The Parable of the Sower - Octavia E Butler

A brilliant, prescient work of science fiction. Written in 1993, it depicts the world in 2024, and you'll be scared by the accuracy of this vision of the future.

I read very little science fiction, but Octavia Butler has been on my list for a while, so I was very pleased when this was picked for a book group. It's a bildungsroman set in a dystopia that seems eerily familiar. We follow Lauren, a fifteen-year-old living in California in 2023 as she confronts various losses in her family, discovers her life purpose, moves away from home, and makes plans to settle elsewhere.

Lauren lives in what would once have been a middle-class neighbourhood, and her father still teaches at a university. However, this is a society where the social contract has broken down. Lauren's father sleeps overnight at the university because it's too dangerous for him to travel back home in the evenings. Lauren doesn't go to school – it's not clear if all the schools have stopped operating or if it's too dangerous to leave their neighbourhood at any time – so she teaches the younger children. Like their neighbours, Lauren's family grow most of the food they eat because they can't afford shop-bought food, and they repair their own clothes because they can't afford to buy new ones.

Lauren is a thoughtful, reflective, intelligent girl who wants to make a difference to a community. She has thoughts of finding a new religion, Earthseed, whose god is change. She records her ideas about this religion over the years, and extracts from these thoughts pepper the text. When she leaves home, despite her age, she becomes the leader of the group of people who form around her and seek to find a new community.

After a slow start, I was really compelled by this book. First published in 1993, there are so many elements of the text that ring uncomfortably true to life. In addition to predicting homeschooling and the impoverishment of the middle classes, the book predicts water shortages, rising energy prices, rising homelessness, a drugs crisis (the homeless in the novel are addicted to Pyro, and some of the effects sound just like the effects of fentanyl), and climate refugees. I also read an article recently in the New York Times on tensions between businesses and the homeless community in Arizona that sounded much like the precursor to this novel, and the story does feel very much like a picture of where society could end up.

The novel also reminded me of a quote from a talk I recently heard (sadly, I haven't recorded the source). “We feel safe enough with each other and really, that's the root of civilisation”. In addition to all the problems listed above, people in this novel have stopped feeling safe with one another. When Lauren and a few other from her community leave their neighbourhood, they're very cautious and mistrustful of the others that they meet at first. However, Lauren has the gift (or curse) of hyper-empathy, and as someone at the book group pointed out, it probably makes her more open to others, and might be what encourages the formation of a new society.

This is an incredibly clever book with many different ideas woven seamlessly into the text. It is written in quite a dispassionate style (Lauren has been taught to mask her empathy, and it definitely comes across in her narrative voice) and might not appeal to everyone. However, there's so much to discuss so it's perfect for a book group or a buddy read. I'm hoping to read Parable of the Talents at some point over the next year.

What I've been reading this week

Now that the Olympics is coming to the end, I'm back into full-on reading mode, and I read or finished 6 books this week.

Let's start with The Slowest Burn by Sarah Chamberlain. This is an enemies-to-lovers story that becomes a friends-to-lovers, which becomes a friends-with-benefits, before the inevitable third-act break-up and romantic declarations. I feel like the author was maybe trying too hard to fit in too many tropes, but I still really enjoyed this. This is an ARC of a novel that comes out in September, so I'll be writing a review of it for Instagram.

I finished reading the Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton. My two favourite stories were the final books in the series (In the Fifth at Malory Towers, and Last Term at Malory Towers). There isn't really consistent character development in the series as such: the teenagers are just suddenly much more mature in the final two books, particularly in book six where they're considering their futures. I'll be writing about the series on Substack at some point in the future.

I also finished Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It's a novel in three parts and I read part one very slowly, then rapidly devoured parts two and three. Part one is an almost-anthropological look at a warrior-farmer society in an unnamed part of Africa, and it's very dry and detailed (it goes into who cooks what, who sits where, who gives precedence to whom, and so on). I found it a bit dull, although I know Achebe was writing in such detail because the society was going to be destroyed in parts two and three (you don't call a novel Things Fall Apart for nothing). And even knowing that things were going to go wrong, I wasn't expecting the ending to be so tragic. I'm not sure if I will post about this on Instagram or not as I don't really have a lot to say about it.

I also started and finished a very short memoir, Thin Deep by Sarah Mackie. It's only 115 pages, but it tells the story of Mackie's struggles with anorexia and bulimia, and how she eventually made a full recovery. It's a brilliantly-written book, but what I liked most was her clear and structured explanation of what she did to aid her recovery, and how to apply it if you suffer from an eating disorder – I think it's a facet that's often left out of memoirs on the subject. This is another ARC, which I'll be reviewing on Instagram very soon as it's just come out.

I'm continuing with The September Man by Christopher Sommerville, which I love. He writes so well about landscape and nature, even though he says he doesn't really have an eye to notice details.

And finally, I started The Time Machine by HG Wells as an audiobook from the Audrey app. It's a work of speculative science fiction that introduced the idea of the time machine (the notes to accompany the book said that prior to it, people had time-travelled through dreams or by suffering bumps to the head – a machine makes so much more sense). What I've found interesting so far is this was published in 1895, so before Einstein's papers on relativity, and yet the time traveller describes time as the fourth dimension of the universe, and of a piece with the dimensions of space. It's impressive that he was able to predict aspects of modern physics!

Have a lovely week. I'll be back next Sunday with some thoughts on a compilation of letters, Letters of Great Women.