Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

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Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Finished: 2025-08-03
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Thoughts: I enjoyed this, but not as much as I was hoping. This novel suffers from a common sci-fi problem, which is that most of the book is a setup for future sequels (that Butler never got around to finishing). The dystopian world of a collapsing America certainly has a prophetic quality, but I guess frustrating for me is Butler's refusal to engage in any kind of worldbuilding. She's no Ursula Le Guin, unfortunately. The politicians & movements that led to this capitalist dystopia are named only at the very beginning and the very end with no real insight or explanation into the broader context of the protagonist's journey. Instead, we get fortune-cookie level philosophy about the Earthseed movement and a lot of talk about the protagonist's hyper-empathy syndrome, neither of which I found particularly interesting to the events of this book as a singular dystopian work.

Highlighted

“The changes.” I thought for a moment. They were slow changes compared to anything that might happen here, but it took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change.”

“So?”

“Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”

It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.