A young woman with intriguing ideas about religion has to make her way across California with a destitute band of survivors after her gated community is destroyed. Not an optimistic view of our future, but a great read. Likewise its sequel, Parable of the Talents, in which all of the heroine's plans are destroyed and we lose a little sympathy with her.

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This book is riveting. It's the story, told by a hyperempathetic California teenager, of American society in 2024, about ten or fifteen years after ecological collapse.

We meet Lauren, the narrator, when she's about fifteen years old. She's a bright, contemplative preacher's daughter, who has decided that she has found her own God: change. The book is sprinkled with discussions of her beliefs, which she's named Earthseed, and free verse from her "Book of the Living". By her eighteenth birthday, terrifying new synthetic drugs and an "eat the rich" mentality have taken hold outside Los Angeles, and the American government has relaxed business laws to the extent that debt slavery has become more common than ever.

Lauren is a wise, clever, and sympathetic protagonist, and the world she inhabits is engaging and perhaps a little too plausible. I plowed through this book in just a few hours, always eager to find out what would happen next, who'd make it through to the next chapter, and what was on each new character's mind.

(One further note -- I know plenty of folks who require a touch of the fantastic in their reading. If you're one of those people, you may as well know: This is NOT sci-fi. It takes place in the future and there's one mention of an improbably tiny radio. That's all you get.) ( )

For once, I'm thankful that my imagination is not particularly visual—if it had been, I think I might well have found Parable of the Sower too difficult to read. Butler is unsparing in her creation of a dystopia which seems scarily possible; a world where global warming has devastated the planet, wreaking havoc with the water supply and causing near-total societal breakdown.

I enjoyed Butler's prose, which is elegant and vivid, and admired the thoroughness of her word building (world destruction?) but really only liked the book as a whole. The pacing was a little off, somehow; the first half of the book was very slow, and the ending felt more like a prelude than a resolution. I wasn't sold on the 'Sharer' idea, which seemed a little random and rather too mystical in a book so otherwise realistic. Similarly, I wasn't taken with the Earthseed religion which Lauren founds—to me, her ideas seemed much less deep and meaningful than they were intended to be, occasionally even a little hokey—and I was frustrated at not being able to tell if Butler intended for Lauren's beliefs to be profound or if she was deliberately making them somewhat naive. ( )

Octavia Butler was the best kind of sci-fi writer - the kind who use the futuristic or fantastic element, not to make something go boom for the sake of going boom, but to push the boundary, pick at the scab and say something amazing, and maybe a little scary, about our world.

This may not be a preachy book, but its certainly not subtle. Class warfare (literally), a ravaged environment, human trafficking - these are the things Lauren and the other characters in this book struggle with. These aren't easy things to deal with, but it helps that the book is beautifully written and ultimately hopeful. Butler's prose and the Earthseed poetry she's included are lyrical and compelling.

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A reread of Parable of the Sower reveals a dark vision of the near future that is eerily reminiscent of the pictures we all saw on TV following Hurricane Katrina, a frighteningly realistic portrayal of poverty and anarchy that is all too easy to imagine following on the heels of global warming’s devastation. The follow-up, Parable of the Talents, is even more grim and harrowing than its predecessor in its depiction of an America plunged into chaos. Butler deftly picks up the threads of the major issues facing us today — climate change, the widening gap between rich and poor, the privatization of education and social services — and follows them to the inevitably disastrous results if these problems aren’t addressed. Most frightening of all is the depiction of an America in the grips of Christian extremists who murder and enslave people and separate children from their parents, just because they do not hold the same beliefs.

But Butler’s story is one of hope too: of a prophet leading her people toward a better future, following a spiritual practice that makes more sense to me than most organized religions I know of, and of a goal — to sow the seeds of humanity throughout space — that I have always believed held the key to our survival as a species. God is change, indeed, but instead of fighting it or surrendering to it, just recognize it and use it to make your goals a reality. This message is contained within a work of fiction that paint a frightening picture of the future, but it rings very true to me. ( )

In 2024, Lauren Olamina is 15 years-old with hyperempathy. While living in a walled community in California, this Baptist minster’s daughter conceives of her own religion – Earthseed. A central tenant of Earthseed is that man’s future exists in the stars, where they can start over and found new colonies. Her isolated community lives in fear, and the adults live on their memories of what was. Lauren knows what was will never be again. Instead, humanity must start anew. When a drug addicted, pyromaniacal mob destroys her community and family, Lauren is forced into the hostile and uncaring world of transients. By 2027, she has become a leader and started sharing her religious ideas. Gradually, she and her ideas will become a nexus around which others will gather, and reap what she sows. Parable of the Sower, nominated for the 1994 Nebula Award, is written in diary format. The sequel Parable of Talents, a 1999 Nebula Award winner, follows the story of Larkin Olamina, Lauren's daughter.

In 2024, Lauren Olamina is 15 years-old with hyperempathy. While living in a walled community in California, this Baptist minster’s daughter conceives of her own religion – Earthseed. A central tenant of Earthseed is that man’s future exists in the stars, where they can start over and found new colonies. Her isolated community lives in fear, and the adults live on their memories of what was. Lauren knows what was will never be again. Instead, humanity must start anew. When a drug addicted, pyromaniacal mob destroys her community and family, Lauren is forced into the hostile and uncaring world of transients. By 2027, she has become a leader and started sharing her religious ideas. Gradually, she and her ideas will become a nexus around which others will gather, and reap what she sows. Parable of the Sower, nominated for the 1994 Nebula Award, is written in diary format. The sequel Parable of Talents, a 1999 Nebula Award winner, follows the story of Larkin Olamina, Lauren's daughter. ( )

A moving and inspiring story of a world in collapse and a young girl with a vision of community. ( )

This book is on my desert island list. Although it is not cheerful it is full of hope and truth and beauty. Despite the 1993 publication date, it looks disturbingly prescient today, 15 years later. Let's hope things things do indeed change, and not in the way Butler describes. ( )

There is so much going on in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower that I’m pretty sure I’m missing part of it. What a great book! Technically, there’s no apocalypse in the story, but the story is generally a post-apocayptic tale, and I like to sink my teeth into them. In addition, this is an aggressively multi-racial novel, perhaps the most so that I’ve ever read. I definitely brings a different feel to it than most science fiction, because the racial make-up of the characters is not in the manner of Star Trek, where it matters little to the story or the characters. In Parable of the Sowers racism is alive and well, and characters remember their own racial and cultural heritage too.

(Full review at my blog) ( )

According to the new religion of Earthseed, God is change, and the only thing that stays the same is change. In the post-apocalyptic world in which Lauren lives, acceptance of change is a valuable virtue and coping method. After her community is destroyed and her family is gone, she travels up north with a group of disciples, in a sense, to find refuge away from all of the destruction. In addition to the standard challenges, Lauren also has hyperempathy - she can feel the pleasure and pain of others, and there is plenty of pain to go around. Parable of the Sower is a very grim, but also very thoughtful, piece of dystopian literature, and a good read ( )

I'm rereading this now after having listened to it in audiobook format. All of Butler's works are good reads, but this one is a different kind of good. She powerfully narrates a young girl through the process of trying to survive and create a life for herself and her friends after an economic tragedy befalls the US. The girl, like Butler herself, comes from a family with a Baptist minister as a father. As the economy becomes worse and worse, she finds more and more that she feels alienated from her upbringing and inclined more towards her own form of faith--a belief in change as the only constant. ( )

A beautifully written, compelling, dystopian tale. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel. ( )

This was probably one of the best books that I have read this year so far. I enjoyed the main character, Lauren Olamina, and her understanding of the world around her. I've been describing it as a dystopian novel, rather than post-Apocalyptic book. There are still humans living in the United States, but living in communities that are under siege. Safety is nearly a commodity. Clean water and guns are hard to come by, and you have to keep watch all of the time. She joins up with people along the way, as she's traveling northwards.

The other aspect of this novel that was intensely compelling for me was Earthseed, the new "religion," or ideas of faith that Lauren discovers within herself. She wants to create a colony of Earthseed followers, to help bring the world some sense of balance. The ways that she describes Earthseed, and the snippets of "doctrine," or closest that there is in the book, are compelling, saying that God is change, and that change is inevitable, but also changeable and malleable.

Butler deals with issues of sexuality, race, and class in compelling and very subtle, but powerful ways. There is no two ways around the topics, as they are part of daily life for Lauren. But, the way she does them is so beautiful that all I could think is "I wish I could write that way."

The book gave me a lot to think about, was well written, and compelling. ( )

http://www.piruett.se/2008/02/21/bast... ( )

Actually closer to 3.5 stars. I liked this one a lot but I didn't like the whole sharer idea. It just seemed like a random sort of fantastic element that was thrown in. It was interesting but there didn't seem to be a purpose to it. Maybe that will all come out in the next book? I also thought the ending was too short. It could have been a complete book all by itself if the ending had been drawn out a bit more. Instead it kind of came off to me as a stepping stone to the next book.

The "Earthseed" idea of her starting a new "religion" to help save the country (world?) also seemed like an idea that up to this point was just filler or a focus for philosophical writing. So I'm hoping to see that better developed in the next book too.

She really does write dirty, gritty, hopeless, suffering very well and it was even better in this book because she didn't also have to fit in an alien cultures (Xeno trilogy) or mental powers (Survivor, Clay's Ark etc...). ( )

This book is the purported diary of teenager Lauren Olamina from 2024 through 2027. In writing about future America, the author said she wanted to "consider where some of our current behaviors and unattended problems might take us." The escalation of drug use, crime, corporate greed, global warming, the rich/poor gap, inattention to literacy all lead to a United States that has become "through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third world country." Burned out of her home with her family dead, Lauren sets out with other stragglers to find a place to live. They include Harry and Zahra from her old neighborhood, a young couple Travis and Natividad and their baby Dominic, abused sisters Allison and Jill, former doctor Taylor Bankole, and the former slaves Emery and her daughter Tori and Grayson and his daughter Doe. Lauren's survival instincts are impeded by "hyperempathy syndrome" caused by her mother's drug use: when she sees another in pain, she feels it also. The former slaves are also "sharers."

The dark vision of Butler's future America (which includes pyromania, parasitism, random violence, gang warfare, and cannibalism) is not without hope. Lauren starts a new religion - Earthseed - that says "God is change." God changes us but we can also change God; that is, one can in fact learn, adapt, and grow.

Lauren finds love with Bankole, a man one year older than her father had been. He has some land in northern California, and they all make their way there to start a new community that will "live according to Earthseed" - the essentials of which are for people "to learn to shape God with forethought, care and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and theselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny [populating other planets]." The group symbolically bury their dead, plant an oak tree for each dead family member, and decide to call their new community Acorn.

Butler ends with the Parable of the Sower from St. Luke 8:5-8:

"A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And others fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit an hundredfold." ( )

This novel scared me because it seems like our world is very close to becoming like this!

Disturbing images of violence and chaos in a futuristic America. Written in the format of a diary. This novel also challenges the virtues and vices of faith/religion. Octavia Butler is such a excellent writer. This suspense-filled page turner will have you reading late into the night.

READ READ READ READ ( )

I've read this at least 5 times. How does a religion start? Is a religion created, made up? Does it grow on it's own? ( )

Will have to try again later. Way too much too read right now.

I seldom read science fiction, but this book was excellent. Octavia Butler's recent, accidental death was tragic. We have lost an inspirational and thought-provoking writer who also created completely believable alternate worlds and who told a great story. ( )