Parable of the Sower

About halfway done, and I think this is my fave Butler book so far, out of a handful of books I've read by her. It's got a very simple plot structure, but a fascinating central character.

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An odd thing happened as I finished up the book–it's a great start to a larger tale, but the writing weakened as it went on. Lots of wonderful ideas here, and it's sadly refreshing to read a book with lots of people of color, but in the end the execution is lacking, for me, in a way that all of the other Butler books I've read weren't lacking. It seems like a sketch for a story, rather than a story.

I do love the idea of Earthseed as a religion, even though I'm mostly anti-religion, and because of that I'll likely read the second book as well, even though the third book of the trilogy was never written...

I'll add that Butler's dystopia is perhaps a little too realistic for me: I think she sees what is actually coming, which makes reading this book chilling.

Read for my “Make me read it challenge” – blog readers told me which of five choices on my TBR shelf to complete.

I'm not sure I would have gotten through it without the challenge, because this is a helluva bleak dystopian vision of America 30 years in the future – that is, now. It is fascinating how much Butler got right – a California devastated by drought and fire, rampant and destructive drug use, people walling themselves off in fear and distrust and turning to guns as the only answer for self-protection, a hopeless government that is selling out its own people ... I could go on, but you get the idea. Butler could see the writing on the wall, and even though things are not quite as dire as portrayed in this novel, it increasingly feels as though we're teetering on the brink of such total chaos.

The response of the young protagonist is to venture out looking for a place to build a better life, gathering a chosen, trusted set of people as her community, and inventing an artificial, made-up religion she calls “Earthseed” to give them hope and purpose. This latter does not get much actual play in this book, other than verses from her journal at the head of each chapter, and a few scenes in which she tries to explain it to other characters. To their credit, none of the characters seem very excited about the idea, and some of them consider it absolute bosh – but they like her, so they will go along with it anyway. I can only say, just asserting that something feels true to you, does not make it true. That's not religion, that's fanaticism.

The idea of Earthseed is that human beings need to escape from this hopelessly damaged planet and find a new place among the stars. I think it would be far more interesting to consider how people could deal with the problems on this world than just run away to another one. The human mind seems irresistibly attracted to pouring resources, energy and ingenuity into creating complicated machines, rather than transforming and healing relationships. This is probably why I'm not a huge science fiction fan.

Another random aspect of the story is the main character's “hyperempathy,” a fetal-drug-induced condition that means she shares the feelings of other people, or rather what she thinks their feelings are. This brought up the question for me of why she couldn't train herself not to imagine their feelings – but I suppose that would make her a psychopath. As it is, the condition has led her to be very cold and calculating about feelings and sensations, and (ironically) not very sympathetic in a normal sense. A creepy romance with a man 40 years older than her adds another bizarre touch.

I was curious by the end how the community's experiment would turn out, so I will probably read the next book, but I'm not terribly hopeful that it will be an enjoyable experience, based on this one.

Butler continues to tell gripping stories with well-wrought characters and large-looming social commentary. Butler's use and building of religion is beautiful and grounding and unique. This story is incredibly dark but still somehow hopeful. I see it less as a cautionary tale and more an example of the sort of community building that will be necessary if we want to build a better world. There are definitely some loose ends I'm hoping get tied up in the sequel.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me a copy of this in exchange for my open and honest review.

This is a faithful adaptation of Olivia Butler's Parable of the Sower story. It is being adapted, Damian Duffy and John Jennings, the same team that tackled Butler's Kindred story.

Initially, I was apprehensive about reading and reviewing Parable of the Sower. It is a story I do not like, to no fault of Butler's beautiful writing. For some reason, the first time I read Parable, there was something about it that disturbed me deeply. Maybe it is how lyrically she describes the bleak future. Perhaps it is the repetition of the word, change. I am not sure. I was hoping that reading the graphic adaptation to the story would lend to some greater insight and love of the story. And it did.

The Sower story is a heavy dystopian story about a world that has drastically changed from our own. The environment has been all but destroyed, wild packs of dogs and cannibals roam the hills. Lauren, the lead protagonist of the story, is trying o find her own spirt and religion in the form of journal keeping while the world around her changes.

Adding the graphic element to the story helped nail down the visuals for me as a reader that was slightly murky on the first read. The graphics in the story are beautifully done. It is done as a monochromatic palette of oranges and reds, and I think that lends to the story and was a good design choice.

Even with the beautiful graphics and faithful adaptation, this still isn't a story I want to come back to. However, that should not keep other people from reading this and starting this journey with Lauren. Butler is a powerful and lyrical writer. She infuses every word she writes with emotion, and for some readers, this story is an emotional, beautiful journey.

It took me too long to read this book, but the dragging of my feet led to me starting this novel, one year from its fictional start date.

Octavia's near term California dystopia is a world we are familiar with. We can see how she build these scenes by extrapolating the societal issues of the 90s to today. Though our immediate 2023 world is not as bleak as the one she narrates, I found eerie truths that are highlighted today - severe weather patterns, inequality of wealth, societal drug reliance, and a dose of anarchy are continued forces of concern.

And we see these all from the eyes of a determined, mature, natural leader in Lauren. She guides us through countless heart breaks and losses, but your confidence in her ability to survive doesn't waiver. It's the same with the people she picks up along the way, then slowly believing in this preacher's daughter. Their strength grows around the new faith she built and her innate ability to create hope when you just can't believe there should be any left.

I'm sad that I did not really like this book. I did read it to the end, and I saw some good things but still did not like it. I wanted to like the story - I think I had heard too much good stuff. I went in expecting science fiction and excitement.

The setting - a dystopian not too distant future where there are few jobs and less water - is probably even easier to imagine today than at the time of the writing. The skills and efforts of the characters are well documented and seemed realistic. The drugs, dangers, and slippery slope of slavery coming from a need for security serve as a frightening (and imaginable) warning.

Octavia does a great job of making complete characters that are real enough to touch. The structure and focus of this novel did not work for me. I didn't like the pretense of the point of view character. I even more did not like the delivery, like a diary in spurts, of the story. The effect of a character I didn't really like, even while I was rooting for her and her family and friend, reading me her diary while preaching to me was overwhelming.

“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.”

This is the second Octavia E. Butler book I've read, after Kindred, and it's a very different beast. Both novels fall in to the YA category but whilst I immediately handed Kindred over to my thirteen year old daughter when I'd finished it, I'd be hesitant to pass Parable of the Sower on. This dystopian nightmare is one of the most brutal and ruthless books I've ever read. The violence and the visceral hatred that seeps from the pages really got to me, perhaps because what in 1993, when the book was published, was a distant and unimaginable future is now looming and alarmingly possible. The only relief from the unending horrors was the insights into the creation of Earthseed, the brainchild of our protagonist; a new religion where God is change and the ultimate goal of the human race is to leave earth and live amongst the stars, because who in their right mind would want to remain on the planet in the state it's in? I enjoyed being witness to its development, especially seeing how it affected each of the characters.

This was a hard book to get through. I found Butler's blunt and clipped writing style difficult to gel with at first, and the bleakness of the story made me quite reticent to keep returning to it. I'm still not entirely sure I'm glad I pressed on with it, or indeed if I'll continue with the series. Maybe after a long break.

Wow. Excellent dystopic sci-fi. Incredibly well written, with great ideas shining light on truths about reality that are hard to ignore. Like all good sci-fi, has ideas in it that will stay with you and leave you thinking.

This review doesn't really do it justice. Look - it's just an amazing book. You've gotta be ready for some tough stuff, but it's very worth it.

Also, there are some interesting parallels to the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, I wonder if it in any way inspired some of this.

I won an ARC of this graphic novel adaption of Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (adapted by Damian Duffy) from Goodreads.

Unfortunately, I did not know I would be receiving an ARC with unfinished black and white artwork, many panels of which were extremely rough sketches that were difficult to make out. I recently finished the original text and enjoyed it overall despite not connecting much with the overarching religious theme. I was really interested to see if the illustrations helped me connect with it more. But all I could do with these rough panels was assess whether Duffy did a good job adapting the original through the dialogue bubbles and text boxes. I'd say he did, and I think the final artwork examples are gorgeous. I absolutely love the way the characters are illustrated. However, I really don't know if all the illustrations work with the descriptions because I don't know what the panels look like.

It's also hard to judge the pacing and descriptions for an unfinished graphic novel. So much relies on the visuals that I can't fault the moments when I felt more context would have been nice, especially for anyone who hasn't read the source material. Perhaps the context is in the final illustration. I think overall the adaptation is done well, but I can't judge how the artwork contributes to that.

I'll be sticking to my rating for the original novel for now. If I'm able to get my hands on a complete version, I'll reassess based on the finished artwork.

I highly recommend publishers reconsider sending such rough versions of graphic novels to reviewers.

Before I joined the 52 Book Challenge I had never heard of Octavia Butler and I certainly did not pick up dystopian fiction intentionally. And this is why I joined the challenge because Wow what a ride! This book is outstanding and terrifying. Butler wrote it in 1995 and it takes place in California in 2025- in a falling society. Government is ineffective, water shortages are the norm, corporations have pushed the country to dangerous levels of greed and corruption. Failed biotech has created a dangerous and highly addictive drug. I could go on and on. The narration by 15 year old heroine Lauren is unemotional, stripped of any joy and very little optimism. It's a world of survival and of building a community out of ruin. Fantastic read. Highly recommend.

 “The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.” 

This book started in 2025 and goes on to a few years later, it's a dystopian world that is not hard to believe at all. This is a an LA which is infested with disease, poverty and water shortage. Not hard to believe right? We could be looking at our near future and that's what makes it terrifying. 

Lauren is living inside the wall where the “fortunate” lives. She's been wanting to pack up and go for the longest time but some things are holding her back until she's forced to when something happens to her hometown.  I love how strong and caring Lauren is. She has helped several people who need it and tried to give people the benefit of the doubt. 

It's both heart breaking and horrifying what happens when there is no proper government ruling and when people are left to fend for themselves. I hope we never get to see that day.

I didn't enjoy reading the bit about religion. Didn't see the point of it that much. Lauren was really passionate about it though and could be quite preachy about Earthseed.

There is a second book to this and I'm not sure if I would like to continue. Thank you to @booksreadbyem for suggesting this for my 12/12 challenge.

I didn't like this. I thought it was well written, the characters were clearly delineated, the locations were all clear and distinct.
But it was very depressing and I don't see the SF&F elements to this.
As near as I could tell, the cause of the economic collapse is not the result of any traditional SF reasons.
All the jobs weren't replaced by robots or AI, nobody developed replicators, nobody discovered magic.
I'm guessing it was because of corporate greed and political support of that greed.
The new religion is only marginally different than existing ones and its followers didn't acquire any new abilities, so it is just as effective as all other religions.

I wanted to read something by Ms. Butler because I often heard she was a good writer.
I would agree that she is, but I didn't find the book very interesting.

While it doesn't top Xenogenesis as my favorite Butler writing, I think I read this book at a very apt time. It is one of those stories that is becoming relevant yet again. You think we humans would figure out ways to avoid dystopian apocalypse instead of continuing to follow every fictional plotline leading up to that apocalypse ever, wouldn't you? Butler's is particularly grim as the thesis behind this dystopia isn't a zombie plague or alien invasion, but a simple matter of too many otherwise intelligent people ignoring major problems until it it too late to fix them, over and over again.

Of course, since it is Butler, one difficult to tackle theme is not enough. This book exlores race relationships, the nature of empathy vs, survival, and a philosophy of embracing “shit happens” to a religious level. I can get behind the philosphy of Earthseed. I definitely want to continue on to the next parable as soon as I take a break to go back to ignoring the problems of my own society. Life is a cabaret, old chum.

I can't believe I didn't find this as a young adult obsessed with dystopias, but in 1993 YA wasn't a genre and this certainly wasn't marketed at me. It didn't hit as hard as I expected, and I think that's a combination of growing up on this type of story (if you read Australian YA in the 90s, you know), but also, it's...happening. It's entirely conceivable. It could be inevitable. The story starts in 2024, and that's eighteen months from when I first read it. Maybe that's the scary part for readers.

The parts I found more interesting to sink my brain-teeth into were Lauren-as-Prophet. Lauren tells the story through journal entries and extracts from the religious text she's building around her created religion, Earthseed. Both Lauren and Butler are former Baptists, and the exploration of an (intentionally) simplistic reaction and adaptation of Christianity into something that meets Lauren's needs and hopes. The goal of Earthseed is to fulfill the destiny of leaving Earth and heading for the stars; reflecting Laurens goal of abandoning her community - she believes both community and Earth itself can't be sustained in the long-term.

Mostly, I enjoyed the journeys - the physical journey Lauren takes, the followers she collects along the way, the character growth and revelation. Like most dystopia, Lauren keeps her hope in a time of despair and becomes a leader because of it. 

Butler noped out of completing the intended series of Earthseed, because it was too depressing to research and write, but the sequel, Parable of the Talents, is on my TBR.