PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Octavia E. Butler

READ JUNE 2020

This book was read in the original LAX LAB climate fiction book club, which was active between 2020 and 2023. 🕷

PARABLE OF THE SOWER |
Octavia E. Butler

1993
Seven Stories Press

“Change is ongoing. Everything changes in some way – size, position, composition, frequency, velocity, thinking, whatever. Every living thing, every bit of matter, all the energy in the universe changes in some way. I don’t claim that everything changes in every way, but everything changes in some way.”

— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993

Lauren Olamina is fifteen years old. She has hyper-empathy and experiences others’ emotions as her own. We meet her in 2025 in dystopian California, in a world ravaged by climate change and social inequality. The fortunate live in walled communities while the space beyond is marred by poverty, chaos, and violence. We join Lauren as she is forced to leave her community, setting off on a journey that will take her from Los Angeles and up the coast. Lauren’s odyssey is also a spiritual one as we witness the emergence of her new belief system called Earthseed.

Octavia E. Butler is a visionary science-fiction writer and a pioneer of Afrofuturism: a genre blending African culture with science, technology, and visions of the future. Her work has been hugely influential, inspiring other Black women science-fiction authors like N.K. Jemisin and artists like Janelle Monáe and Ava DuVernay. The book allows us to reflect on the connections between race, inequality, and climate change. Parable of the Sower may also inspire discussions on belief systems, emotion, human behaviour, and the destructiveness of capitalism.

“Everyone knows change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism's insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season …”), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom.” 

— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993

Further reading, listening, viewing

‘Octavia Butler’s prescient vision of a zealot elected to “Make America Great Again”’
Abby Aguirre, New Yorker, 26 July 2017

‘Why Octavia E. Butler’s novels are so relevant today’
Hephzibah Anderson, BBC, 17 March 2020

'Lost races of science fiction'
Octavia E. Butler, Transmissions, Summer 1980

‘People of colour experience climate grief more deeply than white people’
Nylah Burton, Vice, 14 May 2020

Octavia E. Butler
Gerry Canavan, 2016, published by University of Illinois Press

‘N. K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds’
Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 20 January 2020

‘Janelle Monáe’s body of work is a masterpiece of modern science fiction’
Aja Romano,  Vox, 16 May 2018

‘Read up on the links between racism and the environment’
Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 5 June 2020

Original LAX LAB book cover illustration by Emma Arnold, 2021