PRODUCER NIK VS PARABLE OF THE SOWER

This week, Nik takes a trip through a parched post-apocalyptic California, as Octavia E. Butler shares her vision of the future from more than three decades ago. How well does her Parable of the Sower hold up? Perhaps better than any of us would like.

Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding social chaos and anarchy caused by climate change and economic crisis. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy—a debilitating sensitivity to other people’s emotions.

Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith…and a startling vision of human destiny.

Title: Parable of the Sower

Author: Octavia E. Butler

Genre: Post Apocalyptic Fantasy

Pages: 368

Format: Paperback / eBook / Audiobook

Published more than three decades ago, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower feels all the more prophetic when reading it during the time period in which the narrative takes place. Faced with rising average global  temperatures, widespread drought conditions, and social inequality spiraling out of control, it’s challenging to read this book as anything more than a Cassandra-style warning that met with the same results as those from the Trojan princess, cursed by Apollo. It feels as if there was far too little that was fantastic in this post-apocalyptic fantasy tale, beyond the affliction suffered by Lauren and her fellow hyper empathetic fellows.

Living in the relative shelter of a gated community, Lauren grows up with the knowledge that the world outside her walls is a strange and dangerous place compared to what it was for the previous generations. Food, clean water, and the essentials for survival grow exceedingly expensive, and gasoline has become such a luxury that its scarcity has circled around to the point that it’s fundamentally worthless. In the world outside of her gated community, people have given in to barbarity and predation, taking what they can from those too weak to hold it and spreading destruction in their wake. Those too weak to fight back are forced to become slaves or victims to the whims of people stronger than them, until they become more of the nameless dead left to decay or be devoured by wild animals or equally wild human beings.

Amid this nightmare that is all she’s ever known, Lauren believes in something different from her father and his congregation. She has witnessed a new face of god. Her god is change, and if enough people come together, they can shape this god and—through god—reshape the world into one of compassion and community. But will she survive long enough to plant the seeds she hopes will grow into the nourishment of a new and better world?

As with other less far-fetched tales of oncoming ecological disasters, Parable of the Sower is almost painful to read. In these pages, we see the failings of our modern society and those who cynically make the decisions that adversely impact the population for the sake of generating short-term profits. We witness good people turning a blind eye to what’s happening, content to keep their heads down as they wait for the mythical day when things go back to normal, certain that they are helpless to do anything for those who are in worse circumstances than their own. All through the tale Butler weaves, we repeatedly find ourselves confronted with the banality of evil, even from those who are not—by nature—evil people. Yes, through it all, we also see hope. We witness the kindness and selflessness of the few, and in the fictional California portrayed by Butler, the other fantasy may be that those few would stand some chance of shifting the balance and turning the tide of devastation and death that seems all but inevitable.

In the end, I have to hope Butler’s belief in the better nature of humanity is accurate, because we’re steadily drawing closer to a world that far-too-closely resembles her post-apocalyptic landscape.

Nikolas P. Robinson is an avid consumer of books, movies, and television, especially where horror, science fiction, and fantasy are concerned. When he isn’t consuming media, he’s creating it as an author, photographer, videographer, and news producer in Portland, Oregon.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing. Thank you for understanding.