It is California in the mid-2020s. Years of environmental degradation and drought have made the physical landscape a source of danger and destruction; in fact, wildfires are just one of many threats to humans. A pandemic has wrecked much of the world’s economy. Gun violence and drug use are at all-time highs. The political scene in a fragmented society is dominated by the rise of a populist strongman who promises to restore the nation to its former glory and “make America great again.”
Sound familiar? That scenario is not stolen from the headlines, though: The above are major plot points in two of Octavia Butler’s novels, 1993’s Parable of the Sower and its 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents. Both books are getting new attention these days (the former became a New York Times bestseller in 2020, 37 years after its publication) because Butler—a Black science fiction writer who died in 2006—seems so prescient in their pages about our current environmental and political climate.
Butler, the author of a dozen novels, a short story collection and various nonfiction essays and articles, stood out in the world of science fiction because the genre was dominated by white men. “When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn’t in any of this stuff I read,” Butler told The New York Times in a 2000 interview. “The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn’t manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing.”
Butler was born in Pasadena, Calif., in 1947, into a strict Baptist family; after her father died when she was 7, she was raised by her mother and grandmother. She began writing as a child, asking her mother for a typewriter at a young age. At the age of 12, she saw the British pulp sci-fi movie “Devil Girl from Mars”; years later she would say the movie inspired her to write more “because I could tell a better story than that.”
Butler received an associate’s degree from Pasadena City College in 1968, then continued her studies over the years at Cal State Los Angeles and U.C.L.A. Around this time she met the legendary science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who admired her work and encouraged her to publish. She released her first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976 and followed it with almost a book a year for the next decade. Her 1979 novel Kindred, still her best-selling book, told the story of a modern Black woman who meets both her ancestors and her oppressors on trips back through time to a 19th-century slave plantation.
In 1984, Butler’s novella Bloodchild won the trifecta of science fiction writing awards—the Hugo, Locus and Nebula awards; the tale would lend its title to her later short story collection. The 1990s brought Butler further public recognition, first with her Parable of the Sower in 1993 and then Parable of the Talents five years later. She was also the first science fiction writer to be named a MacArthur Fellow, in 1995.
Parable of the Sower centers on a young woman living in 2024, Lauren Olamina, whose life in the dystopian world described above is eventually completely overturned, leading her to found her own religion, “Earthseed.” Parable of the Talents is a sequel set in 2032 in which a community of believers in Olamina’s new religion finds its existence threatened by a demagogue, President Andrew Steele Jarret, who uses promises of the renewal of a “Christian America” to seize power and destroy his enemies. And yes, one of his promises is that he will “make America great again,” a phrase Butler later said she borrowed from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns.
America did not give Butler the attention she deserved over the years. The magazine did not review any of her novels, and she is only mentioned tangentially in other stories. Not until a friend who teaches environmental ethics recommended The Parable of the Sower a few years ago had I ever read anything by her. America in recent years has begun to fill that lacuna, including in a 2017 essay by David Dark. But elsewhere, Butler has garnered more attention, and not just for her eerie predictions of the most dystopian elements of our current reality.
Writing in the National Catholic Reporter in 2021, Jonathan Rayson-Locke noted that “The Parable of the Sower is not a Catholic book, and some readings of the book may come off as anti-Christian to some readers.” Nevertheless, the actions of the protagonist Lauren throughout the book “demonstrate how to live a life rooted in the tenets of Catholic social teaching. She cares for the poor and marginalized, cultivates and maintains God’s creation, and always stands in solidarity with those around her who are suffering due to oppression and unjust systems.”
Lauren Olamina’s new religion, Earthseed, is incompatible on many levels with Christianity, Rayson-Locke wrote, because “[w]e will always view God as unchanging, that he moves independently of us and that our hope rests in the glorious after. But, like Lauren’s religion, we can channel empathy to care for the common good of all and cultivate a world that can withstand disaster, catastrophe and all the forces of evil.”
Though Butler did not consider herself a Christian, she did credit her Baptist upbringing with giving her a moral center. “I used to despise religion. I have not become religious, but I think I’ve become more understanding of religion,” she told an interviewer in 2000. “And I’m glad I was raised as a Baptist, because I got my conscience installed early. I have been around people who don’t have one and they’re damned scary.”
Octavia Butler died in 2006 at the age of 58 of a stroke, less than a year after the publication of her last completed novel, Fledgling. Six years earlier, she had received a lifetime achievement award from the PEN American Center. There is now an asteroid named “Octaviabutler,” as well as a mountain on one of Pluto’s moons that bears her name. At the time of her death, she was writing another sequel, Parable of the Trickster, to round out her “Earthseed” trilogy.
She is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, Calif. The cemetery is temporarily closed: Workers are still repairing damage from the deadly recent Altadena wildfire, which halted at the cemetery’s edge.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “St. Valentine,” by Hannah Monsour. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
