Earthseed: The Complete Series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents) by Octavia E. Butler

Open Road Media Sci-Fi and Fantasy, 2017

ASIN: B072NZBPFG

Available: Kindle edition

Editor’s note: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are also available individually in paperback and Kindle edition

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Horror is a very personal thing. What is terrifying and disturbing to one person may not be to another. Our reactions can also depend on the time in our lives in which we read it. For instance, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock left me thoroughly terrified because at the time I read it, my son, who was near the same age as the boy who disappears, was also obsessed with Minecraft. It hit far too close to home.

Having recently finished Octavia Butler’s Earthseed duology, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, I can tell you it also hits far too close to home. Parable of the Talents begins in a California town in 2024, with climate change and a lack of water causing weather to run out of control, particularly with earthquakes and fires, a federal government dedicated to eliminating regulations that would protect workers and the environment in order to benefit corporations, and an indifferent, corrupt local government that requires ordinary citizens to take survival into their own hands to protect themselves by arming themselves and building walls to keep out lawless murderers, drug addicts, thieves, and arsonists.

It’s behind one of these walls that fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina, who possesses hyperempathy (a delusion in which she feels other people’s pain when she sees it) begins to develop a religious philosophy that differs dramatically from that of her father’s (he’s a Baptist minister) and a belief that the end of their little community will come sooner than the other members believe. She’s right. The dangers of the world outside the walls escalates, her father has disappeared, and finally her neighborhood is burned and almost everyone in it is murdered. Lauren and two other survivors decide they will stay together and walk north, to find a safer place. The three of them must constantly be on the lookout, because no one can be trusted– almost anyone might rob or kill them for supplies or money, and there is always the possibility that they could be captured and sold to slavers or raped. Despite their caution, though, they end up inviting other travelers to join them on their walk north. Lauren uses the time of their perilous travel to work out and share her new religion, Earthseed. She believes that change is the only thing that is eternal, and that people can either shape change or be shaped by it.

By the end of the first book, many of the characters have developed solid relationships with each other, and under Lauren’s leadership, they choose to stay together to found a community based on her beliefs. It’s an optimistic ending to a book that contains some pretty terrible events– Butler does not pull her punches, and she is matter-of-fact about appalling things like cold-blooded killing, rape, and corpse-robbing– and the future she describes has aspects that seem all too possible. I read this book for a book group, and the violence and destructiveness were so overwhelming and close to home that no one else was able to finish it and actually reach that ending.

Still, if Butler had ended her story there, it would have ended with the possibility of hope. Parable of the Talents manages to pretty definitively stomp out the likelihood of any happy ending. In this book, a new president decides it’s time to “make America great again” (yes, in those exact words) by restoring a white, Christian nation with any means necessary, including sending those who don’t fit that definition to “re-education camps”. I can’t tell you much more about it without giving away the plot, but suffice it to say that it is not for the faint of heart, or stomach. Lauren’s community and chosen family are broken apart, and a great deal of time is spent on the search for their children. There is a frame story where Lauren’s daughter offers her perspective on Lauren’s writings, which make up most of the book, and it is terribly sad on all sides. This book was so difficult for Butler to write that, despite originally planning to make it a longer series, she ended it here.

I’ve never read any of Butler’s other work. She is a powerful writer with a prescient sense of the future here, but I wish it weren’t so bleak. While these aren’t her final books, she wrote them nearer the end of her career than many of the others that she is known for (Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, Parable of the Talents was published in 1998, and she died in 2006). One feeling I came away from this with is that as an African-American who had already lived through decades of oppression and violence, maybe she saw this as a logical progression of where things were headed, even then, as many white people (including myself) couldn’t have imagined the world she created as close to reality until the past few years.

Compelling, occasionally baffling, brutal, and hopeful for a better world, the Earthseed duology is well worth reading, but it’s not light reading. Expect it to stay with you long after you have finished it, if you can finish it at all.