a really interesting aspect of this book, and as for plot, it increases the tension tenfold because the world is so terrifying and there’s so much pain everywhere that Lauren is always in danger of being crippled by other people’s pain. Even when she defends herself and ends up harming someone, she feels the pain right back.
As a plot device, as part of engagement, that works out really well. It increases things and makes it more interesting—but circling back to “meaning”...
“Sharing” could be a huge element in Lauren’s development, yet she treats it like it’s a disability, which you can understand. But being able to empathize and feel what other people feel should inform her entire worldview, including Earthseed. There are a couple times that people mention things about it, like, “Boy, that seems like that would make people nicer if everybody had that,” but Lauren would always go, “No, you don’t wish that other people have this.” She even takes it so far as saying that’s a reason some people become enslaved, because they have the condition—because it’s easier to control them.
So instead of going somewhere really interesting and positive, it just becomes sort of an asterisk plot point. And that’s about it. Again, I felt like that was another real missed opportunity.
Final Thoughts
I’m pretty sure if you’re a Butler fan, right now you’re shouting at what a rube I am for not seeing something greater. I just don’t. And I even afterwards tried to look for some videos (from college professors and other people) who would talk about it because I thought that I had to have missed it. Did I miss something?
Nope.
I didn’t see anybody say anything more—including Butler herself. I watched some interviews with her, and she pretty much just explained it was a warning. And yes, it harkens back to kind of some Buddhism and some African beliefs and things like that. But really, that’s it.
Good read. Not amazingly deep.
I would say that it’s okay. I would recommend Sower to others, sure. I’m not saying it’s a “bad” book at all. But it’s just a bit disappointing, and that’s about it.
All right. So now that I have that off my chest, I guess I’ll end there. And (as always) I would love to hear what you thought about everything that I just ranted about! Prove me wrong—I’m open to revising my opinions.
