Speculative media presents a world barely apart from our own—maybe temporally, maybe dimensionally, or in some other way—that so closely resembles ours that it serves as premonition. Usually, speculative fiction intends to either warn us of what may come, and steer us onto a more righteous track, or to hope for the world presented, and invite us to figure out how such a world might actually come about.

Parable of the Sower comments heavily on the interplay between imperialism and neoliberalism, which use identities like race and gender to uphold hierarchy. We get an explicit example in the work's discussion of company towns—when an international conglomerate announces its partnership with an incorporated city to bring jobs and resources, our main characters immediately recognize the move as a seizure of land and power over people. The company preys on economic downfall for its own profit, and it seems inevitable that the town will become a rent trap.

However, there are subtler signs of hierarchy at play. I found Keith's masculinity especially interesting. Even though he is born into a walled world, presumable with fewer gendered icons than we have in ours, Keith adopts the idea that men should be well-versed in firearms and are better suited to protect women than the other way around. We get the sense that the community may have formed an echo chamber of gender, as while there is less gender marketing, the residents still hold gendered beliefs, and some gendered differences are evident, like women being at greater risk of assault outside the walls. Later, Keith's masculinity seems to consciously guide him to his demise. The reader watches hopelessly as, spurred by an urge to be a man, Keith leaves the walls and gets involved in danger that eventually leads to his death.

We realize that the masculinity was not a catalyst, though—Keith pursued his particular activities because he wanted to help his family, especially his mother, Cory. Additionally, his death represents a potential boon to society: his key could have been used to open the neighborhood and pull their capital and wealth into the open economy, and his labor stimulated the (presumably) drug and crime businesses. There was capitalist utility to his death. Capitalism, too, becomes personified as tricking Keith, through masculinity, to contributing to the market. His family realizes this upon his death. Though he left seeking profit, and did indeed share some with his family, they see that it was not worth the risk of his life. In this situation, everyone is betrayed by the promise of wealth, Keith most of all. Though he is conspicuously portrayed as Judas the traitor, with his continual kisses to Cory, Keith is actually the victim of a larger traitor system. We turn our blame away from Keith and onto capitalism.

The response is clear: communism. Or, in the book, Earthseed. Lauren's triumph at the end of the work is the establishment of Acorn, a commune in which residents provide for themselves as much as they can, attempting to resist the influence of the outside market. Actually, Lauren's original neighborhood functioned similarly, and we saw harm done to it upon interaction with an export economy when they revealed their poultry products for sale to outsiders and inadvertently invited increased theft. Now, with more complete control over her community, Lauren wishes to maintain an internal scope, prioritizing safety and sustainability, seeing stability as essential to creating a well-functioning society.

Parable presents the reader an uncanny parallel to the real world, and in fact most aspects of the work exist very closely in real life, while the rest are unlikely at worst. Butler urges the reader not only to avoid the future that could be Parable, but to break out of the present that is the work. Lauren provides a solution to Jean Baudrillard's comment that "We’re in the postscript of a history or a political economy in which we’re dealing with the waste products of two centuries of capital and production". Lauren, given the opportunity to start a commune from scratch, aims to avoid the capitalist waste products that mar the rest of her world.