Oryx and Crake
Booker and Orange shortlisted, the founding volume of the MaddAddam trilogy and a cornerstone of modern climate-and-biotech dystopia: the engineered apocalypse as corporate deliverable.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler · 1993 · Earthseed, book 1
What is Parable of the Sower about?
California in the 2020s: climate chaos, water dearer than petrol, gated neighbourhoods burning one by one, and a designer drug that makes arson feel like ecstasy. Lauren Olamina, a preacher's teenage daughter cursed with hyperempathy — she feels the pain she sees — watches her community die and walks north with a rucksack, a concealed gun and the seedling verses of Earthseed, the religion she is writing as she goes: God is Change, and the destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. Diary-form, dry-eyed and frighteningly plausible.
Why it matters
The novel that made Butler a prophet: a New York Times bestseller decades after publication, source of an opera and a graphic novel, and the founding text of modern climate dystopia.
Where does it sit in the series?
The Parable duology: a teenage prophet builds a new faith for a collapsing America, on the principle that God is Change. Unfinished at Butler's death, and more quoted every year.
In the Guide from Earthseed:
- Parable of the Sower (1993)
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