Rereading Parable of the Sower in July 2024 – the month/year that the book’s timeline begins – is an unsettling experience. If this vision of a dystopian future felt disturbingly possible in the 1990s when it was written, now it feels scarily close. In the world of Parable, in the midst of a slow collapse of societal organization that isn’t fully explained but which most certainly involves the impacts of climate change, corporations, racism, and misogyny persist but most infrastructure and services are wholly out of reach of most people. Butler’s work demands that we engage with so many pressing, urgent realities and Lauren Olamina’s Earthseed asks us to envision other ways of being and living, futures of freedom and mutual aid guided by a God we create and shape. I am ever grateful to Octavia Butler for these works. 

Content warnings: rape, sexual assault, violence, murder, death, death of a parent, death of a child, child abuse, grief, gun violence, animal death, cannibalism, torture, addiction, racism, sexism, misogyny, slavery, human trafficking, fire / fire injury, injury detail. This book is not easy to read.