Parable of the Sower

In the near future of the year 2024, Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a gated suburb of Los Angeles. Climate change and economic collapse have transformed the United States into a semi-wasteland of poverty and barbarism. Society exists in name only; peace exists only insofar as it can be enforced with high walls and guns. Corporations have started taking over towns, and there’s talk of slave labour employed in factories near the Canadian border. Everywhere in between, the unhoused and the desperate scrounge and kill for another day.

It’s miserable.

For Lauren, whatever misery she avoids by living within tall walls in counterbalanced by her hyperempathy, a neurological disease that causes her to physically feel whatever those around her feel. She has inherited it from her drug-addicted mother, long out of the picture. She has a grip on it most of the time, but woe betides confrontation with a would-be attacker: anything she inflicts in self-defence is inflicted also in self-offence.

Life changes from one day to the next. Lauren watches her once-secure neighbourhood come apart at the seams: first from within, as her brother gets involved with drug dealers on the outside—and then from without, when the neighbourhood is attacked by vagrants addicted to a drug that impels its users to burn anything they can get their hands on. Her home is destroyed and her family is slaughtered. She reconnects with a couple of survivors of the attack and with them casts off north, hoping to find a quiet spot to start anew, maybe where water isn’t so expensive, where life can be lived in a bit of peace. She also tentatively starts sharing with her travelling companions the foundations of a nascent religion—more of a personal philosophy—that Lauren calls Earthseed. It encourages self-reliance and self-determination and is oriented around the koan-like tenet of God is Change.

On her northbound way, she forms an unlikely community with a dozen or so others, gently preaching Earthseed along the way. Though they’re a bit of a motley bunch, they share a common abiding sense of inner kindness (and a healthy dose of commonsense strength in numbers). Lauren emerges as their leader and shepherds them through a few moments of serious peril.

And yet—for a world that we’re told hangs on the brink, and where the next peril seems always around the corner, Butler seldom puts her characters in the path of serious, imminent danger. The high points are never very high, but the lows are never particularly low, either. Lauren’s group is attacked—several times—but the action never seems serious, somehow; the baddies are talked down or chased off offscreen. At one point the group is nearly overtaken by a wildfire, and we wonder if one of the older or weaker members of the group is going to make it—but then the winds change and the wildfire moves off somewhere else. The world is full of peril and death comes nearly indiscriminately—just not for Lauren’s group ¹.

Lauren’s hyperempathy also feels somewhat unplumbed as a concept. It’s a fascinating conceit that should open the door to all sorts of interesting scenarios—but it mostly just plays as a reason to pan away from conflict resolutions. When attacked, Lauren fires her gun until she’s completely incapacitated by pain, and then catches up on the action on her recovery. I wish we’d have gotten a scene where her sharing helps her connect with someone on a level that no one else can. A couple of other sharers join her group late in the story, but remain feebly truculent through the final pages of the book.

Where the story shines, however, is in the details. Lauren’s observations of her travelling companions, the forethought into making it through the night, the offhand comments about toilet areas, or the price of water, or bathing—all of these make the world leap up and press on you. There’s a tense moment where the group is hiding from a firefight in the night, and a baby makes just enough noise to draw the attention of one of the survivors. The group watches the figure move around a burning truck, and look out into the darkness. The moment hangs with the distant figure and the fire and the whirling night all around. The texture of the world is grim but it’s very nearly tangible in its quality. It doesn’t feel like another world—it feels like ours. It feels like a few bad decisions could make it so.

1. This is not strictly true—one of Lauren’s group does die, but they’re not part of Lauren’s Core Team, and they’re mostly mourned over the course of a single chapter.↩︎