Recent Reads : Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

Without particularly trying to, I seem to have stumbled into a rut of reading apocalyptic fiction lately. When Octavia Butler died recently, I was prompted to pick up one of her novels and read it. I had heard of her for years, but did not actually pick up one of her books until now.

As suggested above, it's apocalyptic in tone and substance, but it's a different kind of apocalypse. Each of the books I mentioned while discussing Califia's Daughters recently is based on the premise that some externally-generated catastrophe -- a nuclear war, a super-potent plague, etc. -- brought civilization crashing down.

Butler eschews such drama in favor of a much darker and more disturbing prospect. In her story, civilization is not overwhelmed by massive wars, natural disasters or fatalities, but simply withers away through lack of any organized will to sustain it. The dystopian nightmare she proposes bears some resemblance to the America being brought into being by the policies of the modern-day Republican Party and the "shrink government until it's small enough to drown in the bathtub" theories of Grover Norquist.

The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is the daughter of a preacher who has organized a group of families into a walled, protected community while all around them, public services and infrastructure have, over the years, decayed into rampant corruption and functional collapse. The ultra-rich live in their barricaded fortresses; the corporations have fortified compounds; the poor live a hardscrabble, animalistic life of violence and starvation amid acres of burned-out building shells and collapsed highways. The middle class, already reduced to living in communal groups like primitive villagers, is being, quite literally, exterminated through lack of economic opportunity on the one hand and constant violent assault by desperate thieves and deranged drug addicts on the other.

Lauren, due to the prenatal effects of an experimental drug that her mother took, is cursed with the gift of hyperempathy, the ability to literally feel others' pain. This, and the stresses of the increasingly desperate life she's forced to live, push her to develop a philosophy, or religion, upon which she hopes to found a new kind of society. Personally, I found the "Earthseed" passages in the book, which describe her poetry and philosophy, to be the least interesting and least compelling, although the inconclusive ending of the novel suggests that a community founded on these principles may be the subject of a sequel. I was fascinated by the nightmarish disintegration of society as depicted by Butler, and her characters' attempts to ward off disaster and survive. Perhaps I'm just a Philistine who prefers tales of Thrilling Adventure! to gentler philosophical explorations of more positive prospects.