'Parable of the Sower': A dystopian hero's journey

Octavia E. Butler's 1993 classic feels very of the moment.

Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” was one of those books I’d been meaning to read for years, but never got around to. I once picked up the graphic novel version, but found it hard to follow. Then, this month, a paperback edition appeared on my library’s “Lucky Day” shelf, where titles in high demand rotate randomly. I grabbed it.

I’m the kind of person who refrains from reading reviews until after finishing the book or watching the movie. So all I knew about “Parable of the Sower,” based on the few pages of the graphic novel I’d browsed, was that it was some sort of dystopian tale. In other words, I was not prepared.

The first thing I noticed was that the book, which Butler published in 1993, opened in July 2024. Then it turned out that the teenage protagonist, Lauren, and her family, were hunkered down outside L.A. as they tried to hold their own amid a rampant and violent breakdown of societal order. Living on the West Coast in 2023, all this felt uncomfortably close to home.

This is no coming-of-age tale: As the writer N.K. Jemisin notes in her foreword to the Grand Central Publishing edition of “Parable of the Sower,” “Lauren starts deep and stays deep.” Rather, Lauren’s story feels more akin to a hero’s journey, albeit one in which the victory and the return home are metaphorical. In her world, simply surviving is a triumph, and home is wherever you can let down your guard.

Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment.

Lauren writes the words above as part of the creed she is developing: Earthseed, a philosophy-religion that she begins preaching to those who cross her path. After the 2020 racial justice protests that centered the Black Lives Matter movement, and the subsequent waning of that engagement, those words rang out to me.

Lauren is determined not just to persist, but to persist past the point of what others think possible. She sets out to walk north in search of a safer life. She gathers followers, intentionally and by chance. She lets them in on her vision for Earthseed. So hopeless and harrowing has daily life become that the others don’t need much convincing to come around to her way of thinking.

With “Parable of the Sower,” Butler has skillfully built a world of chaos, then set within it a determined and imaginative protagonist whose pledge of a better future, if we are only willing to strive toward it, sends a beam of light through the shadows.