"Her, startlingly original and astonishingly prescient work transcends the conventions of her chosen genre, exploring issues such as social justice, real-world power structures, empathy and ecology."
Born in California in 1948, African-American author Octavia Butler was the first science fiction writer to ever receive a MacArthur Fellowship (aka ‘’the Genius Grant’’) and one of the few women of colour to achieve success and recognition in a genre traditionally dominated by white men. Her, startlingly original and astonishingly prescient work transcends the conventions of her chosen genre, exploring issues such as social justice, real-world power structures, empathy and ecology.
Octavia Butler’s tenth novel ‘Parable of the Sower’ was originally published in 1993 and is set in an all -too-plausible version of 2024 ravaged by climate change, the depredations of disaster capitalism, religious fanaticism and a collapsing infrastructure. The novel’s heroine is a young Black woman living in a gated community who suffers from ‘’hyperempathy’, which makes her feel the pain of others. When her home is destroyed she gathers a community around her and creates a new belief system named ‘Earthseed’, believing that humankind’s destiny and ultimate salvation lies beyond the doomed and dying Earth world out among the stars.
Parable of the Sower finally became a New York Times Bestseller in 2020, during the dying days of the Trump Administration. As a nightmarish vision of a dystopian future, the novel is, in the surface at least, as chilling and prophetic as The Handmaid’s Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Brave New World but, inspired by her own history and the struggles of those around her, Octavia Butler never allowed herself to surrender to total pessimism and Parable of the Sower ends on a note of optimism and hope for a better future through collective effort, community and mutual support.
In an epigram for the book’s unfinished sequel, ‘Parable of the Trickster’ Octavia Butler wrote:
There is nothing new
under the sun,
but there are new suns.
| Primary Genre | Dystopian and utopian fiction |
| Other Genres: |
