Hanging by a Thread: Apocalypse in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

I'm obsessed with post/apocalyptic fiction. Perhaps the Puritan sermons that I obsessively read during my Masters program sparked my interest in the possibilities of the physical (and as many Puritan writers argued) the spiritual worlds being thrown into lawless chaos. Maybe we are all hanging by a thread as John Edwards argues...

Some science fiction seems to gravitate towards more pessimistic versions of apocalypse--Atwood, Dick, and Gibson all envision worlds where people have lost many of the liberties we currently take for granted--enslaved to corporations, richer folk, and our own dependence on body and mind altering materials, these versions of the future feature destruction, devastation, and a wanton disregard for autonomy or "free will."

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (2000) begins in a similar way to these other authors' stories. The year is 2024 (July, actually) and the United States has fractured along state lines. Government rule has all but disappeared.The environment has wreaked havoc on the geography as well as the food and water supplies. In California, walled communities serve as some of the only protection against hoards of urban poor (sounds sort of familiar huh?). Lauren, the protagonist, lives with her brothers, step-mother, and father in one such small "gated" community. However, as the narrative progresses, outsiders infiltrate their walls more and more frequently and their crimes become increasingly violent and brutal. Eventually, Lauren comes to understand that her community will face a moment when it will no longer be able to protect itself. Before that time, Lauren advocates preparing for evacuation and for change from the life that many of the adults in her community delusionally hold onto.

Change becomes the impetus for Lauren's creation of a new religion called Earthseed. Earthseed recognizes that change is perhaps the only thing that humans can count on to happen with regularity: "the only lasting truth is Change. God is Change" she writes in Earthseed: The Books of the Living (3). Perhaps blasphemous, Lauren's religion recognizes the importance of community, preparedness, and "making a new home among the stars." Earthseed does not worship God; they "learn from God" (17). Through adapting to change (which God is correlated with), they yield (and honor) God. Because the earth has been devastated ecologically and economically--its former communities all but destroyed, the military and government impotent to enact all but martial and tyrannical order--Lauren creates a new religion that recognizes humanity's various predicaments and offers practical solutions to them.    

Themes that are familiar from Butler's other books arise again in this text. Questions regarding mixed race relationships (Fledgeling and Kindred) and slave-master relationships hover at the periphery of this "road" tale. Slavery has once again become common. Laborers are exploited--given company script rather than actual money--and in debt and spiraling downward. The urban poor and refugees have little in the way of bargaining power with this government-like businesses. Corporations are beginning to take over walled communities, and as they do they cut off entire populations from the outside world. Lauren realizes that many of these "Utopic" or at least "safe" spaces are screens behind which bodily exploitation of many forms takes place.

Because this text is set in the future, and because neurological modification is a common futuristic trope in sci-fci, the drugs that people take tend to work in ways different from the illegal substances that we have today. Lauren's mother becomes addicted to a "smart" drug called Parateco while pregnant with Lauren. This drug resulted in Lauren's "hyper-empathy" syndrome, which makes her so sensitive to others' pain and suffering that, as a child, she bleeds whenever she witnesses others bleeding (12). Lauren's "hyper-empathy" sets her apart from many of the people that she encounters on her sojourn to the North, after her community is destroyed. Both a gift and a curse, she is able to keep a tight reign on her emotions, yet shooting and killing people causes her to die along with them in a physical--it not literal--sense. Parateco is a neurological enhancement drug that works on memory, executive functioning, emotional sensitivity, and sexuality (she can also feel physical pleasure), yet its unanticipated side-effect is that it can render children of users all but unable to defend themselves against physical attacks. In a world as deeply violent as the one Lauren inhabits, the effects of Parateco are fatal in a cruel and protracted way.

Pyro, which is the other drug, also works on pleasure and pain receptors, but in opposite ways. Hyper aggressive and drawn to fire, users feel sexual bliss when they encounter fire while high. Bald, painted, and animalistic, users tend to crash into rich settlements, burn everything to the ground and murder and rape their victims. Afterward, scavengers flood in to pick the bones of the charred community clean.

Butler's world is a frightening place indeed. Cannibalistic 12-year-olds, and pyromaniacs, roam the roads and forests. Slavery has once again become legalized and socially acceptable. Everyone is a potential threat--the weakest-seeming and youngest often the most dangerous--rape, murder, and gun battles follow the travelers (Lauren and her group) everywhere they go. However, unlike other versions of apocalypse, the earth is not entirely dead. Life is everywhere Lauren and her community walk: deer, dogs, fish, even cats run through the woods. Stores still exist--albeit in fortified states--where consumers can do their laundry and buy food products. Life, Butler tries to show us, goes on in spite of the terror, in spite of the lawlessness. And Lauren is at the center of what becomes an emerging movement aimed at recuperating humanity and rebuilding the world.

A number of years ago a professor of mine tried to figure out what was so interesting and trendy about apocalypse fiction. Because many of us were interested in those Puritan sermons that seemed to portend the end of the world in the most gruesome of ways, we took up the question with gusto. We coined the term apocrophilia to connote a complicated love with stuff related to the end-of-the-world. One part morbid curiosity, one part practicality (the world will end someday right?) these stories might be the "shape of things to come" to quote Battlestar. Books are the entry point into imagined futures, just as they are sign posts for Lauren on how to found her new community. Fiction, Butler (as well as my Prof.) is saying, can be a parable on how to live as much as it can be on how not to live: which side of history one is standing on seems to be the determining factor of how a story is read.