Parable of the Talents (original 1998; edition 2000)

I find the daughter of Lauren Olamina to be entirely unsympathetic and unlikable, which makes the power of Butler's writing clear to me. Butler's exploration of slavery, religion and love is, as usual for her, very incisive and not particularly easy reading. What's telling, for me, is how much less far-fetched this all sounds now than it did when it was new. Well done, albeit with more repellent characters than the first of the books. The narration was excellent. ( )

I gave Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" two stars a while back, and one of my criticisms of her book was that I didn't find her vision of American totalitarianism to be at all credible. For better or worse, I find Octavia Butler's portrait of a post-democratic America, a frightened, fragmented, environmentally degraded, economically depressed, religiously obsessed place, to be much more believable. It's not that I think that this future is right around the corner, mind you, but Butler's taken certain strands of thought that are already present our political dialogue and fashioned a truly frightening future from them. She even manages to imitate the way in which some on the furthest edge of the right use the language of inclusion to convey a message that implies division. Post-apocalyptic settings are everywhere in fiction, movies and video games these days, but the one is particularly subtle, and that makes it that much more frightening.

Butler's response to the fictional world that she's created here is also interesting. Earthseed, the commune or philosophical movement founded by Lauren Olamina, the character at the center of the book, proposes that in order to mature, humanity must literally reach for the stars: we must set our collective sights on the colonization of space. Butler's more concerned, I think, than the inner lives of her characters than with the particulars of space travel, but she makes an interesting point about the psychological usefulness of this sort of grand scientific project. Humans, she seems to argue, always need a horizon to sail toward, and science will be the boat on which we'll reach it. Butler's arguments reminded me of some of the arguments that rock writer Simon Reynolds makes in his recent "Retromania," in which he links a innovation in music with a culture-wide fascination with space travel and new technology.

Finally, I want to emphasize that "The Parable of the Talents" isn't just a novel of ideas, or a thought experiment in book form. True, like much speculative fiction, the book is light on what might be called "cultural detail," there are no songs or slang or movies or other cultural products that we, as readers, usually use to identify a book's time frame. There are very few stray bits of twentieth century culture hanging around here: in fact, Olamina herself suggests that society has reverted entirely to the technological level of the nineteenth century, if not earlier. Instead of making the book seem less-than realistic, though, it seems to emphasize its characters' personalities and the immediacy of the problems they face. Butler's narrative voice is clear and strong, an indirect third shaped by Lauren Olamina, a charismatic community leader turned new-age preacher working to revivify a post-Christian American society. She's a genuinely fascinating and often admirable figure, though the author suggests in an interview included with my edition of this novel that she took care not to make her main character too perfect. Still, it sometimes seems that "The Parable of the Talents" is held together by little more than Olamina's enormous will. Butler's a skillfull enough, as a writer, that she almost forces you to care about the members of the embryotic Earthseed community she describes here, and the descriptions of the psychological trauma that almost every character in this book is made to endure are often genuinely heartbreaking. In "The Parable of the Talents," Butler initiates an interesting and even necessary conversation about the ultimate fate of the human race by showing the frighteningly believable costs of refusing to participate in a larger discussion about we, as a species, are headed right now. Recommended. I'll be picking up more of Butler's work in the near future. ( )

Joanie Just Read ...... ( )

This is a really good book, love Octavias style! ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1960895.html

When I first read it, shortly after publication, the dystopian setting of a near-future USA torn apart by social conflict and religious extremism seemed a bit far-fetched; in these days of the Tea Party, Rick Santorum, the Citizen's United ruling and today's anticipated judgement on healthcare, it doesn't seem so unrealistic after all. I must say that the detail of the philosophical ideas of Lauren Olamina, the central character, rather sail past me - it's a compassionate, pro-technology belief system, which I think is all you need to know. But basically this is a story of a community carefully built and brutally destroyed, of bigotry and violence eventually overcome at huge personal costs. The humanity of the tale and the vivid detail of the setting are the ingredients which make it remarkable. ( )