I just finished The Parable of the Sower, which was compulsive reading. When it was written in 1993, 2024, when the events recounted begin to take place, must have seemed far off in the future, and as we are nearly there, I realised the changes that have been brought to our world by mobile phones and the internet - I don't think any science fiction writer predicted those, and the world as portrayed by Butler seems out of kilter with reality as we know it. And yet... global warming, the lack of water (which in the book is more expensive than gas), drugs, guns, plain ignorance... there is a feeling this could become reality.

Lauren, the narrator, has been brought up in a religious household (Baptist) and is very preachy, planning a new, more secure future on a kind of religion she refers to as Earthseed, perhaps on another planet, and to my mind she goes on too much about God, God is Change. There is no place for God is Love in this 2020s world, all is self-defence, with guns, pillaging, drugs, arson, even cannibalism. As a result of drugs taken by her mother when pregnant, Lauren is afflicted with a condition she calls "sharing", or hyperempathy, where she feels the same pain as anyone she is confronted with, even the pain of death.

Attempting to escape from the mayhem and destruction of her home community, heading northwards (like everybody else, a river of refugees) she makes a nightmarish road trip, on foot, through California, joining forces with former neighbours, an old man, two girls rescued from a burnt-out building, and others. I liked the mix of ethnic peoples, their watchfulness, their wariness, their gradual knitting together. The last pages of the book do plant seeds of hope.

Parable of the Talents: Lauren (Olamina) and Bankole have had a little girl, Larkin. The community they have set up on Bankole's land has grown, and Olamina teaches her conception of Earthseed, culminating in Destiny which involves space exploration and settlement somewhere up in the stars. The theory of Earthseed is difficult to comprehend and even the explanations she gives to new arrivals in the community did not convince me, mostly because this mantra God is Change annoyed me more than anything. I wish she had forgotten about God and said Life is Change, or something of the sort, as her belief did not make sense to me, nor did the idea of packing people and seeds into a spaceship and sending them off to colonise another planet make any sense. (Consider the Earth. We are all interdependent and interacting, people, animals, plants, trees, insects, sealife, rivers, clouds, bacteria, everything has a purpose and a reason, even a mosquito.

This book is a collection of writings by Bankole, Olamina, Marcus and Larkin, put together in the 2090s. The Christian America government set up by elected evangelical president Jarrett, its spin-off group of raping, killing, pillaging, arsonist Crusaders in black tunics with white crosses on the front, and especially the slogan Make America Great Again cuts very close to the bone.
There is a lot of abject horror and heartache in this book. Butler was far-seeing.

Even though Olamina welcomes all ethnicities, isn't it strange that there is no reference to Native Peoples? I would have thought they would have been the best teachers for surviving off the land.

For such a beautiful publication - lovely jacket and slip case, nice paper, clear fonts - this book has a horrendous number of typos. It is as though it has not been proofread, or proofread by someone incompetent, perhaps relying on a spellchecker. Examples:
hoards (noticed twice) should be hordes
toucttleh (bottom p.136) should be touch
role call should be roll call
total some should be total sum
Pennsylvnia is missing the a
Olamina's brother dithers between Uncle Mark and Uncle Marc, Marcos and Marcus
nave should be naive
Numerous times, in words beginning with the letter l in midsentence, the l has been capitalized for no reason at all
Typesetting mistakes: misplaced hyphens; spaces before commas; many times, indented lines that should be justified at the right margin are not, and the following line has been indented when it should be flush left.
And these are only the mistakes I remember; there are others I've missed.

Just to take note of a coincidence: I have been reading in parallel The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, and yesterday came to a part where he mentions the Parable of the Talents (obviously not knowing what a talent was).Strange because it is not something that comes up every day. ( )

Over the course of these two books, Lauren Oya Olamina grows from a brilliant, determined teenager into the charismatic prophet of a hopeful human destiny in a violent and chaotic near-future California.

I found myself more interested in the ideas than in the story, which is grotesque and horrifying, but distant, unfeelable, like news of a faraway war.

But the ideas! "God is Change," Olamina says, but I think what she really means is "Change is God." That is, change is inevitable and implacable and irresistible. But also, "We shape God." Which is to say, we have agency; what we do meaningfully contributes to what happens next; we shape the future, whether intentionally or by default.

I have no interest in the intersteller Destiny of Earthseed, and I am not a deist. But I am very interested in human agency, in the possibility that we humans CAN steer toward life, if only we choose to do so. ( )

Somehow I wolfed this post-apocalyptic series down in a matter of days, even though we are in an apocalyptic feeling world already. I liked the first book better than the second. I thought the daughter’s POV in book two took away from the narrative drive (Is that a thing?) and she was pretty much a brat about her mother. I did like that it ended on a hopeful note and that queer people were included in the second volume. ( )

Another masterpiece by Octavia Butler.
An all-too real future world torn down by global warming and the people who try to survive. Delving into it all: politics, religion, race, and gender, she captivates with a new belief system. I have to admit, by the end, I was a convert. ( )

Very prescient near future novels that predicted the MAGA movement more than 20 years ahead of time. A bit too much emphasis on brother Marc in the second book for my taste, but overall very good. ( )