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)

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