EDIT: This post previously misattributed quotes to the Camden mayor, which were in fact made by the Director of the Camden County Board of Commissioners.

Negative review time! It’s time for a negative review!

I never write negative reviews—I mean fully negative, not just a mixed bag—because I rarely finish books that I really dislike. And then if I do, I don’t want to waste even more energy writing about it. But Parable of the Sower is beloved and lauded, and Octavia Butler is basically canonized by the current crop of SFF writers, so I think a full review is worth my while and yours. Maybe it will shed some light on common failings in dystopian lit, maybe it will make other people who disliked this book feel less insane, maybe it will just be fun!

There will definitely be some spoilers, if you can spoil something that is already rotten.

Introduction

Parable of the Sower is narrated by Lauren Olamina, a young girl living in Orange County, in the year 2024. The United States is collapsing into poverty and lawlessness, and is backsliding into oligarchy, all apparently driven by global warming. Things start bad and get a lot worse. Strike that: things start bad for Lauren’s last-gasp-of-the-middle-class enclave, and get a lot worse. For the poor, the misery is pretty abject from the very beginning.

The book has two major parts, about equal in length. In the first half, when things are only bad, Lauren is preparing for the worst, and trying to get her community to do so as well. This preparation mainly entails making bug out bags and reading books about foraging, first aid, etc. Also she wants to start a religion, “Earthseed,” which recognizes change as the only God, and as a fundamental force which people must accept and work through. She develops this religion, writing its holy verses, in secret.

In the second half, her community has been obliterated, and she travels north with a few survivors, hoping to find somewhere they can resettle. They join a mass migration north, and occasionally add new members to their group. Lauren starts to share Earthseed with them. They are attacked multiple times.

Also Lauren has a psychosomatic hyper-empathy condition triggered by the apparent physical sensations of others. It’s not plot-relevant or theme-relevant, and it’s barely character development-relevant, so I will not mention it again.

That is the basic story-shape of the book. There is a sequel, I haven’t read it.

What’s really strange is that this book is not good any way you turn it. With books I dislike, I can usually see the element that people enjoy in them. I cannot see it here. It fails, or is at most subpar, on all counts.

Let’s start with the loftiest of traditions which this book attempts to engage, which is societal critique. This is generally how this book is framed when people describe or recommend it—a cautionary tale of where we’re heading, or (jerk off motion) a prescient vision of where we are!! Oooo!! Octavia Butler warned us!!! (jerk off motion)

Gun-Bearing Freaks in a Society of Lawlessness

Okay so the basic problem is that Butler’s vision of dystopia and societal breakdown is bog-standard prepper crap, a world where everyone is out to kill, rob, and rape everyone else. The cause of this breakdown is scarcity, caused by global warming. At least, that’s what the reader must surmise—for a cautionary tale*, the book actually does not bother to weave much of a connection between its dystopic future and the time it was published. But the gist seems to be that climate change means less food, and less food means a descent into a lawless all-against-all struggle to survive.

Rather than focusing on the people most affected by this scarcity, Butler instead focuses on Lauren, who lives in a middle class walled neighborhood. Obviously it is a very precarious middle class, but her father is a professor and her mother doesn’t have to work and they own their house, so that’s what I’m calling it. Their main problem is not that they’re unable to afford food, but rather that their food keeps getting stolen by poor people.

This sheltered perspective is presented uncritically, for the most part. Once Lauren is outside the walls, in the second half of the book, she has a few moments where she reflects on some things she took for granted, and how she might have acted differently if she’d been born less fortunate. But mostly the book is just uncritically appealing to the reader’s fear of poor people, particularly homeless people and addicts. The idea that Lauren’s neighborhood might make some mutually beneficial relationship with the miserables outside is not mentioned, it is not even within the book’s imagination.

And that’s understandable, because the poor are just an undifferentiated mass of misery and violence. They have no community, no organizations. They do not work in coordination, they do not help one another except in very small two- or three-person groups. This is not only unimaginative, it’s just plain unrealistic. Power vacuums, where everyone is just out for themselves, don’t exist for long before someone takes over—a protection racket, a military organization, a cartel, kinship groups, something should coalesce to provide stability and organize resources. Instead, we get a pornography of violent chaos, Hobbesian anarchism, which lasts for year after year after year! The only people capable of practicing mutual aid, or forming any stable transactional relationships, are these walled middle class neighborhoods and, later on, our precious genius baby narrator who has been forced to condescend to the poor people, as she begins her Earthseed community.

Butler gestures at the existence of company towns and gangs, but they are not meaningfully present until the very late part of the book. They certainly have no presence in the cities.

Even worse than her vision of extreme poverty is Butler’s vision of addiction. Addicts in this book serve as pyrotechnic zombies. They are shocking nightmare humans who take a ~~~crazy future drug~~~ which makes them paint their bodies and set things on fire. It’s the same shit as with the food scarcity: the scariest thing about food scarcity is that poor people might try and steal your food. The scariest thing about addiction is not that you might become an addict, nor is it the pain of losing a friend or family member to addiction, no, the scariest thing about addiction is the threat of stranger addicts who act like Mad Max psychos.

I don’t know how anyone can laud this book as a societal critique, as dystopically visionary, when it just completely writes off the humanity of drug addicts in order to have an unlimited supply of convenient terror, enemies that our heroes can murder with sparkling clean consciences. Very compelling for readers who are afraid of homeless people and cities. Very compelling for readers who fantasize about murdering home intruders.

Very fucking embarrassing that anyone socially progressive would sanctimoniously recommend this, call it prescient, call it brilliant, powerful!! It is just the typical conservative nightmare vision of life in cities! If I search “Kensington” on Twitter, I can find people spouting off apocalyptica just like this about Philly—what do I need this stupid book for?

Look, just a few weeks ago, following a shooting which injured a child, the Director of the Camden County Board of Commissioners said: “We just want to send a message to the thugs and criminals and gun-bearing freaks over in Philadelphia who live in a society of lawlessness—we don’t want you here. Stay out of Camden. Stay out of Camden County. Stay out of New Jersey. Keep your barbaric behavior in Philadelphia.” (Source.)

And here is Lauren Olamina, about her brother’s desire to go to Los Angeles: “For reasons that make sense to him alone, he’s always wanted to go to L.A. Any sane person would be thankful for the twenty miles that separate us from that oozing sore.” (Chapter 10)

Butler you hack, get better material!

I think the reason people drool all over themselves talking about this book is just presentism. They see connections to current circumstances and instead of thinking about what might have inspired Butler in her time, they canonize her as a prophet-saint. But in reality it seems she was just reading sensational crime reports in tabloids or something, I don’t know.

*Butler herself used this phrase in a talk at MIT in 1998—”This was not a book about prophecy; this was an if-this-goes- on story. This was a cautionary tale …” It seems that the “book” is Parable of the Talents, but it’s a little ambiguous. She discusses both in the talk.

Just Covering My Bases Here

Now, apocalyptic/dystopic books do not have to operate in a realist mode. Giving the book the benefit of the doubt, could this be read as more poetic, lyric? Could we generously assume that the crazy addicts are intentionally heightened to a level of absurdity?

No. We can’t. Or if we do, the book is failing spectacularly—the prose is just adequate and no more, the imagery is cheap and bluntly delivered.

These aren’t actually faults though, because the book is operating in a realist mode, not engaging with the surreal/unconscious/whatever.

Gunfights and Campfire Talks

So, putting aside poeticism, societal critique, putting aside any kind of artistic vision, is the book at least entertaining? The Walking Dead books present a similarly cynical and retrograde vision of humanity, but I enjoyed those as compelling drama. John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar has really nothing to say about urban unrest or race, but the characters are interesting, the style is flamboyant, I mean that book moves, man!

No, Parable of the Sower is not narratively compelling either. That slack, amorphous portrayal of the poor, homeless, and addicted makes everything arbitrary. Whenever the plot needs it, Butler can summon forth a raid of psycho drug addicts (astonishingly, they are the only group outside the walls that seems capable of working in mass coordination.)

So all the meaningful action of the book has to be internal. In the first half, this means interactions between the inhabitants of the walled neighborhood, especially members of Lauren’s family. This part actually functions well enough, about which more later.

In the second half, this means interactions within Lauren’s fledgling Earthseed community. The second half does not function. It proceeds at a plodding, regular pace, alternating between scenes of violence and interpersonal interactions. Already I would say this is a meathead way to write an apocalypse book. Butler makes no effort to dramatize foraging, wayfinding, cooking, or exchanging information. At one point they’re at a market buying a gun, and the haggling is just summarized, we don’t even get to see it play out! In the first half of the book Lauren goes on and on about how they need to prepare, need to develop survival skills for when they’re inevitably forced to flee their neighborhood, but apparently only one skill is worthy of full scenes: gun.

This deadening drumbeat of gunfights and campfire talks is structurally uninteresting, and the content of the scenes is just as bad. In the scenes of violence Lauren’s group is attacked, or saves someone from being attacked, and may add the rescued victim to the group. The violence, as I said, is arbitrary. Butler can conjure thugs or hapless victims out of thin air. So those scenes are tedious.

In the interpersonal scenes, Lauren makes suggestions about the group’s next course of action, or talks about Earthseed. These interactions are never contentious. No one ever strongly disagrees with Lauren, no one rigorously challenges her on Earthseed. Disagreements usually conclude with something to the effect of, Well, we’ll try it out at least.

And there’s so much potential for conflict! It would be so easy! The group could fight about letting new people into the group, or about their decision to set one member’s farm as their destination. How about the fact that Lauren, just 18 years old, is hooking up with a man three times her age? That’s a weird, complex dynamic, and that complexity could be dramatized by having her argue about it with someone. The group’s coherence ensures their survival, so any disagreement that threatens to split the group has instant, built-in stakes.

Instead, we get a podcast.

Narrative malpractice!

To make my point a little clearer, I’ll talk about the one part of the book that I found really compelling—Lauren’s relationship with her younger brother, Keith. Keith is hot-headed and over eager to get his hands on a gun. Part way through the first half of the book, he gets in a big fight with his father, and runs away. But he keeps returning, in secret, to deliver ill-gotten cash to his family. Lauren is one of the few members of the family he visits.

Keith’s story is compelling because Keith actually pushes back against Lauren. He represents a counterpoint to her vision of Earthseed, to her desire to help out their neighbors, and so both characters come out in higher contrast in their scenes together.

He’s also our first vision of a person living outside the walls. He has humanity, he’s a real person, not a painted ghoul. Although Lauren is disgusted with his thieving and killing, she still loves him—she loves and hates him both. Their relationship is difficult and irresolvable, and, thus, far more compelling than her relationship with any of the members of her group in the second half of the book, which all follow the same course of timid pragmatic trust giving way to lukewarm friendship.

Misc. Pot Shots

I’ve basically said my piece at this point, but I feel I should quickly take some pot shots at Earthseed itself. We get verses from Earthseed: The Books of the Living as epigraphs throughout, and in the second half of the book Lauren starts explicitly discussing her ideas with her fellows.

Pot shot one: How ironic that the founder of this religion which deifies change does not, herself, have to change one iota throughout the course of this book. Her circumstances change, but Lauren is never really tested, never forced to give up some principle she once thought unshakable; she’s never tempted, never succumbs to temptation; never has to change her plans, her plan of fleeing north works out perfectly.

Pot shot two: It’s all well and good to say change is God, change is everything, embrace change, but the thornier aspects of this are never addressed. E.g. If one person wants to keep traveling around forever, and their partner wants to settle down, who is embracing change? The person traveling is changing their location constantly, but never changing their way of life. The person settling down may be profoundly changing their life, but also seeking a false sense of stability. This is tricky stuff! Does Earthseed grapple with this? No, because it’s a throw pillow religion.

Pot shot three: The more communalist aspects of Earthseed are presented as a revelation, as some inspired insight from Lauren—but projects like this have come and gone throughout the entire course of human history. Lauren has no interest in engaging with the past, in locating herself within a tradition. She doesn’t even bother to build on compatible aspects of Christian thought, and her father is a preacher! This is understandable because Lauren is a child. She’s a know-it-all. This didn’t really bother me, because it’s realistic—that’s how kids are, and often they do know more than the adults around them.

The problem is Lauren seems to truly know it all. Her assumptions are never challenged, her plans are never thwarted. Nothing she insists on ever ends up causing problems for others because she got something wrong.

And the adults around her never question her. They just let her assume this leadership position, they don’t try and impose their own ideas or expertise (with the exception of the member whose farm they end up going to, who suggests they go to his farm.) Given how limp and shallow Earthseed is, and how generally unremarkable and uncharismatic Lauren is, the only logical conclusion is that this is a group of adults who are willfully abdicating their responsibility and indulging the artistic-philosophical delusions of a teenager, because they can’t be bothered to make decisions for themselves.

My final diss against this book is that it is not even doing anything innovative or new for its time. It was published in 1993! Climate change as apocalyptic engine had already appeared in books by John Brunner and J.G. Ballard. As for the combination of new age spirituality with sci-fi, Le Guin and Dick beat her to it by a few decades. It is cool that the book is about a black girl, and that her race is relevant but not instrumental in the plot—that strikes me as uncommon. But otherwise, this is not one of those books whose enormous impact has made it seem contrived now. It’s just not good, at all.

Conclusion

My best guess is that the praise heaped on this book is actually owed to the sequel. When people talk about the parable books, and what happens in them, they mainly mention plot developments from Parable of the Talents. In the foreword to the 2019 edition of this book, N.K. Jemisin does not write about Parable of the Sower specifically, but both books, and the storyline she holds up as exemplary is from the second book.

So I think it’s secondhand praise, backwash adulation.

More cynically, it may be that the book is so beloved because of that middle class perspective, because of the familiar apocalyptic shorthand. Lauren is respectable, smart, kind, tough, infallible, easy to root for. The villains are hateful, rapacious, or totally inhuman, easy to fear. Dystopian pap, but because it’s by Butler you can delude yourself into thinking it’s brilliant, prescient, etc.

Anyway the book sucks. My guess would be that the sequel is better in terms of narrative vigor, but equally lazy and incurious in its vision. I can’t say though, I haven’t read it, and I will not.

I had hoped to be able to recommend this book as part of a trio of Orange County dystopias, the other two being A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick and The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson. Books about how it sucks to live in Orange County in the future, haha. But it turns out this book isn’t any good, so you should just read those other two. (Of course Robinson’s book is actually part of his own Orange County triptych, but his other two are post-apocalyptic and utopian.)

Yeah read A Scanner Darkly if you want a dystopia featuring addicts who are often horrible and exquisitely human; read The Gold Coast if you want a dystopia about young people just living their lives in a shitty world—I wrote a full review of that one here. Listen to We Shall All Be Healed by the Mountain Goats for a soundtrack.

Don’t read Parable of the Sower though, it stinks. Intellectually bankrupt, ideologically retrograde, narratively incompetent. 👎