7/20/2024 Parable of the Sower
I have not had the capacity to do much musing recently, but I must mark this particular day: July 20, 2024 is the date of the first entry by the main character Lauren Olamina in the book Parable of the Sower, written by Octavia E. Butler & published in 1993. If you’ve never heard of this foundational speculative fiction book, I cannot write a meaningful synopsis right now, but I recommend you read it & the sequel Parable of the Talents - with plenty of trigger warnings. These books are brutal, violent, & extremely prescient, describing in horrific detail a United States that aligns closely with our current lived reality. In fact, I have collected a few real life examples of this alignment:
Alignment with reality in 2024
Lauren said: “Tornadoes are smashing the hell out of AL, KY, TN, & other states. 300 people dead so far. There’s a blizzard freezing the northern midwest, killing even more people. In NY & NJ, a measles epidemic is killing people. Measles! People can’t afford immunizations, & those people are half dead already. They’ve come through the winter cold, hungry, already sick with other diseases.” Measles + tornadoes
Lauren’s dad foresaw debt slavery for the residents of Olivar, a company town based around a huge desalination plant on the CA coast - Company towns
US political leaders with deep connections to various “American Christianity” groups/organizations like the Council for National Policy (starting around 4 minutes into the video, description of “New Apostolic Reformation” a sect of “American Christianity”)
Butler’s fictional Christian American presidential candidate unnervingly uses the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ which seems unbelievably prophetic until you realize that this phrase was originally used before Trump by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 presidential campaign - like most speculative fiction artists, Butler is not predicting the future, but merely pointing out the cyclical nature of our history
I totally understand those who can’t or won’t spend their free time in heightened anxiety reading speculative fiction like this. If that’s you, all I want to impart on this notable day are some critical lessons from these books.
Earthseed (the religion & apocalyptic community-building strategy created by the main character) can be summed up like this: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
Quote from Octavia Butler in 1999: “The parable of the talents is one of the harsher parables of the Bible, but then, life can be harsh. We human beings will use our talents - our intelligence, our creativity, our ability to plan, to delay gratification, to work for the benefit of the community & of humanity, rather than only for ourselves. We will use our talents or we will lose them. We will use our talents to save ourselves or we’ll do what other animal species do sooner or later.”
Foreward to the 2023 re-print of Parable of the Talents by Akwaeke Emezi (another incredible author you should read if you haven’t yet!)
“As Butler wrote Parable of the Talents, she was not only looking at true things from her time but also following them along their path of least resistance, & now the things she wrote about don’t only exist in story or imagination. They are alive & here with us. I think about how evil is walking well-worn roads, how it is - if you’re paying attention - predictable. I wonder what it takes to put up resistance to this story so we don’t end up where Parable of the Talents takes us.”
Their friend “quotes a section late in the book, where the character Len asks Lauren, ‘If God is change, then who loves us? Who cares about us? Who cares for us?’ & Lauren replies, ‘We care for one another. We care for ourselves & one another.’ As my friend repeats those lines to me over the phone, they sound like a life raft in the burning ocean of this world. I begin to believe that this is how we might survive the unthinkable. If there was a map to surviving the fascist decline of this empire, it would be that we cannot do it alone.”