I am writing this on January 9 2020.
The Parable books were written in 1993 and 1998, set to take place from 2024 to 2037, with an epilogue set in 2090.
I remember the nineteen nineties as mostly a good time, with the Soviet Union freshly collapsed and the whole internet thing just starting. The world was opening up. Yes, we were worried about the eco system, but progress was being made. True, we did not live in a world that was 100% fair for all, but when had we ever? Things were moving in the right direction.
Octavia Butler was less optimistic and more far sighted.
The dystopia that she describes as the future of Southern California is not only terrifying, it is much too close to present reality for comfort.
Warning. Plot spoilers.
In 2024 young Lauren Olamina grows up in a walled community that started as a regular suburban cul de sac, guarded by adults with guns.
Everyone grows what food they can. Extended families are crammed in together, two young married couples sharing a garage. Young generations have no hope for any improvement in the future.
Outside roam mobs of desperate homeless people, some honest but dispossessed, some hard core criminals and on scary drugs, all dangerous. Packs of feral dogs roam the hills. Police are both useless and corrupt. People inside cling to an illusion of normalcy.
Some families opt for a life of corporate servitude in fortified company towns.
Lauren is the oldest daughter of a Baptist minister and half sister to four younger brothers. Her father is a tower of strength and a community leader. Her stepmother used to be a teacher, and teaches the children of the community as well as she can without resources.
Lauren is an independent thinker. Her father’s faith cannot hold her. Instead her own thoughts lead her to create a belief system of her own: Earth Seed.
A combination of humanism and New Age thinking, Lauren’s religion postulates that the Universe and God are one. There is no personal deity to whom prayers can be directed. All is God and there is no God, though she uses different terms. God is change. God is both shaper and clay, in constant mutual interaction with the world. Man cannot live by bread alone. People need a purpose.
The purpose of humanity is to become Earth’s seed and go live among the stars. All her life Lauren works on the Book of the Living, poetic verses with a biblical cadence that form the basis of the liturgy of her new faith.
When Lauren is 15 her community is overrun and destroyed. She has known this day would eventually come. She takes to the hills with a
‘Bug out bag’ and joins the stream of desperate people who are moving North, where life is supposed to be better.
The rest of book 1 describes Lauren’s adventures on the road. People are encountered and a community coalesces around the young but charismatic Lauren. The book ends with the group finding a place to call home. One of the members just happens to own a secluded piece of land in Northern California. Hey, this is fiction.
The parable of the talents has a rather idyllic start. Life in the growing community of Acorn is tough, but so are the people.
In an interview Octavia Butler mentions how hard she found it to get her protagonist out of that village because she herself liked it so much.
In the world outside trouble is brewing. The desperate times have thrown up a fascist Presidential candidate. Andrew Steele Jarrett promises to bring back law and order, promote Christianity, and generally pretend it is the middle of the twentieth century, or even a bit earlier. His most fanatical followers burn witches. Wait till the end to see his slogan.
Eventually Acorn is overrun by thugs who call themselves Jarrett’s crusaders. The young children, including Lauren’s baby, are taken away and mostly never seen again. The chapters following the takeover are a harrowing description of slavery enhanced by modern technology.
After 17 months of horror they do manage to regain freedom.
The community is forced to scatter. Lauren takes to the road again.
She desperately tries to find her baby daughter. Sadly, by the time the two meet mother is in her fifties and daughter in her thirties, and the daughter is unable to form a relationship with her mother. Butler is a serious novelist, not a writer of Marvel Comics. Not all is heroism and happy endings.
However, all this time Lauren continues to preach Earth Seed, eventually succeeds and in old age lives to see the first starship lift off.
The description of possible near futures is so uncannily harrowing I could not put these books down. Are you ready for Jarrett’s slogan?
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.
Reader, I felt my hair stand on end.
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