Book Club Prep: Parable of the Sower

Octavia E. Butler

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change. (3)

Octavia E. Butler was a renowned African American author who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. Born in Pasadena in 1947, she was raised by her mother and her grandmother. She was the author of several award-winning novels including PARABLE OF THE SOWER (1993), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and PARABLE OF THE TALENTS (1995) winner of the Nebula Award for the best science fiction novel published that year. She was acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the far future. Learn more about her work and her estate.

Oct 30, 2020 | #book club, #virtual

NYU Skirball Book Club: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

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Talking Points

If you’re not sure where to start a conversation in a breakout room during Book Club, find an example in the text related to one of these themes. Or, pick a passage that stood out to you and share it with the group.

  • Futurity & hope in the midst of the confluence of many crises
  • Butler’s “prescience” – which is to say, her understanding of the many structural inequalities organizing contemporary American life, and their potential repercussions – what can the text help us understand about our own present & potential futures?
  • Religion as an opportunity for change vs. a place of violence – in relation to Lauren’s upbringing vs. her development of Earthseed
  • Genre (sci-fi or speculative fiction) in relation to race & class – ie, space travel & advanced entertainment equipment available to the wealthy, vs. Lauren’s hyperempathy and idea of Earthseed’s Destiny
  • Community, trust & honesty – in Lauren’s home neighborhood & on the road north

Get Into It

New Yorker

Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again”

In her lifetime, Butler insisted that the Parable series was not intended as an augur. “This was not a book about prophecy,” she said, of “Talents,” in remarks she delivered at M.I.T. “This was a cautionary tale, although people have told me it was prophecy. All I have to say to that is: I certainly hope not.”

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Slate

Why So Many Readers Are Turning to Octavia Butler’s Apocalypse Fiction Right Now

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents contain many plot elements that seem to have “predicted” our current circumstances. But because Olamina’s story is also the story of a prophet—and because Butler is interested in how people might retain their humanity and direction through conditions of extreme chaos and change—the Earthseed books are instructional in a way that other apocalypse fictions are not.

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Adaptations & Other Resources

Singer/songwriter Toshi Reagon has adapted the Parable books into an opera. You can see the trailer and listen to songs from the show, and read more about it.

Reagon and adrienne maree brown have also made a chapter-by-chapter podcast on the books, with in-depth conversation around the text and more resources connecting to politics & mutual aid in 2020.

Julie Dash interviews Octavia Butler (1995)
Julie Dash interviews Octavia Butler

From the Office of Global Inclusion @ NYU

Related media, events or reading materials from NYU’s Office of Global Inclusion, the official Book Club Co-Sponsor

Matthew Frye Jacobson

Whiteness of a Different Color: The Alchemy of Race

America’s racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of “whiteness studies” and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants “race” has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were re-racialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counter-history of how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became Caucasian.

Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of racial formation—race as formed in conquest, enslavement, imperialism, segregation, and labor migration—are all part of the complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race. Whiteness of a Different Color traces the fluidity of racial categories from an immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history, including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft Riots of 1863.

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Close Reading

To the adults, going outside to a real church was like stepping back into the good old days when there were churches all over the place and too many lights and gasoline was for fueling cars and trucks instead of for torching things. They never miss a chance to relive the good old days or to tell kids how great it’s going to be when the country gets back on its feet and good times come back. (8)

–

I can’t do a thing about my hyperempathy, no matter what Dad thinks or wants or wishes. I feel what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel. Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an “organic delusional syndrome.” Big shit. It hurts, that’s all I know. (12)

–

My favorite book of the Bible is Job. I think it says more about my father’s God in particular and gods in general than anything else I’ve ever read. (16)

–

“We have to get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!” (55)

–

“Things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” (57)

–

Tomorrow, I’ll be sixteen. Only sixteen. I feel older. I want to be older. I need to be older. I hate being a kid. Time drags! (84)

–

I used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos that would destroy the neighborhood. Instead, things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit. (123)

–

I’m trying to speak— to write— the truth. I’m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them. If it happens that there are other people outside somewhere preaching my truth, I’ll join them. Otherwise, I’ll adapt where I must, take what opportunities I can find or make, hang on, gather students, and teach. (125)