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This week, John is teaching you about the near-future dystopia in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Parable of the Sower tells the story of Lauren Oya Olamina, and her life growing up in a post-climate change, semi-lawless America. It’s not great. The book reads as a dystopia, as a bildungsroman, and as a sacred text. Lauren grows up in a terrible future, and a lot of the book is concerned with the religion she has created, Earthseed. There’s lots to think about in this one, and John will talk you through it.
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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
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Hi I’m John Green, this is Crash Course Literature and I have some bad news.
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Disease is devastating the planet.
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Soon the global food supply will be compromised, clean water will become scarce, violence will
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grow epidemic, dangerous new street drugs will circulate, the income gap will increase,
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corporate slavery will return and a strongman president will be more interested in issuing
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tough-guy slogans than actually improving the lives of the people.
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Of course none of that’s happened yet.
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What’s that?
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Oh, Stan informs me that some of it has happened.
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But the only place it’s all happening, so far, is in “Parable of the Sower,” Octavia
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Butler’s 1993 science fiction novel.
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It’s just made up.
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Thankfully.
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But jeez, I have never read a dystopia that feels more possible, or more terrifying.
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And yet, it’s also one of my favorite books, and a genuinely hopeful one.
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The kind of hard-won, uneasy hope that actually means something.
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INTRO Let’s start with a brief introduction to
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the author, Octavia Butler.
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She was an African-American science fiction writer who won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards
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and a MacArthur genius grant.
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She died in 2006 at the age of 58.
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Growing up as a shy only child in Pasadena, California, Butler spent a lot of time reading
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at her local library and telling herself her own stories.
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And then, when she was nine, she saw a movie and thought, I could write a better story
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than that.
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So she did.
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Her aunt told her that an African-American girl couldn’t be a writer, but she kept
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going.
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And as a young adult, she would get up at two in the morning so that she’d have time
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to write before working jobs like dishwasher and potato chip inspector.
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It wasn’t until her early thirties that she was able to support herself entirely as
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a writer.
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Her works deal with race, class and power, and most of her books also include fantastic
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elements like time travel, and alien life forms and telekinesis.
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She described herself as “A pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former
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Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”
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“Parable of the Sower” is a coming-of-age story-one of the best of the past several
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decades.
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It’s also a story about being black in America, and a feminist story and a theological story
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and a dystopian story and in some ways maybe a bit of a utopian story.
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It takes its name from a Bible parable.
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In which Jesus describes someone who goes out to distribute seed.
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Some of the seed falls on the path and is eaten up by birds, some falls in a rocky place
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and can’t grow, some falls near thorns so that’s no good, but some of it falls on
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fertile ground and grows beautifully.
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So before we talk about genre and theme, let’s briefly look at the story of “Parable of
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the Sower.” in the Thoughtbubble: When the book begins, Lauren Oya Olamina is
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a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in a small community outside of Los Angeles, in 2024.
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She lives with her father, a professor and a Baptist minister, her stepmother and her
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four half-brothers.
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Climate change and disease outbreaks have increased social disorder so much that Lauren’s
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community has built a wall all around it.
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When people leave the community, they leave armed.
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Both Lauren and her father become more and more worried about how long the community
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can survive, and they prepare stashes of money and supplies so that they can run away if
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they have to.
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And Lauren has other secrets.
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Because of drugs that her mother abused during pregnancy, Lauren has “hyperempathy”—she
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feels what other people feel, which makes it hard for her to hurt anyone.
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Also, Lauren has begun to develop her own belief system, one that is different from
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her father’s.
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It locates god in chaos, and change and uncertainty.
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Throughout the book, we read pieces of a new kind of scripture.
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“All that you touch, you change.
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All that you change, changes you.
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The only last truth is change.”
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Lauren comes to call this religion Earthseed and believes that its purpose is to prepare
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humankind to “take root among the stars.”
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Eventually, her walled community is overrun, and unlike most of her family and friends,
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she manages to escape and then Lauren meets up with other survivors.
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For a time, she disguises herself as a man, and eventually begins walking north with a
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growing community–the first members of the Earthseed movement.
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Thanks Thoughtbubble.
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There’s a lot of death in this book, and like the Handmaid’s Tale, the narrative
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voice is so strong that it all feels terrifyingly real.
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And yet, it IS science fiction.
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It’s set in the future–albeit barely.
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And there’s speculation from 1993 about how climate change and wealth inequality and
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walls will shape the world of the future.
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Part of what makes Parable of the Sower, and its sequel Parable of the Talents, so powerful
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is how prophetic they seem.
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Another term for this kind of science fiction, which is set on earth and uses contemporary
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technology is “mundane science fiction,” although this is one of the less mundane books
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you’ll ever read.
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In 1998, Butler told an audience that she liked to think of science fiction in terms
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of categories established by the writer, Robert A. Heinlein, “the what-if category; the
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if-only category; and the if-this-goes-on category,”
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She described “Parable of the Sower” as “definitely an if-this-goes-on story.
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And if it’s true, if it’s anywhere near true, we’re all in trouble.”
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Oh it’s time for the open letter?
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An Open Letter to my future self.
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But first, let’s see what’s in the secret compartment today.
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Oh look!
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It’s the sky express rocketship that I’m going to use to travel around the solar system
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in the future.
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Dear future me, Parable of the Sower is set in 2024, it’s currently 2017, you’re watching
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this in 2024—how we doin’?
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Was Octavia Butler right that we were all in trouble?
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Because I’m concerned.
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So it’s seven years in the future, how are things going?
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I think you guys recently had an election hopefully?
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Did climate change turn out to be a hoax?
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Are we still doing Crash Course?
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Did the Looking For Alaska movie every get made?
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Does Diet Dr. Pepper turn out to be bad for me?
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Has Liverpool won the Champions League?
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I have so many questions!
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But mostly, I just hope you’re around to answer them.
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Best wishes, current John.
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So “Parable of the Sower” is obviously an exploration of if-this-goes-on, but it’s
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also lots of other things.
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I want to look at two of the book’s other genres—the book as a bildungsroman and also
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as a sacred text.
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So you might remember bildungsroman is a long and fun to say German word that means a novel
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of education, a story in which a young person grows up and becomes more or less independent.
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At the beginning of the book Lauren is a teenage girl who does what her family expects of her.
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She agrees to be baptized in a religion she doesn’t believe, because her father wants
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her to, she helps out in the school her stepmother runs, teaching the set curriculum.
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But as the book goes on, she starts thinking for herself more and more.
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She establishes her own belief system and begins to study how to survive in case her
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community breaks down.
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After talking things over with her father, she also starts conveying some of that information
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to the children at the school even though survival skills are definitely not in the
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curriculum.
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And then, when her neighborhood is overrun, Lauren learns her capacity for leadership.
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She protects others in her group even though her hyperempathy makes violent action nearly
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impossible.
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And she keeps them going until they find a safe place in Northern California.
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And we should mention here that Lauren’s suffering and her escape, as well as her journey
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north, have led some critics to draw comparisons between Lauren’s story and narratives of
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escape from slavery.
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And Lauren is an escapee and a leader, but she’s also something else.
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In an interview, Butler explained that she wanted to tell the story of someone who, “sometime
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after her death – after people have had time to forget how human she was – might
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easily be considered a god.”
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Now Lauren is human, but she does have this god-like capacity for empathy, and “Parable
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of the Sower” is in many ways a sacred text.
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It’s structured as a series of journal entries, but also features many these passages from
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what Lauren calls, “The Book of the Living,” a devotional text that people in the future
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might read and interpret.
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And we learn a lot about the belief system of Earthseed in these beautiful little passages
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from The Book of the Living: Earthseed is focused on the inevitability
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of change–several times, in fact, it says that God is change.
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Lauren says that she has based these religion on “everything I could read, hear, see.
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All the history I could learn.”
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And Butler seems to draw on elements of Buddhism, Taoism, matriarchal religions, even a little
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bit of the Yoruba religion.
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It’s probably not coincidental that Lauren’s middle name, Oya, is the name of the goddess
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of the Niger river.
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But Lauren doesn’t really believe in goddesses, as she says, “Earthseed deals with ongoing
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reality, not supernatural authority figures.”
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And as a person she isn’t perfect or puritanical.
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She gets angry.
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She steals when she has to.
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She has sex when she wants to.
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“I mean to survive,” she says.
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She also isn’t always certain about the moral choices she’s making, some of which
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are influenced by her hyperempathy, which she calls “a biological conscience.”
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But that’s all part of what makes this portrait of a prophet so fascinating.
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Butler shows us how her actions and her beliefs might influence future generations.
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According to the verses Lauren writes, Earthseed understands that:
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“God is Power— Infinite,
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Irresistible, Inexorable,
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And yet, God is Pliable— Trickster,
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Teacher, Chaos,
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Clay.
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God exists to be shaped.
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God is Change.”
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Change is the one inevitability in “Parable of the Sower”, it’s the only constant
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in Lauren’s trauma-filled life.
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In an essay on the book, the professor Philip H. Jos writes that those who practice Earthseed
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must learn to respond positively to change.
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He writes: “‘God is Change” is an invitation to respond to fear with creativity, productivity,
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and compassion.
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[Practitioners must] fully acknowledge and accept suffering and struggle as an inevitable
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companion to love and happiness.’”
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And I want to pause here and acknowledge that for a lot of hardcore fans, “Parable of
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the Sower” is a sacred text.
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Another way to look at “Parable of the Sower” is as a dystopian novel, exploring a world
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gone very, very wrong.
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And if we read the novel this way, Lauren and her community’s journey toward a safer
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place can make the end of the book seem a little utopian, or at least as utopian as
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a book can be where political instability and environmental degradation mean that almost
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everyone dies horribly.
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I’d argue though, that Butler takes care not to make the Earthseed community, or its
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leader, seem ideal.
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She once said, “Personally, I find utopias ridiculous.
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We’re not going to have a perfect human society until we get a few perfect humans, and that
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seems unlikely.”
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For Lauren–and for Butler–the past, with legal racism and misogyny, wasn’t ideal.
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And what’s fascinating to me about Parable of the Sower is Lauren’s struggle to imagine
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a better world that is not based on past models, that isn’t trying to go back in time or
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return to some imaginary golden age.
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The hope is less that Lauren’s followers will create a utopia, on earth or elsewhere,
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and more that they’ll learn new and better forms of relating to each other and to the
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world around them, and that they will find something to unite them.
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Instead of a search for a paradise where nothing ever changes, they have to learn to embrace
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change and use that change to move forward and seek life among the stars.
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Whereas so many utopian and dystopian novels seem to argue for dismantling technology,
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Lauren sees this interstellar travel as a goal that can unite humanity.
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As we come to the end of our miniseries on dystopias–although I suppose Macbeth is also
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fairly critical of traditional power structures–I think it’s worth pausing to consider the
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if-this-goes-on-ness of Parable of the Sower.
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What forces or goals can unite and pacify us?
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We know how will humans of the past have responded to resource pressures and deprivations—is
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there a way that we can somehow avoid their mistakes, when responding to the pressures
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and deprivations of a changing climate?
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And can we reconcile ourselves to change, and live with it, as The Book of the Living
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calls us to do?
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“Parable of the Sower” is so page-turningly, compulsively readable that it’s easy to
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miss the moments where Lauren, and Butler, speak directly to us and to our times.
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So I want to leave you with a quote from one such moment in the novel.
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Lauren writes, “Embrace diversity.
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Unite— Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey.”
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Good advice.
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I’ll see you next time.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video