Sunday Morning! Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

“Does the future have a future?” J.G. Ballard once asked. He was referring to the sleek and shiny automated “future” once promised in space age science fiction, which had seemed to have fallen into abeyance. Hopeful images of the future were increasingly hard to come by when Nixon was still in office, and seem downright quaint today. Oscar Wilde’s line about not wanting a map that doesn’t include Utopia because that is the land to which Humanity is always sailing, makes most of us snicker “good luck finding that!” The future can become outdated. Even if we hadn’t been misled into thinking our noblest impulse- the impulse to imagine better worlds- is somehow suspect, it still just seems so naive! We know better now.

Conversely, dystopias are having a real heyday right now, a trend thatshould continue into whatever’s left of our future. Our political campaigns now seem like dueling dystopias and the film versions of dystopia just seem like gritty realism. There’s no shortage of books and movies and other works of art depicting the grim times ahead; no doubt, we’ll soon be experiencing Dystopia Fatigue, even if we’re not quite living in one. It’s as if we’re steeling ourselves up for whatever’s ahead, planning for a trip.

Along with all the Twin Peaks watching, I’ve recently taken Veronica D’s recommendation and read Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, which is set in 2024, and has to be one of the most frightening dystopian novels I’ve read, for reasons I will explain in a bit. It is a very bleak picture of the… erm, very near future, that does have a deep core of hope- buried deep, but you can see it clearly, in the same way you can see a candle burn brightest in a pitch-black cave.

Growing up in Pasedena, California, Octavia Butler was always making up stories, often of a sci-fi bent. Her father died when she was just seven and she was raised by her grandmother and her mother, who worked long hours as a maid. As she explained in an interview:

I never told myself ordinary stories. I was never interested in fantasizing about the world I was stuck in. In fact, I fantasized to get away from that drab, limited world. I was a little ‘colored’ girl in that era of conformity and segregation, the 1950s, and no matter how much I dreamed about becoming a writer, I couldn’t help seeing that my real future looked bleak.

And yet, Butler was also someone possessed of a tremendous amout of will, intelligence, and imagination, which clearly helped. By the 70s, she was writing for a living; she is remembered today as one of the key SF writers of the second half of the 20th century and an influence on what has been called Afrofuturism. Hilton Als has also argued, it must be noted, that Butler’s fiction was a key influence on Beyoncé’s Lemonade.

Similarly, the heroine of this novel, Lauren Olamina, is a young Black girl stuck in a very, very bleak world, who will nevertheless found a new religion that will, we assume, eventually populate other planets. This planet, you see, is in a very bad way. Ecological catastrophe is an accepted fact, large corporations are privatizing everything and even bringing back the company towns of the early 20th century, unemployment is the norm, especially in the cities, and roving gangs of drug-addicted maniacs are looting and raping, enslaving and killing in any neighborhood that isn’t sufficiently protected. Lauren, whose journals make up the bulk of the text, realizes that the gates protecting her neighborhood won’t hold forever; while everyone else seems to be hunkering down, she’s preparing for the inevitable fight for survival.

What I found frightening about this was it’s a dystopia that doesn’t exactly announce itself as such, nor seem that far removed from the current reality. It’s a dystopia located right next door in other words. Usually, there’s a conceit with these “post-apocalyptic” stories: a war that went nuclear, a military coup, an ecological catastrophe. Here, it’s the most likely outcome of humanity not facing the problems that it’s… well, not facing. The sci-fi conceits- a drug that inspires pyromania, another that develops a sort of hyper-empathy in which people really think they can feel others’ physical pain- are only slightly unreal, and peripheral to the story. Mostly, the novel seems to ask “how do we keep hope in times when things are really messed up and broken?” and then taps us on the shoulder and adds, “incidentally, things are really messed up and broken at present.”

And this isn’t even getting to the 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents, in which a demogogue rises to power in the faltering America on a wave of vengeance and vague promises to “make America great again.”

Naturally, things do fall apart in this novel, as they tend to, and our heroine loses her family and has to fight to stay alive. It’s a grim and foreboding picture of the future; Butler’s straightforward prose renders everything as stark as a crime scene photo. There are little islands of hope though; Olamina falls in love with an older man, Bankole, and they lead a small group of survivors northward, to a family plot of land in Northern California, in hopes of founding a new community for the religion she’s been developing, Earthseed.

The religion is rooted in change:

“All that you touch/ You change.

All that you change/ Changes you.

The only lasting truth/ Is Change.

God/ Is Change.”

Olamina acknowledges the similarities to Buddhism; however, the point here is to act creatively with change, not passively accept it. Nor is the aim to “manifest” desired change, as in more syrupy New Age movements that assert we “create our reality.” Rebecca Solnit has noted the “solipsism” of this view: “a crass way of overlooking culture, politics, and economics- that is, realities are made, but by groups, movements, ideologies, religions, societies, economics, and more, as well as natural forces, over long stretches of time, not by individuals alone.”

Solnit was talking about Pragmatism, and there’s something very American about the Earthseed religion- a sense that we can’t control much in a world that is constantly changing, but with what we have, we can take part in that change and hope to influence it a little for the better. Maybe it’s too late to forestall dystopia, but hope is perennial in the human heart. And so, maybe we can’t make the future great again, but with work, it might not be quite so completely dystopian…

So, what are you reading, watching, pondering, playing, or creating this weekend?