Octavia Butler is an important figure in literature. She is one of the first African American science fiction writers and is considered to be a pioneer in Afrofuturism literature. Her stories reflect on issues surrounding the environment, politics, and injustices toward African Americans.
Butler’s 1995 novel Parable of the Sower takes place in post-apocalyptic California across the years 2024-2027. When reading the story today, it shows frightening similarities to the world today, global warming, wealth inequality, corrupt politicians/police officers and corporate greed. The story follows a girl named Lauren on her journey to walk across California to start a better life. Lauren grew up in an area that was rampant with violent crime and drug abuse, her community survived on growing their own produce because it was far too expensive to buy groceries, let alone dangerous to travel to a store in world where walking was the primary form of transportation. Most of her community was unemployed due to the dangers, and employment opportunities that provide safe housing and food were equivalent to slavery. The environment was so polluted that safe drinking water was hard to come by and extremely expensive, if money was spent on anything it was water. The only choice that Lauren had to surviving is to escape and rebuild her community with the friends she made along the way.
The novel has increased in popularity within the last year as the novel begins in the summer of 2024, and many readers have found that the novel is representative of today’s world. Based on issues going on in the 90’s, Butler focused on issues she thought were important to discuss and created a world where these things destroyed the United States. However, in the 90s, this story was not the alternate world that we would have desired to live in but one we should fear.
In the novel, poverty is a major issue across the entire country, and the proposed solution was modern day slavery. Employing workers who couldn’t make enough to pay back their employer for food or rent. Before Butler began working on her novel, Reagan issued budget cuts to welfare programs and set higher restrictions on those who were able to receive benefits, negatively affecting families already struggling. Parable of the Sower shows us the potential future if we dismiss social reform policies to benefit the already wealthy.
A major issue Lauren and her community face is the inability to access clean drinking water. It’s said to cost “several times as much as gasoline” (18). Places to get safe drinking water were dangerous as it made you a target for thieves and beggars, you could buy water from water peddlers but there was no guarantee that what you bought wasn’t disease ridden or contaminated with chemicals. We saw a major issue with unsafe drinking water not long ago in Flint, Michigan. Other major bodies of water are also contaminated, the Hudson River in New York used to be filled with oysters and despite repopulation efforts, they continue to die. Despite all the practices and policies put into place about the environment, we still struggle to have clean air and water, and the push for industrialization only makes things worse.
The last influence I’ll mention is the LA riots in 1992. The riots began as a response to four police officers who were acquitted after brutally beating Rodney King in the streets of LA. The book reflects these riots in both violence and impact of the police. In Lauren’s world, drugs are rampant, and users act violently on people and property, killing people to steal the little money they had and burning down homes because they enjoy watching the flames. Community is something that is very important to her, and the violence of the novel shows us the dangers of what happens when we don’t support our communities. The depiction of police officers in the novel are also represented by that of the 1992 riots. In the novel, the police do little to protect the communities they serve, going far as extorting members of the community for personal benefit.
Octavia Butler tried to warn us of all the dangers we could face if we don’t make major changes in the world; it is a wake-up call to take care of our home and our community. Unfortunately, we are facing many of these difficulties perpetrated by Butler’s alternate future, and hopefully, we can prevent them from developing further.
