Book: Parable of the Sower (originally published in 1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998)
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Review by: Penelope Prime, retired professor of business and economics and founder and director of Atlanta’s China Research Center
Vanessa, our daughter, introduced me to Butler’s books. I started with the Parable series, which is two books but was supposed to be three. I have read several dystopian books about the future of global destruction due to climate change and political dysfunction (read my 2022 review of Ministry for the Future in Global Atlanta here) and continue to think about how to deal with this reality in our own family.
I find it helpful, if not enjoyable, to ponder what the disintegration of society as we know it would look like. The Butler version is like others, but with a key difference: She predicted the context in which the U.S. now finds itself: a Christian Nationalist government, crime and looting that destroys communities without warning, many people hooked on drugs, people high, starting fires and shooting guns, and most unsettling of all, the slogan “Make America Great Again” as the call to change.
Wow. She wrote these books in the 1990s, and died at 58 in 2006, but she nailed it. A couple of researchers argue that she was able to think ahead in such a realistic way because she followed current events very closely, built clipping files from the papers on her key topics such as mega storms, and thought very creatively about what it all might mean.
Octavia herself says in interviews that science fiction allows for the open imagination—there are no limits or guidelines on sci-fi, which is one reason why she loved this genre.
The scholars also suggest that since Butler was black and from a poor family, she was better able to see society from the sidelines, and not from within a bubble, and this could have contributed to her ability to imagine these scenarios.
In any case, these stories have been helpful to me to see future worlds, none of which I like, but ones that I should think about taking seriously and be planning for.
I should add that the stories are a good read in and of themselves. They kept me engaged—I wanted to know what happened to the characters, many of which I hoped would survive.
Editor’s notes: Global Atlanta will receive a 10 percent commission on any purchase of this book through the links on this page.
Each year, Global Atlanta asks influential readers and community leaders to review the most impactful book they read during the course of the year. This endeavor has continued annually since 2010.
See last year’s full list of books on BookShop here and see Global Atlanta’s full store, featuring Reader Picks lists going back to 2013 along with lists of books we’ve covered through stories or author talks.
All books were chosen and reviews written independently, with only mild editing from our staff.