Making Connections

Reflecting on Parable of the Sower

Illustration of a sunset by John Jennings in Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

Perhaps the most intriguing creation in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is the small community Lauren is able to bring together on her journey north. Throughout Parable, human cruelty is underlined; the domestic side of it seen in Lauren’s brother Keith, the governmental shown by corrupt police and politicians, and the societal in the violence of the unhoused masses. That Lauren creates a circle of people willing to trust and help one another is nothing short of a miracle, and almost a redemption for the unfeeling nature of her world. Actually, it may be more accurate to state that Lauren’s Earthseed community serves as a reminder that human cooperation is still possible, but this theme of redemption is present in the greater series of the Parables.

Professor Alexander remarked in his final lecture, Parable’s Rhetorical Circulations, that the final book in Butler's Earthseed Trilogy was going to be Butler’s affirmation of hope, a novel that was going to show that humanity could be still be redeemed after its terror-ridden history. This pressure to show a future of human integrity is what hindered Butler’s ability to write the novel and caused it to remain unfinished at the time of her death.

The focus on human behavior is central to her writing, making her what Isaac Asimov coined as a “social science fiction writer” (Alexander). This arc of moral decline and growth seen in Butler’s Parable of the Sower and ensuing novels is something that I’ve begun to notice in other works of speculative fiction. Though the genre explores a wide range of human behavior, this ultimate question of whether or not humans are morally redeemable seems to be the ultimate function of speculative fiction.

Collage of Parable of the Sower's different covers. Individual image credit: AbeBooks. Collage credit: Brianna Smith

Klara and the Sun and author Kazuo Ishiguro. Image credit: La Times

This is usually examined in fictional situations by a novum in the form of a new technology, power, or freedom, and how humans react to it. Common examples of this are the imagined interactions between humans and sentient robots, such as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun or the TV series Humans on UK’s Channel 4. The truly speculative part of these stories comes in how the unequal power between the two types of beings would play out, and how our history of prejudice, classism, and slavery come into play with beings we consider non-human. In both media, humanoid robots work as servants in the homes of privileged families, and are overall second class members of society despite being conscious, feeling individuals.

In the case of Humans, prejudice against the robots goes as far as physical brutality and murder, leading to questions of which type of being is more “human” in terms of morality. In Klara and the Sun no such violence occurs, but after years of tending to and loving her family, the android Klara is left in an electronics disposal dump once she begins malfunctioning. Though the victims here are robots, the cruelty shown by the humans asks the question of whether or not humanity will ever be able to acknowledge the multitude of identities under its umbrella. In summary, to answer if we are capable of moral redeeming ourselves to others.

Opening Scene of AMC TV series Humans. Video credit: AMC and Youtube

Video credit: Youtube and Zero Media. Image credit: Rotten Tomatoes

Much speculative fiction is pessimistic when approaching this question: no, humanity will never be able to redeem itself because everytime we are introduced to something new, everytime we get a new start, we find a way to make the worst of it. Almost every novum imposed by a speculative fiction creator leads to human chaos. Sometimes the novum is something that clearly has negative connotations, such as the supernatural disappearance of all adults in Netflix’s The Society, and Micheal Grant’s YA book series Gone. Think of these as offspring of The Lord of the Flies; predictably, the remaining teens and children become players in a speculative display of the concealed impulses of society and bring ruin to both their homes and morals.

Image Credit: Amazon

The novum can also be a neutral development of an intriguing new power or technology. In The Power, a novel by Naomi Alderman, young women develop ropes of skeletal muscle, or “skeins” over their collarbones that allow them to produce shocks from mildly painful to fatal. The results of this could be manifold; domestic abuse could rise or fall, a new energy alternative could be developed, there could be a rise in female leaders, and so on. Alderman’s speculative world considers this, and then decides that sexism would reverse in perhaps the most extreme way possible; women become the rutheless leading sex, terrorize men as the lesser gender, engender war, and cause such discord that eventually nation leaders begin nuclear warfare. In Alderman's novel, as well as in the previously mentioned Society and Gone, speculative narrative is used to claim that humanity’s potential capacity for cruelty outweighs its capacity for moral decency.

Cover of Naomi Alderman's The Power. Image credit: Good Reads

"I'm also comfortably asocial - a hermit in the middle of a large city, a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive."

Yet one can only take so much pessimism. Despite Octavia Butler’s difficulty with writing the hopeful conclusion to her Earthseed Trilogy, she understood that positivity and affirmation are invaluable. By simply reading the phrase, “a pessimist if I’m not careful” in her self description, and the motivational notes she wrote to herself, it’s clear that Butler pushed herself to appreciate the positivity around her (Alexander 6, Butler). Similarly, I believe that consuming speculative fiction that re-affirms our humanity is just as useful as that which disputes it.

Take Adam Silvera’s YA romance They Both Die at the End, a brilliant example of “social science fiction”. The premise of the book lies in the company Death Cast, a cooperation able to determine when a person has less than 24 hours to live and promptly alerts them so. The focus of the story lies in the relationship of two teen boys who know they only have one day left to live and meet over a friendship app. The two, Mateo and Rufus, spend the next twenty four hours trying to live their lives to the fullest, forming a friendship where they confess their fears, encourage the other to confront their flaws, and eventually fall in love. As the title suggests, they do not make it to the end of the novel. There is never a doubt that the story ends tragically, yet the novel is ultimately a hopeful one because it believes in the redeeming kindness humans can show each other in the most harrowing moments.

Image credits: Amazon, IMDb, and Good Reads.

Speculative fiction doesn’t exclusively focus on the world wide effects of its novum; oftentimes it questions the nature of our relationships, and whether or not we can salvage them. The novum, whatever it is, serves to test the durability of a relationship and often provides a resolution to entrenched conflict. In A24 Studio’s Everything Everywhere All At Once, the ability to travel within the multiverse is used to explore the generational and cultural conflict between Chinese mother Evelyn and her first generation American daughter Joy. Another speculative narrative, dystopian novel Station Eleven, seeks to reaffirm our ability to bond over art. Despite the destruction of society brought by plague, a group of actors, writers, and musicians come together under the belief that to make art is the most human of impulses, and can restore empathy in their world; again, showcasing the belief that humanity is indeed redeemable.

Most speculative fiction serves as a warning that should we continue on the path we are on, we shall eventually reach a future of unredeemable pain. There are a variety of media that express this, but the final example I shall use in this article is digital band Gorillaz’s 2005 album Demon Days. The fifteen songs comments on a range of topics including colonialism, the War on Terrorism, gun violence, and global warming. The interesting aspect of this album comes from the fact that the characters of the Gorillaz inhabit a fictional dystopian world beyond redemption and sing from this hopeless perspective; however, for listeners in the real world, the songs offer a warning: that our world is not yet doomed, and that we have the chance to combat our faults before they become beyond cure. While these dystopian warnings are pessimistic in nature, they also attempt to galvanize change because ultimately they believe we can turn things around.

Playlist credit: Spotify

Works Cited:

Alderman, Naomi. The Power. Penguin Books, 2016.

Alexander, Jonathan. “Parable's Rhetorical Circulations.” Humanities Core Lecture, 28 November 2022, University of California, Irvine. Lecture.

Arnold, Lewis, director. Humans, AMC and Channel 4, 2015.

Butler, Octavia E. “A Quote by Octavia E. Butler.” Goodreads, Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/411372-i-m-a-48-year-old-writer-who-can-remember-being-a-10-year-old.

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. Graphic novel adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Abrams, 2021. ISBN 9781419754050.

Grant, Michael. Gone. HarperCollins, 2008.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun. Vintage International, Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2022.

John, St. Mandel Emily. Station Eleven: A Novel. Vintage Books, 2015.

Kwan, Daniel and Daniel Scheinert, directors. Everything Everywhere All At Once, 424 Studios, 11 Mar. 2022.

Silvera, Adam. They Both Die at the End. Harper Teen, 2017.

Spotify. “Demon Days Album.” Spotify, Gorillaz, 2005, https://open.spotify.com/album/0bUTHlWbkSQysoM3VsWldT.

Webb, Marc, director. The Society, Netflix, 10 May 2019, https://www.netflix.com/title/80197989.

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