Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
In the early 2020s, social unrest caused by global climate change and economic issues will turn California into a dangerous place with widespread water shortages and hordes of vagrants willing to do anything to survive. Lauren Olamina, 15, lives in a gated enclave with her pastor father, relatives, and neighbours, shielded from the chaos outside. She has hyper empathy, and a crippling sensitivity to other people’s emotions, in a culture where any weakness is dangerous.
Precocious and perceptive, Lauren must speak up to defend her loved ones from the impending catastrophes that her small society stubbornly refuses to see. But what starts out as a struggle for survival quickly develops into much more, including the emergence of a new faith and a surprising realization.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
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The genesis narrative of Lauren Oya Olamina, who is unable of sensing other people’s emotions, is found in The Parable of the Sower. Her borders have truly disappeared. She has this illness and resides in a gated enclave as the world beyond the gated community progressively vanishes. People make a huge issue out of the fact that Donald Trump’s campaign anthem, “Make America Great Again,” was used by the president at the time. People view that as prophetic, but I think she was more emulating Ronald Reagan, who she utterly despised. In this society, police services are privately contracted. similar to health services. In essence, the middle class is extinct.
The Parable of the Sower is a masterfully crafted depiction of the world after the breakdown of western culture due to climate change. I refer to this universe as amazing in the sense that Octavia Butler created it made me genuinely wonder about it. This book succeeded in doing exactly what sci-fi books are meant to do—create in the reader a sense of disbelief and a longing for the future and what might lay ahead—while also tackling and overcoming significant issues like race and religion. I’d like to spend a good deal of time talking about racism in particular, but I’ll also go into some length about religion.
These are the two that stood out to me like a sore thumb and those I was most interested in writing about. There are many additional specifics and topics that could be discussed. Excellent and fascinating, this book is definitely worth reading more than once.
The tale Octavia Butler portrays is a gripping tale of community and survival. En media res, like a good futuristic novel, may, is how the book begins. Personally, I believe that providing too much background information might hinder the reader’s ability to invent their own, and it also hinders the author’s capacity to develop suspense and mystery within the text itself.
Butler does a fantastic job of presenting us with a compelling narrative without boring us with the specifics of society’s failings from the past. When reading, it is quite simple to adopt a young girl’s perspective, which makes it much simpler to assimilate all of the novel and occasionally perplexing material. The primary character and narrator of the book, Lauren, then continues to discuss the sense of neighbourhood she experiences in the walled “neighbourhood” she lives in.
Despite the obvious racial tensions present inside the neighbourhood, everything appears to be running like a well-oiled machine. The white residents of the community are divided from the other racial groupings. This makes a lot of sense given the racial tensions that still exist in the world today, but it was fascinating to note that Butler does not view a post-racial society as our destiny.
