Parable of the Sower
Year: 1993
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Length: 722 minutes / 12.03 hours
Even though it was written in the 90s, the premise of Parable of the Sower intrigued me because it was set in our near past of 2024. That its themes focused on the end of the world being brought about by climate change and wealth inequality was also eerily prescient enough for me to want to read how Octavia E. Butler thought things would play out in the “future.” Perhaps part of me wanted some amount of optimism; but ultimately, it’s just a depressing examination of current failures.
The first half of Parable of the Sower really paints a picture of some scarily accurate predictions for the state of society today. Even if people deny the effects of climate change, this book shows an even more extreme world that could be in our future if we do nothing to reverse it. Of course, climate change is really the exacerbating force that drives the wealth disparity present in this book into apocalypse territory. The depressing part of this book is how the only realistic solution is to give up and start over.
With the onslaught of awful things that happened in this book, it lost its entertainment appeal as the hits kept coming. Perhaps it was my desire for escapism—that it would give a way to fix these broken things that we currently have no control over—that ultimately wasn’t met. And while I agree the current system should probably be demolished and built from the ground up with empathy (or even “hyper-empathy”), I still think there are things we can also do to fight what’s happening. Even if this book predicted a lot of bad things , I hope we can work to make some good.
A gauntlet of eerily prescient bad news for modern times, I give Parable of the Sower 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
