Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
Lauren Olamina has survived the loss of her house and family in 2032 and has achieved her goal of creating an Earthseed-based peaceful society in northern California. With the election of an ardently conservative president who promises to “make America great again,” the fledgling community offers protection to outcasts who are being persecuted. Lauren’s subversive colony, a minority religious group led by a young black woman, becomes a target for President Jarret’s reign of terror and oppression in a country that is becoming more polarized and deadly.
Years later, Asha Vere discovers the journals of Lauren Olamina, a mother she never met. She struggles to come to terms with the legacy of a mother torn between her responsibility to her chosen family and her desire to guide humanity toward a better future as she looks for answers about her own past.
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
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The Parable of the Talents depicts that group’s demise and subsequent rebirth, albeit as a more dispersed and dispersed community. It starts off by introducing us to the manner in which the Earthseed community has developed and adapted to the ongoing social breakdown that is happening in the rest of the United States five years after the founding of Acorn, the Earthseed community, at the end of the first book. For a brief period, things in the neighbourhood appear to be going well, but there is a subtext of potential danger in the form of presidential candidate Andrew Steele Jarrett, a Christian hardliner who thinks that only a return to “traditional Christian values” will restore the nation to its former glory.
The reader gains a deeper understanding of both sides of the argument as a result of their interaction because Lauren is fighting against her own husband’s desire to uproot the family from the neighbourhood and relocate somewhere “safer” despite Acorn’s success, especially after she becomes pregnant. His fear of the future works directly in opposition to her inherent optimism. Religion and government are significant topics. It’s astonishing how Octavia E. Butler can make them sound so approachable; if only we were willing, to be honest with ourselves, the solutions to the arguments about “who’s right and who’s wrong” could actually be that straightforward.
