Given the frequent headlines about wildfires, flooding and record heat, Octavia E. Butler’s vision for 2024 in Parable of the Sowerseems more prophetic than ever.
The novel, published in 1993, depicts the consequences of another three decades of climate change and an economic collapse and an even wider gap between the wealthy and the poor. Fires burn out of control, for example, because drought has made water too scarce and expensive. Even if water was plentiful, there is no one to put out fires anyway. Climate change could be considered a character in the novel about 15-year-old Lauren Olamina’s struggle for survival.
The author, recipient of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards and a MacArthur Fellowship, said in a 1995 interview published in Literary Hub that she wanted to look at the possibilities of global warming.
“Right now I see a fairly grim future. In my book Parable of the Sower, I wrote that thinking about the future, thinking about the things that we’re doing now and the kind of future we’re buying for ourselves, if we’re not careful. That isn’t prophecy, I hope,” Butler said.
In the book, Lauren founds a religion, Earthseed, which centers on the idea that “God is change” and aims to establish life on other planets.
Interest in the dystopian story has resurged in recent years. Parable made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2020. In 2021, NASA named the Mars landing site for the Perseverence rover the Octavia E. Butler landing. In 2022, FX released a miniseries, Kindred, based on Butler’s book of the same name.
In January, The Washington Post ran a story with the headline: “A 1993 dystopian novel imagined the world in 2024. It’s eerily accurate.” The Atlantic ran an article “How Octavia Butler Told the Future.”
The nonprofit newsroom The 19th, featured a podcast featuring an interview with Dr. Ayana Jamieson, an educator, mythologist and depth psychologist and founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, which is committed to highlighting Butler’s life and work.
In the podcast, Jamieson highlights a key theme of the book that resonates today: the inevitability of change.
“…anyone who wants to maintain the status quo even when it’s not working for everyone, they’re going to suffer the consequences of their inaction and inability to accept change. And I think that’s what we are experiencing in this political moment,” Jamieson said.
In this way, Parable of the Sower and the following book in the series, Parable of the Talents, foretell the consequences of resisting change. Parable of the Talents even has a character who is running for president on the campaign slogan “Make America great again.”
In an interview published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Butler was asked: “Are you optimistic about humanity’s long-term survival?”
“I am, but it probably has to do with faith more than anything else. We probably will have some very hard times ahead, just has we have had some very hard times behind us, but probably we will survive at least as long as we have already. I don’t see us as destroying ourselves entirely. Something else will probably have to do that. We are liable to bring ourselves right up to the brink on one occasion or another….I don’t see that [climate] bringing us to the brink of extinction or anything like it. It’s just going to make for an enormous amount of misery and death.”
NOTE:
Palwick, Susan and Octavia Butler. “Imagining a Sustainable Way of Life: An Interview with Octavia Butler.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 149-158.
Comments