Ken-ichi's Reviews > Parable of the Sower

Many reviewers seem to describe this book as prescient, but I finally picked it up because it was mentioned in Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear, a book about the many natural disasters that beset Southern California and our society's enthusiasm for exacerbating their destructive effects, and in that context, and in the context of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Parable doesn't read as prophetic so much as sensible planning. From the perspective of the 2020s, I view the 1990s as a pre-9/11 utopia of economic growth, bountiful resources, and contained global conflict, but I suspect that's just present bias. Readers in the Trump era probably latched on to the fictional President Jarret's use of "Make American Great Again," but Butler would have heard those words from the lips of Goldwater and Reagan. In her all-too-short 1993 interview with Terry Gross, she says she'd finished the book months before the LA riots and thus they weren't a direct influence, but that means the book incubated in the same milieu as the riots. Maybe her rigorous, sensible extrapolations were the same thing as prescience, but I feel like that word is often synonymous with Cassandra-like prophesy, predictions that none but the supernaturally gifted could make. Butler wasn't a prophet. She did the work.

And as a result of that work, it is impossible to read this book in California in the 2020s and not feel its world is just a few mega fires, pandemics, and violent political actions away from us, like we too might be walking a highway toward Canada in a year or two, like we're seeing that world through a ripped curtain. Now is a great time to read this book and Butler generally, not just because we need to understand and pay homage to minority authors that laid the groundwork for today's flourish of diversity in SF, but because Butler not only helped shaped the way we think today, she looked at today's problems with a determination that we struggle to summon. We don't want to genuinely contemplate society's fall unless it's a melodramatic hero fantasy, but Butler did.

Having read Kindred, Sower, and Talents, I feel like Butler shared Le Guin's interest in scifi as sociological experimentation and expression, but Butler seems like more of a realist, a "hard sociological SF" author if you will, always grounding her work in our world. Comparisons between them seem necessary, but I wonder, did they talk? Read each other? Review each other?