Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, 1993
The suffocating power of this book isn’t just it’s total command of what our present was in the past, nor is it the harrowing and compassionate and gripping journey out of right-now. It isn’t that Butler will not let you forget how horrible humans can be to each other, or how quickly we accept becoming animals. Butler has mastered every detail and breath of surviving in a world not that far away from ours, but so much worse.
America two-steps into a reality of slavery, prostitution, rape and murder as a daily backdrop to the walled in cul-de-sacs left over and surrounded by the chaos of the majority poor. Every face is a thieves, but a thieves driven by desperation and unending hunger. But the most dangerous are the addicts killing for a narcotic which transmutes fire into an experience better than sex. And, so, they burn everything. All while wholesale and unpoliced murder rampages through the last illusions of civilization.
What makes this book so eviscerating is the Balanok, the much older lover to Lauren Olamida the protagonist and leader of a survivors colony as they daily escape robbery or carnivorous rape from fellow escapees heading north out of California to a larger disaster. It is a world plagued by climate change; it hasn’t rained in Los Angeles in six years. It is one where community is the sole means of survival, even if everyone you know is burned to death. We may pray that Ms. Butler’s vision is never realized, because she has put before us something terrible and perfect. And even on her last page’s salvation, you cut your finger on the inexorable finality
