Dystopian Horror Predictive of our Modern World

                          The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Nikolas Coukouma, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons

 This book was a choice for my book club. The book club randomly selected dystopia as its theme. I tend to shy away from dystopian novels, and although I know that her novel Kindred was very popular at a school where I taught, I never read any of her books. Interestingly, just as I started reading this book, there was a story on NPR about Butler mostly focusing on Parable of the Sower. It ended up being an excerpt from a show called Throughline that had a longer story on Butler’s life and influence on the new wave of Afro Futurist writers. After listening to the story and learning more about Octavia Butler’s life, I ended up enjoying this book much more than I thought I would. This was not a typical dystopian novel, although there are some brutal parts. In our book club, we talked about how in the beginning of the novel, within the first 100 pages or so, it starts to get rather bleak. One of the things, though, that balances this despair is Lauren’s Earth Seed philosophy. There’s also some kind of connection with space exploration that isn’t completely covered in this first book, but overall, I really enjoyed how she outlines and charts the evolution of the Earth Seed movement. It seems to be one of the main things that keeps her going and gradually attracts others along the way. Although some of the secondary characters are not well developed, this was an interesting quest/journey novel. I also appreciated the social commentary that Butler provides with painting such a dire portrait of what would happen if economic, job, race, and environmental concerns are not addressed. As I was reading the book, I couldn’t help but think about the influence of the LA Riots and the craziness of the early 90s. I actually thought the book was written much earlier, but it makes sense that it was published a year or so after the riots. Her description of the Freeway and Los Angeles in general sounded like what happened after the earthquake in the late 80s and the riots. It was also interesting to see some possible connections between Pyro, a synthetic and destructive drug that compels users to set fires, and the crack epidemic that plagued the US in the late 80s and early 90s. Although I was apprehensive to read a dystopian book like this, I really enjoyed it and felt that there were some amazing messages in the events in the novel.