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Parable of the Sower

Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Topics For Further Study
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
What Do I Read Next?
Sources
Further Reading

Octavia Butler
1993

Introduction

Parable of the Sower (New York, 1993) by Octavia Butler is set in California and covers a period of three years, from 2024 to 2027. It is a grim near-future novel that exaggerates trends in American life that were apparent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as fear of crime, the rise of gated communities, illiteracy, designer drugs and drug addiction, and a growing gap between rich and poor. Climate changes brought about by global warming are also central to the novel.

The protagonist is Lauren Olamina, an African American girl who is fifteen years old when the novel begins. She lives in Robledo, about twenty miles from Los Angeles, which has become a walled enclave only partially protected from the rampant lawlessness and desperate poverty that exists beyond the walls of the neighborhood. When the enclave is completely destroyed by bands of arsonists and thieves, Lauren is one of the few survivors. She heads north, on foot, with a couple of companions in a perilous search for a better life.

Butler's disturbing dystopia, written in the form of Lauren's diary entries, is at once an adventure story, a coming-of-age story, and a thought-provoking exploration of some negative trends in American society that have become more pronounced in the decade that has elapsed since the novel was written.

Author Biography

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947, the daughter of Laurice and Octavia Margaret (Guy) Butler. Her father died when she was a baby, and her mother supported the family by working as a maid. Butler loved reading science fiction stories as a child, and she soon started writing them herself. At the age of thirteen she was submitting her own stories to magazines.

Butler attended Pasadena City College, and while a student there she was awarded fifth prize in the Writer's Digest Short Story Contest. She received an Associate of Arts degree in 1968 and went on to attend California State University, Los Angeles, in 1969, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 1969, Butler entered the Open Door Program of the Screen Writers' Guild, where one of her tutors was Harlan Ellison. At Ellison's suggestion she enrolled in the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop, held in Pennsylvania. As a result of taking the workshop, she sold two short stories. Deciding she wanted to be a writer, she supported herself with low-paying jobs such as dishwashing and cleaning, while continuing to write, often getting up at three o'clock in the morning to do so. When she was laid off from a telephone sales job in 1974, she decided to use the time to write her first novel, the science fiction tale Patternmaster, which she completed in less than a year and sold to Doubleday. Patternmaster was published in 1976 and was quickly followed by three more novels in the Patternmaster series: Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), and Wild Seed (1980). In between, Butler published Kindred (1979), a mainstream novel focusing on African American history.

In 1984, St. Martin's published Clay's Ark, a fifth volume in the Patternmaster series. In that year she also won the Hugo Award, for her short story "Speech Sounds," and in 1985 she won the three most prestigious science fiction awards for her novelette Bloodchild (1985): the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Locus Award. After this, Butler turned her attention to the science fiction trilogy, Xenogenesis, which was published by Warner Books. The three novels were Dawn: Xenogenesis (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989).

Butler then hit a barren spell. She knew she wanted to write about a woman who wanted to start a new religion, but she could not produce a manuscript that satisfied her. Eventually the ideas flowed smoothly, and the result was Parable of the Sower (1993).

Butler received a MacArthur fellowship in 1995. In 1998, her novel Parable of the Talents, which she described as a continuation of Parable of the Sower, was published by Seven Stories Press and republished by Warner in 2000. The novel won the Nebula Award for best novel, 1999. Also in 2000, the three novels in the Xenogenesis were collected under the title of Lilith's Brood and published by Warner Books.

Plot Summary

Chapters 1–3

Parable of the Sower begins in July 2024, in Robledo, in southern California. It is Lauren Olamina's fifteenth birthday. California has changed drastically over the past three decades. Water is scarce and expensive, there are few jobs, and climate changes have produced massive rains followed by years of drought. Lauren lives in a neighborhood that is walled off for protection from the homeless people, drug addicts, vandals, arsonists, and thieves who roam the unwalled residential areas. Lauren's father is a Baptist minister, and Lauren goes to church to be baptized, even though she no longer believes in the Christian God. The church is outside the wall, and the family goes armed. Many of the houses are burnt out and have been looted, and homeless families wander the streets. Lauren feels their pain because she suffers from "hyperempathy syndrome," also called "sharing."

Several weeks later, a neighbor named Mrs. Sims shoots herself. She was in despair after her family died in a house fire started deliberately. Meanwhile, Lauren tries to form a new concept of God. She decides that God is change, because the reality of life is that everything changes.

Chapters 4–9

In February 2025, Lauren goes to the hills with a neighborhood group for target practice, where they encounter a pack of feral dogs. They shoot one dog, and as it dies, the hyperempathic Lauren feels its pain. Guns are essential because the family cannot rely on the police to protect them. In Lauren's neighborhood, every household has at least two guns.

In March, after three-year-old Amy Dunn wanders off and is shot dead, Lauren talks with her friend Joanne Garfield about how they need to make plans to survive before their neighborhood is overrun by thieves and killers. She wants to learn how to live off the land, and she plans to create emergency packs of supplies should they have to leave in a hurry. She tries to enlist Joanne's help, but Joanne tells her parents, exaggerating what Lauren said. Lauren's father tells her to stop panicking people, but he does allow her to start teaching the neighborhood kids about her ideas.

When thieves rob the gardens, the community sets up an armed neighborhood watch. But the thieves keep coming, and Lauren is desperate to think of a way out. She develops her God-is-Change belief system further, calling it Earthseed.

Keith, Lauren' thirteen-year-old brother, slips out of the neighborhood, stealing Cory's key. He returns, beaten up. Two weeks later he disappears again for nearly two weeks. When he returns, he is wearing new clothes, but he will not say where he has been. His father beats him severely. Two months later, Keith leaves again, this time returning with money, which he gives to Cory. Then he leaves again.

Chapters 10–13

In June 2026, Keith returns after an eight-month absence. He has been squatting in an abandoned building with friends but will not say how he acquires his money. Later, he admits to robbing and shooting. In August, he is tortured and killed, probably by drug dealers.

There are more robberies, and by October the community is starting to come apart. The Garfields move to Olivar, a coastal suburb of Los Angeles, which has been bought by a company called KSF. Lauren fears that the company will cheat and abuse people. She decides that next year she will go north, maybe as far as Canada.

In November, Lauren's father disappears and is assumed dead. Lauren speaks at a church service for him, and she begins to emerge as a leader in the community. She takes over her mother's teaching responsibilities.

The day before Christmas Eve, the Olamina house is robbed. Another house, where the Payne and Parrish families live, burns down, leaving only one survivor.

Chapters 14–19

In July 2027, the entire neighborhood is overrun by violent intruders. Fires blaze everywhere. Lauren is one of the few to escape. When she returns, the place is littered with corpses, and scavengers are at work. Lauren gathers supplies, and as she leaves she meets Harry Balter and Zahra Moss. Learning that her entire family is dead, Lauren decides to head north, and Harry and Zahra go with her. Lauren cuts her hair so she can be taken for a man. They buy supplies and begin walking on the freeway, heading for the 101 that would take them up the coast toward Oregon. Hundreds of other people are walking the highways. Lauren has a gun and Harry a knife to protect themselves against predators. Lauren insists that they trust no one. At night, they take turns keeping watch. On their first night, they are attacked by two men. Lauren and Harry kill them both.

They replenish their water supplies from a commercial water station. It is a dangerous place, and Lauren and Harry help to scare off two men who attempt to rob a woman and her husband. They reach the ocean, and Lauren improves their survival skills by devising a method to make seawater drinkable. The couple they helped, Travis and Natividad, and their six-month-old baby, Dominic, join up with them, although the newcomers are suspicious at first. As the days go by, Lauren talks to her group about Earthseed. Travis and Zahra are interested, and Lauren regards Travis as her first convert.

There is an earthquake, and fire breaks out in a community as they pass. Scavengers flock to it and there is gunfire. Lauren meets another traveler, Taylor Franklin Bankole, and he stands guard as Lauren and her friends pull two young women, Allison and her sister, Jill Gilchrist, from the rubble of a house. A man attacks Lauren, and she kills him with her knife. Allison, Jill, and Bankole travel on with Lauren's group. They reach Salinas, where they replenish their supplies, using money they have taken from corpses.

Chapters 20–25

They avoid the Bay area because the earthquake has created chaos there. Camping just east of San Juan Bautista, they emerge unscathed after a nearby gunfight at night. Bankole brings in a three-year-old child, Justin Rohr, whose mother has just been killed. Allie soon takes charge of him.

They reach the San Luis Reservoir. A friendship springs up between Lauren and Bankole, and she explains her Earthseed philosophy to him. They become lovers, and he is shocked when he finds out she is only eighteen.

By September, they reach Sacramento. They pass some horrible sights, including a dog with a child's arm in its mouth and a group of kids who are roasting a severed human leg. Bankole tells Lauren that he owns three hundred acres of land in the coastal hills of Humboldt County, where his sister lives with her husband and three children. He wants her to leave the group and go with him. Lauren thinks it might be a good place to begin the first Earthseed Community.

The group is surprised to discover that a ragged woman, Emery Tanaka Solis, and her nine-year-old daughter, Tori, have crept into their camp at night. After some discussion, the group decides to take them along with them. The next day, they are joined by Grayson Mora and his eight-year-old daughter, Doe. Grayson does not trust the group but stays for the sake of his daughter. It later turns out that Grayson, like Lauren, is a "sharer," as are Emery and Tori.

Several days later, a man tries to grab Tori and attacks Emery. Lauren shoots him, and the rest of the group fight off the remainder of the gang, but Jill is shot dead. They continue on their way, narrowly escaping a raging fire before they arrive at Clear Lake. Eventually they reach Bankole's land, but the house has been destroyed and all his family killed. They decide to stay and build Acorn, their Earthseed community.

Characters

Harry Balter

Harry Balter is a young white man from the same neighborhood as Lauren. His girlfriend is his first cousin, Joanne Garfield, but they split up when the Garfield family moves to Olivar. Harry survives the violent attack on the neighborhood and is one of the original members of Lauren's group. His new girlfriend is Zahra Moss. Harry is more trusting than Lauren, and on the road he has to learn to become more ruthless.

Taylor Franklin Bankole

Taylor Franklin Bankole is a fifty-seven-year-old black doctor who joins Lauren's group halfway through their journey. Since he is much older than the others, he is able to give them steady advice and support. Bankole is from San Diego, and he left his community after it was destroyed by arson. Five years earlier, his wife died after being beaten by thieves. Bankole and Lauren are attracted to each other and soon become lovers. He tells Lauren that he is on his way to three hundred acres of land that he owns in the coastal hills of Humboldt County, California. He hopes to meet up with his sister and her family who live there. Lauren and the group make this their destination, but when they arrive, they find that the house has been destroyed and the family killed.

Dominic Douglas

Dominic Douglas is the six-month-old son of Natividad and Travis.

Gloria Natividad Douglas

Gloria Natividad Douglas, known as Natividad, is a Hispanic woman, the wife of Travis Douglas and the mother of Dominic. This family joins Lauren's group quite early in the trek. With her husband, Natividad used to work as a maid for a rich couple, but she ran away when the man tried to seduce her.

Travis Charles Douglas

Travis Charles Douglas is a black man, the husband of Natividad. He used to work as a handyman and gardener for a rich couple. Travis is suspicious of Lauren's group at first but soon warms to them. He becomes interested in Lauren's idea of Earthseed.

Amy Dunn

Amy Dunn is a three-year-old girl in Lauren's neighborhood. She sets fire to the family garage. Later, she is accidentally shot dead.

Tracy Dunn

Tracy Dunn is Amy Dunn's sixteen-year-old mother. She was only twelve when her uncle made her pregnant with Amy. After Amy's death, Tracy disappears and is never found.

Jay Garfield

Jay Garfield is the head of the Garfield family, who are friends with the Olaminas. Jay, who is white, leads the search for Lauren's father after he disappears. Later he takes his family to the company town of Olivar.

Joanne Garfield

Joanne Garfield is the daughter of Jay Garfield, the girlfriend of Harry Balter, and Lauren's friend. Her friendship with Lauren cools when she divulges to her parents details of Lauren's plan for survival. After that, Lauren does not trust her anymore. Eventually, Joanne moves to Olivar with her parents.

Allison Gilchrist

Allison Gilchrist, known as Allie, is Jillian's twenty-five-year-old sister. After her father killed her baby because it would not stop crying, the two sisters burned the house down while the drunken father slept. Fleeing a life of prostitution and poverty, they took to the road. When Lauren's group pulls Allie and Jill out of the rubble of a house hit by an earthquake, they join the group. Allie takes charge of Justin Rohr.

Jillian Gilchrist

Jillian Gilchrist is Allison's twenty-four-year-old sister. She shares Allie's history of poverty and abuse. Neither she nor her sister can write, although they can read a little. Jill is shot dead when the group is attacked by a gang.

Bianca Montoya

Bianca Montoya is a pregnant seventeen-year-old Latino girl in Lauren's neighborhood. She plans to marry her boyfriend, Jorge Iturbe, and continue to live in the neighborhood.

Doe Mora

Doe Mora is the eight-year-old daughter of Grayson Mora.

Grayson Mora

Grayson Mora is the Latino father of Doe Mora. He joins Lauren's group toward the end of their trek. He is quiet, aloof from the group, but protective of his daughter. Like Lauren, he has hyperempathy syndrome.

Richard Moss

Richard Moss is the father of Aura and Peter Moss. He has three wives, including Zahra, whom he bought from her homeless mother when she was fifteen. Moss is an engineer for a big commercial water company. He has also put together his own form of religion, which emphasizes patriarchy and the subordination of women. Moss is killed when the neighborhood is overrun.

Zahra Moss

Zahra Moss is the youngest of Richard moss's three wives. Ross bought her from her homeless mother. Her new home is the first house she has lived in. When the neighborhood is destroyed, Zahra sees her baby daughter killed. But she escapes and heads north with Harry, who becomes her boyfriend. Zahra cannot read or write until Lauren starts to teach her.

Cory Olamina

Cory Olamina is Lauren's stepmother. An educated woman with a Ph.D., she teaches the neighborhood children. When the neighborhood deteriorates, she wants to move to Olivar but cannot persuade her husband to go. After her husband disappears, she takes over the teaching side of his job. Cory is killed when the neighborhood is attacked and burned.

Gregory Olamina

Gregory Olamina is Lauren's youngest brother. He is killed when the neighborhood is overrun.

Keith Olamina

Keith Olamina is the oldest of Lauren's three brothers and Cory's favorite, although he and Lauren do not get along well. He is twelve when the story begins. Keith is not very intelligent and dodges work and school whenever he can. His ambition is to leave the neighborhood and go to Los Angeles and make money. When he is thirteen, he frequently leaves the neighborhood for long periods. He acquires money and new clothes, but he will not say where he got them. After a few months of living dangerously, he is tortured and killed, possibly by the drug dealers he thought were his friends.

Lauren Olamina

Lauren Olamina is fifteen years old when the story begins. She lives in Robledo, California, with her father, stepmother, and three brothers. Her dead mother was taking the prescription drug Paracetco, and this was why Lauren contracted "hyperempathy syndrome," which means that she feels the physical pain of others in her own body. On the advice of her father, she tries to keep this condition secret, since she thinks she might be perceived as weak. She only confides in people she trusts.

Lauren is an academically gifted student. She finished her high school work early and has taken college-level courses. She also reads voraciously and is extremely well informed about history and current events. Although her father is a Baptist minister, Lauren has already lost her faith in the Christian God. She develops her own religion called Earthseed, based on the idea that God is Change. Change is her watchword. Even before disaster hits their community, she is certain that she does not want to live the life that is expected of her: to marry young, have children, and live in impoverished circumstances in Robledo. She also guesses that her neighborhood will be destroyed in the near future, and she makes plans to escape, reading everything she can about how to survive in emergency situations and how to live off the land.

When the disaster happens, Lauren shows that she is strong willed and determined and that she possesses great leadership qualities. She is the undisputed leader of the small group that heads north along the freeway, seeking a better life. She is ruthless, she kills when she has to, and she ensures that her group does what it has to do to survive. Gradually, she also instills in her companions a sense of ethics and community. Although she is tough, she also cares about others and shows compassion. She is rewarded when the group arrives at Bankole's land, where she can put her dream of founding an Earthseed community into practice.

Marcus Olamina

Marcus Olamina is Lauren's brother. At thirteen, he is already handsome, and he attracts girls. His friend is Robin Balter, Harry Balter's sister. Marcus is killed when the neighborhood is attacked.

Reverend Olamina

Reverend Olamina is Lauren's fifty-seven-year-old father and the husband of Cory. He is a college professor and dean and a Baptist minister. A very strict father, he severely beats Keith for misbehavior, which produces a permanent estrangement between father and son. He has also beaten Lauren, but she does not hold it against him. Reverend Olamina is a tough-minded man who does his best to protect his family in difficult circumstances. His own parents were murdered fifteen years earlier, and his first wife was a drug addict. Olamina goes missing from the neighborhood one day and is never found. He is presumed dead.

Wardell Parish

Wardell Parish is a strange and solitary man who lives in Lauren's neighborhood. His sister and all her children are killed in a house fire.

Justin Rohr

Justin Rohr is a three-year-old boy who is taken in by Lauren's group after his mother is killed just outside San Juan Bautista.

Emery Tanaka Solis

Emery Tanaka Solis is the twenty-three-year-old mother of Tori Solis. She married at thirteen and bore three children. After her husband died, she worked for an agribusiness conglomerate that made a virtual slave of her. She fell into debt, and the company took her two sons. She then fled with her daughter and headed north. They are taken in by Lauren's group toward the end of their trek.

Tori Solis

Tori is the nine-year-old daughter of Emery Tanaka Solis.

Curtis Talcott

Curtis Talcott is Lauren's boyfriend in Robledo. He wants to marry her and leave Robledo, but she says she must stay and help her family until she is eighteen. Although she says she will marry him if he waits for her, her heart is not in it. There is too much of herself that she is unable to share with him. She never sees him again after the neighborhood is attacked and burned, and she assumes he was killed, though she never knows for certain.

Kayla Talcott

Kayla Talcott is the mother of Curtis Talcott. After Reverend Olamina disappears, Kayla takes over some of his preaching and church work, even though she is not ordained.

Themes

Change

Lauren rejects traditional religion. Based on her experience, she sees no relevance in a belief system focused on the Christian God. Instead, she forms her own religion based on her observation that everything in the universe changes. Change is the one constant in life. People can either accept change and work with it for the betterment of themselves and their community, or they can resist it, hoping in vain that things will carry on the way they always have done.

For Lauren, change is God. This God shapes humans and is in turn shaped by them. God is dynamic process, not a static, transcendental lawgiver and judge. Change is an irresistible force, and humans can harness it to promote the spiritual evolution of the race. According Lauren's Earthseed religion, each human life is a seed that can sprout into something valuable and productive if it can adapt to changing realities. By yielding to change, this human earthseed can also shape it constructively. The consequences of failing to do so are death and chaos. The ultimate expression of Earthseed, its destiny, is "to take root among the stars," to spread human life to other planets and galaxies.

Freedom

Lauren's trek north is a journey toward freedom. She is escaping the prison of a walled community in which there is no hope for a full, productive, free life. Most of the people her group accumulates on the way are fleeing from some kind of slavery or exploitation. Zahra Moss is escaping an oppressive marriage that rests on a belief in male superiority. Harry has turned down a chance to go to the company town of Olivar, in which the residents give up their freedom and their rights in order to buy security. Jill and Allie flee from a life of prostitution in which their pimp was their father; Travis and Natividad escape from menial service to a rich man who thought he had the right to seduce Natividad; Emery Solis and her daughter are escaping virtual slavery to an agribusiness that keeps them in permanent debt and even takes Emery's sons away. Bankole, too, is escaping from conditions of life similar to those that Lauren was enduring. He seeks freedom on the land he owns in the coastal hills. The members of Lauren's Earthseed community who decide to settle there will at least be free to shape their own destiny, although there is no guarantee they will survive.

Loss and Restoration of Community

The novel is divided into two halves. The first half, set in Robledo, shows how the social order in California in 2024 has broken down. Society is split into several groups. The rich live in walled estates, with lavish security systems. The middle classes, much threatened and impoverished, live in walled communities and try to maintain a semblance of normal life. But jobs are scarce, and no one has any prospects. Inflation has eroded the value of money, and essentials such as water are expensive. In Lauren's neighborhood, people try to grow as much of their own food as they can. For meat, they rely on eating rabbits. Everyone in the community over the age of fifteen is trained in how to use guns, since they cannot rely on a corrupt police force for protection against the thieves who regularly break into their community. Outside, in unwalled areas, the rule of law and the sense of community have totally collapsed. Homeless, dirty, desperately poor people roam the streets, along with drunks and drug addicts. Many are addicted to a drug that makes them commit arson, because they love to watch things burn.

The second part of the novel presents a gradually emerging contrast between the lawlessness and brutality of life amongst the traveling bands of refugees and the sense of community and mutual responsibility that eventually characterizes Lauren's group. Lauren's quest is to recreate what an ideal community should be. At first, because of the dangerous situation she is in, she is ruthless, trusting no one and looking out only for herself and her two companions. But as she continues to travel north, she does not shut out the voice of compassion. A key moment is when she pulls Allie and Jill out of the rubble of a house. Bankole, who has never lost his sense of values, says to her, "I was surprised to see that anyone else cared what happened to a couple of strangers." Another key moment comes when Emery and her daughter are found in the group's camp. Lauren goes out of her way to feed them, offering them two of the five sweet pears that she had bought only two days earlier. Seeing her example, other members of the group share what food they have. When Lauren puts out the idea that Emery and the girl could join their group, Harry tells her she is going soft. "You would have raised hell if we'd tried to take in a beggar woman and her child a few weeks ago." But Lauren is not going soft. She is simply demonstrating that in spite of the degradation and danger all around her, humans can still show that they care about each other. Then, when Jill is killed, Lauren comforts the grief-stricken Allie with a hug. The message she conveys is "In spite of your loss and pain, you aren't alone. You still have people who care about you and want you to be all right. You still have family." When Lauren's new "family," a heterogeneous, multiracial group that spans several generations, arrives at their destination, they have learned to take care of each other. They are ready to develop a community based not on fear or exploitation but on mutual respect and shared values.

Style

Dystopia

A dystopia is an unpleasant, sometimes frightening, imaginary future world. Dystopias usually take undesirable aspects of present-day society and depict a world in which those aspects have become dominant. In Parable of the Sower, Butler creates a dystopia by magnifying some disturbing social trends that occurred in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These trends included the widespread use of designer drugs (custom-made, mind-altering drugs such as Ecstasy). In the novel, use of the drug pyro reaches epidemic proportions. It makes people commit arson because doing so feels better than sex. Another trend in the 1990s was the increasing popularity, particularly in California, of gated communities protected by security fences. These become the walled communities in 2024 California. In both cases, the walls go up because of fear of crime. Homelessness, illiteracy, and global warming were other issues in the 1990s that appear in larger form in the novel.

Image and Metaphor

The novel takes its title from the parable of the sower in the gospel of Luke. The sower is like the spiritual teacher who spreads the word of truth. Some people listen; others do not—just as seeds take root in some places but not in others. In the New Testament, the sower is Jesus; in the novel, it is Lauren. The metaphor of the seed occurs again in the name Lauren gives to her new religion, Earthseed. It is also reflected in the name of the first Earthseed community: Acorn. The acorn image occurs earlier in the novel, too. Lauren loves to eat bread made with acorns rather than wheat or rye. Her father tells her that he had a difficult time persuading his neighbors to eat acorns. They wanted to cut down the oak trees and plant something else they considered more useful. Lauren learns from a book how to make acorn bread, and this helps to sustain their group as they travel north. The acorn image conveys the idea that the seeds of new life are always available, not only in nature but in humans, too.

Historical Context

Illiteracy

Rising rates of illiteracy became a matter of public concern in America in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1989, it was estimated that 13 percent of seventeen-year-old Americans could not read or write and that twenty million Americans had problems with literacy. Some could not read or write at all, and this often resulted from poverty or being in culturally disadvantaged families. Others were partially literate and could read street signs and grocery lists but not much more. Often this was due to undiagnosed learning disorders such as dyslexia. According to a 1987 National Assessment of Educational Progress government survey, although 96 percent of those between twenty-one and twenty-five years old had basic reading skills, less than 48 percent were capable of reading a map well enough to use it properly. In the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey by the Department of Education, over 40 percent of the adult population fell short of the literacy skills needed to succeed on a day-to-day basis.

Gated Communities

In the late 1980s, fear of rising crime in urban areas led to a growth in the number of gated residential communities in the United States, particularly in California and other western and southern metropolitan areas. These were communities where access was controlled through gates and security guards. Sometimes fences topped with barbed wire surrounded the community. An example of a gated community is Canyon Lake, located seventy miles east of Los Angeles. Created in 1968, it incorporated as a city of its own in 1990. Gated communities proved an effective deterrent against crime, and their numbers increased throughout the United States in the 1990s. In 1997, there were about twenty thousand gated communities, which increased to around fifty thousand by 2000.

Fear of Crime

Fear of crime was a prominent feature of life in the United States at the time Parable of the Sower was written. According to a 1994 Gallup Poll, 52 percent of the people in the United States named crime as the most important social problem, up from only 9 percent in a similar poll conducted eighteen months earlier. A 1993 poll showed that 87 percent of U.S. residents thought that crime was higher than a year earlier. This was not in fact true, since the crime rate fell from 1991 to 1994, but people thought it was true. There was a particularly strong fear in urban areas of street crime and random, gang-related violence. Fear of crime led legislators and the public at large to call for harsher punishments for criminals. In California, a "three strikes" law was passed in 1994. It mandated a sentence of twenty-five years to life for a third felony conviction if the previous felonies were serious or violent.

Homelessness

Homelessness in America increased drastically during the 1980s, to an estimated two million people in 1989. Some experts argue that the policies of the Reagan administration were to blame for cutting welfare programs and making massive cuts in the budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD was the main government sponsor of subsidized housing for the poor. The situation was not helped by the fact that poverty also increased during the 1980s. In 1978, 24.5 million people lived below the federal poverty line; by 1988 this had risen to 32.5 million. The gap between rich and poor also increased. Another factor in the rise of homelessness in the 1980s arose from concerns about the rights of the mentally ill. It became harder to commit people to mental hospitals against their will. The result was that many mentally ill people ended up on the streets. It is estimated that one-third of the homeless during the 1980s were mentally ill and that a similar proportion had problems with substance abuse.

Climate Change

Concerns about global warming, an increase in Earth's average surface temperature, were first raised in the 1980s. The phenomenon was also known as the "greenhouse effect." Many scientists believed that global warning was caused by an increase in emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide resulting from the burning of fossil fuels for energy production. In 1988, James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, told a U.S. Senate committee there was strong evidence that global warming was being caused by human activity. He warned that if global warming were not reversed, it would cause catastrophic climatic changes. Throughout the 1990s, scientists warned of extreme weather including floods, heat waves, droughts, and hurricanes that would occur as a result of global warning.

Critical Overview

Although Four Walls Eight Windows, the original publishers of Parable of the Sower, tried to present the book as similar to the fiction of other African American writers such as Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara, reviewers seemed still to regard it as science fiction. This did not prevent the novel from receiving high praise. For Faren Miller, in Locus, it "presents what is simply the most emotionally and intellectually appealing religion I've encountered in nearly four decades of reading sf." Miller commented on the grim nature of the world depicted and the religious issues Butler presents but added that the novel "functions beautifully as fiction, brimming with living characters and the crazy complexity of life."

Hoda Zaki, in Women's Review of Books, pointed out that Butler drew extensively on African American history:

[I]mages of slavery remind us of the U.S. past: slaves hiding their attempts at self-education and literacy, and fleeing cruel overseers; Lauren's band of survivors, which recalls the Underground Railroad; the pervasive feeling that freedom, work and security lie to the north.

Zaki also pointed out that Butler shows characters from a variety of racial backgrounds in positive roles that are not usually found in science fiction novels about the future. Zaki concluded, "In a world increasingly polarized ethnically and racially, [Butler's] work contributes a needed critical element to the genre of science fiction."

In a glowing review in the New York Times Book Review, Gerald Jonas commented that although religious awakenings are common in science fiction of the future, they are often arbitrary and conventional, but Butler "dares to take Lauren's revelations seriously," and this enables her to show how Lauren's ideas capture the allegiance of her followers. Jonas concluded that the novel succeeded on many levels: "A gripping tale of survival and a poignant account of growing up sane in a disintegrating world, it is at bottom a subtle and disturbing exposition of the gospel according to Lauren."

Criticism

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses Parable of the Sower in terms of dystopias, utopias, archetypal patterns, coming-of-age novels, and the character of the narrator, Lauren.

Butler is a writer of great originality whose work does not fit neatly into categories. Although she is usually referred to as a science fiction writer and Parable of the Sower was reviewed in the science fiction section of the New York Times Book Review, there is in fact little science fiction in it. Butler pays scant attention to the technological aspects of her near-future society, merely mentioning in passing "Window Wall" televisions and the newest "multisensory" entertainment systems that include such things as "reality vests" and "touch-rings." Much more important to Butler's purpose is the fact that almost no one in Lauren's Robledo community can afford these items.

Parable of the Sower properly belongs to the category of dystopia. Dystopias come in many forms. George Orwell's 1984 (1948), for example, depicts an oppressive, totalitarian society. A more recent form of dystopia is the "cyberpunk" novel, such as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992), in which highly sophisticated information technologies exist alongside environmental degradation, rampant crime, and the domination of ruthless corporations. Yet another form is the feminist dystopia, in which women are systematically oppressed, as in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) and Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World (1974).

Parable of the Sower resists easy classification, though, since it has elements of a number of different kinds of dystopias. It offers some censure of the political system, although that is not the author's main target. In Butler's 2020s, the federal government seems to have become irrelevant rather than oppressive. It wastes money on space programs and makes futile attempts to tackle homelessness and unemployment by passing legislation that restricts workers' rights.

The all-powerful corporation, at the heart of many "cyberpunk" dystopias, makes an appearance in the novel as the company town of Olivar, where people get protection from crime and unemployment but at the expense of individual rights and freedoms. The reader is left in no doubt that Lauren and Harry make the right choice when they elect not to go to Olivar. Feminist elements also appear in the novel, although it does not present a systematic portrait of the institutionalized oppression of women. Women have the opportunity to become astronauts and go on the latest mission to Mars. Indeed, a female astronaut is killed on Mars. But in contrast to that, Butler presents many examples of men behaving badly to women. Richard Moss, for example, adopts a quasi-religious patriarchal family system that creates a system of virtual slavery for his many wives. Apparently, this is a common practice amongst middle- and upper-class men. Butler delivers a crushing verdict on Moss when she describes him, after the catastrophe overwhelms Lauren's neighborhood, lying stark naked in a pool of his own blood. So much for patriarchy.

To add to the complexity of this novel, it might be pointed out that within the dystopia is also a vision of utopia. Utopian works, of which the prototype is Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1515–1516), depict an ideal society. Lauren's vision of Acorn, a self-reliant community built from scratch on a few hundred acres of farmland, in which the new, enlightened religion of Earthseed is to take root, is a utopian vision. It is still in the future, and there is no guarantee that it will succeed, but the verses from Lauren's "Earthseed: The Books of the Living," which appear as epigraphs to each chapter, are constant reminders that within this miserable dystopia a utopia is ready to spring up. Lauren, of course, thinks her religion is new, and some elements of it are, particularly the vision that it is the destiny of Earthseed to colonize the stars. But its central idea, "the only lasting truth is Change," was expressed over two-and-a-half-thousand years ago by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, whose famous phrase was "All is flux; nothing is stationary." Even in 2024, it appears that there is still nothing new under the sun.

Be that as it may, within the dystopian/utopian framework of her novel, Butler manages also to touch on the archetypal pattern that mythologist Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) described as the "monomyth." In the monomyth, the hero hears a call to adventure, leaves his familiar environment, and journeys to an unknown or unfamiliar realm, where he undergoes many trials. He then returns to his society to bestow a boon on his fellow man. It is not difficult to see a similar pattern, with some variation, in Parable of the Sower, as well as some of the standard elements in a coming-of-age novel. Lauren—a female protagonist, of course, not a male one—is only fifteen when the novel begins. On the threshold of maturity, she must decide what she believes and what she wants to do with her life. When another neighborhood girl, Bianca Montoya, gets pregnant at seventeen and decides to marry her boyfriend, Lauren knows that this is the life expected of her too—to marry young, have children, and remain in poverty. Lauren would sooner commit suicide than endure such a life. Like many a strong-willed fifteen- or sixteen-year-old, she clashes with her stern father, who, as the representative of the older generation, is more conservative and cautious than she. Lauren knows she must break with the old ways of doing things, just as she has already broken with the religion of her father, which does not speak to her personal experience. She boldly plans to encounter life beyond the walled neighborhood that is all she has ever known, and she does not falter when this "call to adventure" finally comes. When she shepherds her small group on their dangerous journey north, like the hero of the monomyth, she faces many dangers in an environment where the rule of law, and human kindness, no longer exists. The boon she brings is a vision of renewed hope for humanity—an agrarian, back-to-nature utopian community that will act as a counterpoint to corrupt cities and lawless countryside where all civilized values have been destroyed.

It is Lauren, then, who carries much of the interest in the novel. She is far more well developed by the author than any of the other characters, most of whom, except perhaps for Bankole, remain somewhat sketchy. (Bankole, incidentally, has something in common with the archetype of the wise old man. His ethical values are not impaired by the chaos around him, and it is he who guides the group to their safe haven.) Lauren is certainly an unusual, even strange, figure. She is something of a child prodigy, since even at fifteen she has a sophisticated understanding of the world and an emotional maturity well beyond her years.

As Lauren matures over a period of three years, she becomes a visionary, a prophet, and a charismatic leader, who also has formidable, practical organizing skills. No one in her group ever disputes that she is their leader, and she never lets them down, usually one step ahead of the others in anticipating danger and taking steps to avoid it.

In an interview with Rebecca O. Johnson, published in Sojourner: The Women's Forum, Butler commented on her character Lauren, but in a way that some readers might find surprising. She says she found it hard to write the book "because I knew I would have to write about a character who was power-seeking. I didn't realize how much I had absorbed the notion that power-seekers were evil." Butler thus found herself out of sympathy with her main character. She got around the problem by deciding that "power can be a tool.... [M]oney, knowledge, religion, whatever is common among human beings, can be beneficial or harmful to the individual and is judged by how it is being used."

An author's views of her own work must be respected, but it does not mean that other views are not possible. It might be interesting, for example, to discover how many readers reach the conclusion that Lauren is a power seeker. Certainly she has a missionary desire to promote certain ideas; she wants to persuade and lead, but those personal qualities do not of themselves make her a power seeker. Lauren's situation in life is as much forced on her by circumstances as created by her own will. Earthseed, the religion she creates, teaches humility before the irreducible fact of change. It does not sound like a religion that calls for a messiah figure or an autocratic leader.

If the creative and resourceful Lauren does seek power, it is not from any egotistical or selfish desire to dominate others. This would be doubly hard for Lauren since she is an empath. She has the capacity to feel the pain of the oppressed to an unusual degree. The origins of this "hyperempathy" lie in her mother's abuse of a drug named Paracetco when she was pregnant with Lauren. In creating this detail, Butler builds on a distressing fact that emerged in the early 1990s: Some babies born to cocaine-addicted mothers were addicted to cocaine from birth. Lauren emphasizes that her condition is a delusion (the doctors call it "organic delusional syndrome"), but delusions are real to those who suffer from them. She is also encouraged to keep her condition a secret, since it is perceived as a weakness. The pain of others has the power to disable her completely, but sometimes a person's greatest weakness is also the source of her greatest strength.

It is not hard to see in fifteen-year-old Lauren as she rides her bicycle in an unwalled area, absorbing the distressing scenes ("I tried not to look at them, but I couldn't help seeing—collecting—some of their general misery") an echo of the legend of the Buddha, who as a young man walking in the street was awakened to the reality of human life by the sight of old age, sickness, and death, from which he had previously been shielded. From this arose his desire to find the cause of suffering and the means by which it might be removed. Just as the compassion of one man gave rise to one of the world's great religions, so the vision of a young girl, in entirely different circumstances, in a different time and place, and in a different way, gives rise to Earthseed, a religion that embraces suffering as an inevitable part of the change that is the fundamental principle of life itself.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Parable of the Sower, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Madhu Dubey

In the following essay excerpt, Dubey identifies "current urban problems" in the changing communities of Parable of the Sower, and argues that "investing literature with broadbased social value" to resolve such dilemmas is problematic.

In "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston," first published in 1991, Hazel Carby seeks to account for the recent academic revival of Zora Neale Hurston's southern folk aesthetic. Carby argues that Hurston's writing, locating authentic black community in the rural south, displaced the difficulties of representing the complex and contested black culture that was taking shape in the cities and that the current academic reclamation of Hurston's work illustrates a parallel logic of displacement. Carby concludes with the suggestion that present-day critics of African-American literature and culture "begin to acknowledge the complexity of [their] own discursive displacement of contemporary conflict and cultural transformation in the search for black cultural authenticity. The privileging of Hurston . . . at a moment of intense urban crisis and conflict is perhaps a sign of that displacement."

Carby's provocative argument can be extended beyond its specific reference to the academic recovery of Zora Neale Hurston, and applied to the turn toward southern folk culture taken in so much of the criticism surrounding novels by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and others. Although most of these writers have published city novels, criticism on these novelists has tended to privilege those selected texts and textual elements that help consolidate a black feminine literary tradition derived from southern folk culture. Following Carby's logic, we might argue that these critical texts are executing a "discursive displacement" of problems of urban literary representation, but this displacement is itself an oblique form of response to the widely prevalent rhetoric of contemporary urban crisis. This rhetoric, magnetized around the notorious term "underclass," tends to frame the issue of urban crisis essentially as a crisis in black culture and community. In popular media and academic discourses, the underclass is commonly represented as a recalcitrant urban mass polarized against an expanding black middle class and caught in illicit culture of poverty. Given the public sway of these discourses, it is not surprising that so much recent African-American literature is framing urban crisis as a problem of representation, and grappling with the questions of whether and how the writer can bridge class divides and speak for, as well as to, a wider black urban community. This problem of representation is exacerbated by the fact that contemporary literary readerships are highly specialized and restricted as well as racially and culturally diverse, and are certainly not coextensive with "the black community."

The southern folk aesthetic exemplifies a "discursive displacement" of this crisis in literary representation in the sense that, if black community is perceived to be irreparably fractured in the contemporary city, the folk domain of the rural south operates as a site where integral black communities can be imaginatively restored. These face-to-face models of community are typically bound together by ties of place, distinctive cultural modes of knowing (clustered around the term "conjuring") and styles of communication (oral tradition). The turn toward southern folk culture works essentially to guarantee the writer's ability to identify, address, and speak for a wider black community. For example, Alice Walker declares, in a much-quoted passage from her essay "The Black Writer and the Southern Experience," that "what the black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community. Something simple but surprisingly hard, especially these days, to come by." If we accredit current discourses of urban crisis, black community does appear surprisingly hard to come by these days, requiring as it does difficult acts of mediation across intraracial class, regional, and cultural distinctions. The literary turn toward a rural southern past helps short-circuit this labor of mediation, furnishing community as the writer's "natural right." Alice Walker's, remembered image of wholesome southern community hinges on a "cooperative ethos" that mitigates intraracial class divisions, precisely the ethos that is often said to have dissolved in the contemporary city.

Houston Baker, in his study of black women novelists, specifies the type of community implicit in the southern folk aesthetic, as he opposes the "mulattoization"—or racial dilution—of black urban culture to "a field of 'particular' or vernacular imagery unique to the Afro-American imagination," a field Baker situates in the rural south. Even Addison Gayle, a prominent advocate of the city-based Black Aesthetic of the 1960s, has more recently argued that black southern folklore gives us "the genesis of a racial literature"; despite "the fact that modernization, urbanization, and all the concomitant evils have come to the South," the African-American writer who taps into southern folklore can be "one with his community, and his works . . . validated and legitimized by the community itself." As these passages suggest, the southern folk aesthetic stakes a claim to crisis-free literary representation, and strives to recover, in Toni Morrison's words, "a time when an artist could be genuinely representative of the tribe and in it." Morrison's use of the word "tribe" (and, elsewhere, "village") invokes a metaphor of organic community that serves to secure the contemporary writer's claims to literary representation, and that bespeaks the difficulty of affirming the writer's social function within the more complex and conflicted conditions of contemporary urban community.

The critical currency of the southern folk aesthetic has obscured those African-American novelists who explicitly engage the difficulties of writing an urban fiction that cannot configure its reading audience as an organic racial community. In this essay, I shall focus on one such novelist, Octavia Butler, whose recent novel, Parable of the Sower (1993), addresses several concerns feeding into a contemporary crisis of urban literary representation. Octavia Butler is a prolific writer whose novels have usually been targeted at a restricted science-fiction readership and, with the exception of Kindred, have therefore remained outside the critical purview of the African-American women's fictional tradition. Butler's latest novel merits attention because its unusual approach to questions of community broadens and complicates influential current accounts of black women's literary tradition. If, as Hazel Carby contends, southern folk aesthetics exemplify a discursive displacement of urban crisis, Parable of the Sower attempts squarely to confront this crisis through its starkly dystopian urban setting. The novel self-reflexively deploys scientific modes of knowing and textual forms of communication (rather than the magical epistemology of "conjuring" or oral tradition) in order to assess the writer's role in mediating urban crisis. The novel forcefully rejects localist and organic notions of community, reaching instead for more complex ways of representing communities that are not coextensive with places or with discrete cultural traditions. In what follows, I treat Parable of the Sower as a lens that clarifies the dangers of advancing folk resolutions to current urban problems. I then go on to examine Butler's resolution to dilemmas of urban literary representation, which depends on the very same model of organic community that her novel struggles to discredit as an unrealistic and undesirable ideal. As I shall argue, the contradictory terms of this resolution reveal not only the difficulty of investing literature with broad-based social value within contemporary urban conditions, but also the constraints placed by current discourses of urban crisis on the African-American literary imagination.

If the urban migrations of the first half of the twentieth century constituted a mass movement of African-Americans from "medieval America to modern" as well as a collective effort to seize "the larger and more democratic chance," the reverse literary turn toward the rural south in the last decades of this century may be read as a form of "desperate pastoralism" born out of acute disenchantment with the failed promise of urban modernity for African-Americans. As so many urban historians have observed, the American city at the end of the twentieth century is typified by two contradictory but interdependent trends—hardening racial and economic divisions on the one hand, and on the other a promiscuous intercourse between cultural signs of racial difference that maintains the mirage of a "consumer democracy." Locating authentic black community in a segregated folk domain, the southern aesthetic enables writers to divest from the illusory pluralism promised by the contemporary city.

Parable of the Sower similarly exposes the hollowness and duplicity of recent American ideologies of urban development. The novel takes as its point of departure an uncannily credible future in which ideals of the American city as a "consumption artifact" have devolved into a precarious urban order founded on economic and racial inequality. Octavia Butler has said in an interview that in this novel she "made an effort to talk about what could actually happen or is in the process of happening." The dystopia presented in Parable of the Sower is so closely extrapolated from current trends, as Stephen Potts observes, that it produces a shock of familiarity rather than estrangement. Butler identifies the walling of communities as one process that is actually and already occurring in contemporary urban America. And, in fact, the novel's depiction of walled neighborhoods as spatial manifestations of a segregated urban order based on unequal distribution of economic resources uncannily resembles both John Edgar Wideman's journalistic description of contemporary Los Angeles as a city structured by "invisible walls" and Mike Davis's grim account of "Fortress L.A."

Set in Robledo, a "little city" near Los Angeles, during the years 2024–27, the first half of Parable of the Sower presents a walled neighborhood whose residents armed themselves to protect their property against threats of looting and arson. The streets outside this enclave are occupied by an urban underclass made up of "the street poor—squatters, winos, junkies, homeless people in general" who are "desperate or crazy or both." Inhabitants of the walled neighborhood are too fearful of street violence to send their children to the few schools that still exist; few jobs are available even for the educated. Past patterns of production and consumption have so thoroughly stripped the earth of its natural resources that even water has become an expensive commodity. Vegetable gardens, fruit trees, and livestock provide the means of subsistence for the relatively well-to-do, such as the residents of Robledo, whose struggle to preserve their property, their families, and their community ends when their neighborhood is destroyed by pyromaniacs, users of a popular drug that stimulates arson.

Projecting widespread scarcity and heightened class and racial antagonisms as the probable results of current patterns of production and consumption, the novel thoroughly discredits the enduring image (revived in recent times) of the city as a marketplace of abundant and diverse consumer options. It is the gated community rather than the vibrant and heterogeneous marketplace that Butler presents as the epitome of contemporary urbanism. Lauren Olamina, the eighteen-year old protagonist and narrator of the novel, describes Robledo as "a tiny, walled, fish-bowl cul-de-sac community." The novel's only other extended image of urban order is equally, if not more, dystopian. Olivar, a city bought out and controlled by a multinational company, offers its citizens employment, a "guaranteed food-supply," and security from the "spreading chaos of the rest of Los Angeles County." But the safety of a company town like Olivar is based on a system of labor exploitation that seems "half antebellum revival and half science fiction." Corporations pay their workers wages that barely meet living expenses, forcing them into a cycle of debt slavery that perpetuates their dependence on the company. The order of this privatized city is maintained by the suspension of "'overly restrictive' minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws," so that corporations can do away with money wages altogether and hire labor in exchange for room and board.

The gated communities of Olivar and Robledo sketch a future scenario in which American cities can no longer continue to function as systems supporting an equitable organization of production and consumption. In response, the novel's protagonist urges other characters to seek more viable economic and ecological alternatives, such as living off the land. This turn to a simple agricultural economy is certainly a logical consequence of the novel's refusal to equate current directions of urban development with the promise of progress. Lauren's mother remembers a past when this urban promise seemed tangible, when cities were "a blaze of light." In the novel's present, however, "lights, progress, growth" are discredited as the thwarted goals of urban development. In its critique of an urban order rationalized by ideologies of conspicuous consumption and in its turn to a modest agricultural order, Parable of the Sower decidedly recalls novels such as Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, which affirm primitive social orders situated in an imaginary rural south as alternatives to contemporary capitalist cities organized as artifacts of consumption. As Susan Willis has argued, seemingly nostalgic images of the rural south in black women's fiction often serve as Archimedean levers for criticizing urban capitalism.

Parable of the Sower shares this critique but refuses the polarization of rural and urban spheres that bolsters the southern folk aesthetic. Raymond Williams warns, in The Country and the City, that "we need not, at any stage, accept the town and country contrast at face value," because literary constructions of this contrast so often repress the realities of agricultural labor and thereby blind us to the functional interdependence of country and city in advanced capitalist economies. Butler is careful not to disguise the harsh facts of agricultural labor or to represent the rural sphere as an elsewhere to the urban capitalist economy. Emery, the only farm worker in the novel, has worked for an agribusiness conglomerate that paid wages in company scrip and practiced a form of exploitation through debt as pernicious as the debt slavery common in privatized cities such as Olivar. By means of such exact parallels between conditions of labor in rural and urban areas, the novel resists constructing an idealized fiction of the countryside to ground its opposition to urban capitalism.

Butler even more emphatically refuses the retrospective stance that typically characterizes rural-based critiques of urban conditions. Commenting on the literary method of using a fabricated rural past as a "stick to beat the present," Raymond Williams remarks on its tendency to turn "protest into retrospect," a tendency that curtails the radical reach of rurally grounded critiques of urban capitalism. In Parable of the Sower, Butler clarifies the strongly conservative (and conservationist) ideologies that tend to accompany a retrospective critical stance toward the present. The adults in Robledo are "still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back"; as Lauren frequently points out, this backward vision prevents them from reckoning with the many changes that have already occurred and from imagining future social transformation.

In explicit opposition to the "dying, denying, backward-looking" posture of her community, Lauren searches for a belief system that can "pry them loose from the rotting past" and push them into building a different and better future. To this end, Lauren establishes her own religion, which she names Earthseed. This name comes to her as she is working in her garden and thinking of the way "plants seed themselves, away from their parent plants." Based on her observation that "A tree cannot grow in its parents' shadows," Lauren envisions members of the Earthseed community (which, at this point in the novel, exists only in her imagination) as "Earthlife . . . preparing to fall away from the parent world," "earthseed cast on new ground," far from the familiar spaces of home, family, and neighborhood.

Butler's seed metaphor carries both a critical and a constructive response to conditions of urban crisis that strikingly diverges from the southern folk resolution to urban problems, crystallized around the metaphors of roots and ancestry. Taking their cue from Toni Morrison's essays, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" and "City Limits, Village Values," critics including Karla Holloway, Joanne Braxton, and Farah Jasmine Griffin configure the ancestor as a repository of southern folk tradition and a means of combating the presumed fracture of black urban community. The ancestor, as a bearer of collective folk memory, helps displaced city-dwellers to preserve their roots in the rural south; these roots support the foundation of "village" models of home, family, and community that alone can withstand urban alienation and dislocation. In this conception of the ancestor as the root or foundation of urban community, a remembered and imagined rural past grounds a critique of the capitalist city as well as an alternative vision of social order.

In contrast, Butler's critique of the capitalist city does not take its bearings from the past (whether real or imagined). If the metaphor of roots points toward consolidation of past values as a positive response to present urban problem, in Parable of the Sower, attachment to the "apparent stability" of home, family, and neighborhood obstructs action directed at change. Like the gated community, home, too, in this novel is figured as "a cul-de-sac with a wall around it." This is not to suggest that Lauren does not draw emotional solace from her home, family, and neighborhood. Butler has said in an interview that family seems to her to make up "our most important set of relationships" and, in fact, other novels by Butler have been criticized for the heavy redemptive weight they place on family. Parable of the Sower fully grants the sustaining value of home and family, but the novel sketches an emergency scenario of such wholesale urban devastation that these constructs cannot offer refuge from or guide a viable critique of dystopian urban conditions. As exemplified by the reactions of the adults in Robledo, people often react to perceived crisis by conserving familiar structures and values in an attempt to fend off the inevitability of change. This defense of traditional values associated with an idealized past often serves dubious political ends, as is obvious from contemporary discussions of the urban "underclass" that promote familial stability (associated either with rural southern life or with a "golden age of the ghetto") as a resolution to structural economic and political problems. The seed metaphor in Parable of the Sower suggests a valuable corrective to such approaches, urging as it does the necessity of discarding ideas and ideologies rooted in the past that aim only to stabilize, not to transform, present social conditions. Home and family in Butler's novel cannot escape or counter the systemic logic of urban poverty and unemployment. The novel delineates the broad national and international economic processes that impinge on every home and every neighborhood, clarifying the futility (and impossibility) of constructing urban communities on "village" foundations. Lauren's aspiration to seed herself away from the shadow of home and family signals her readiness to relinquish available mirages of stability and to embrace drastic change and rupture if these are the only means to future survival and growth. This readiness is expressed in the central principle of Lauren's Earthseed religion: "When apparent stability disintegrates, as it must—God is Change."

Both the name of Lauren's religion, Earthseed, and its governing metaphor of seeding suggest notions of place and community other than those inhering in the roots metaphor, which consolidates cultural and ancestral traditions as bulwarks against modem urban forces of displacement. Lauren's religion assumes mobility across space as its necessary and enabling condition. Recognizing that all visionary schemes of social transformation require an imagined elsewhere to inspire and focus action, Lauren writes that the "heaven" or "destiny" of Earthseed is "to take root among the stars." By this Lauren literally means that the future of the human race lies in extrasolar space. The importance of this image of heaven is its orientation toward a future space that can only be reached by means of modern technology. The extraterrestrial direction of Earthseed, a common enough science fiction device, hyperbolically conveys the expansive globalism of the novel's vision, a vision far removed from the localism of folk models of place-bound community.

I do not mean to suggest here that mobility is in itself a forward-looking urban value or that localism is necessarily aligned with nostalgic folk models of community. In fact, urban community movements have often sought to conserve the use values attached to specific neighborhoods as the only available means of resisting the instability of an urban space that is repeatedly deformed and reformed by the dictates of capitalist exchange value. As Logan and Molotch have persuasively argued, contradictions between use and exchange values, between place as the site of lived community and place as commodity, are at the root of "truly urban conflict." Poor neighborhoods inhabited by racial minorities have been especially vulnerable to the rapid conversions of urban space over the last two or three decades; the forcible dislocation of these residents has been the invariable byproduct of urban renewal and gentrification projects intended to raise property values. In this kind of urban context, mobility can hardly be affirmed as a more progressive stance than efforts to defend the use values of places and communities against the dis-embedding forces of capitalist spatial turnover.

This conflict between urban use and exchange values is dramatized in a recent novel, Tumbling, by Diane McKinney-Whetstone, which depicts a low-income black residential neighborhood in Philadelphia that forms the site of a closely knit community modeled on the southern "village." Residents band together to protest and obstruct an urban renewal project undertaken by real-estate developers and subsidized by the city administration, which threatens to raze the neighborhood. Despite the residents' efforts, their neighborhood church is bulldozed to clear the space for highway construction. Tumbling ends with the lines, "They would not be moved. No way, no way." In the novel's closing scene, residents form a makeshift community on the debris of the church in a last-ditch and ultimately futile effort to defend the use value of their neighborhood—futile because the community lacks the political and economic power to overcome the urban "growth machine" jointly run by "place entrepreneurs," city officials, and political leaders.

It is because neighborhoods and communities are imbricated in wider and unequally structured grids of exchange value and political power that struggles to preserve local value and communal integrity are almost always unsuccessful. For this reason, Parable of the Sower insists that readiness to move—to outer space, if need be—is crucial to survival in modern capitalist cities. Like Tumbling, the first part of Parable laments the inevitable defeat of movements to maintain local and communal self-sufficiency. The Robledo neighborhood cannot be sustained because its relative financial and social stability is structurally interconnected to the extreme instability of the poor and the pyromaniacs who throng outside the walls of Robledo and who eventually raid and burn down the neighborhood.

Just before the destruction of Robledo, Lauren Olamina preaches a funeral sermon for her father (who has disappeared and is presumed dead) and for the ideal of self-contained, stable, place-bound community that Lauren associates with an older way of life. Lauren's sermon commemorates her father's attempts to preserve the integrity and durability of locale and community: "We have our island community, fragile, and yet a fortress. Sometimes it seems too small and too weak to survive. . . . But . . . it persists.... This is our place, no matter what." This is, however, a funeral sermon and Lauren is mourning the death of traditional conceptions of community rooted in a fixed and impermeable sense of place. At the end of her sermon, a member of the community begins to sing the spiritual, "We Shall Not Be Moved," to which Lauren mentally responds, "We'll be moved, all right. It's just a matter of when, by whom, and in how many pieces." Appropriately enough, then, the first half of the novel traces the literal destruction of Lauren's home, neighborhood, and community in Robledo, and the second half describes her journey north (with a band of fellow travelers she picks up on the way) toward a new home and community. The novel ends soon after the group reaches its destination. The entire action of the novel reveals the impossibility of maintaining "village" ideals of bounded community rooted in a stable locale. In this sense, even as it presents the complete collapse of actual cities, the novel insists on an urban understanding of place as the inescapable basis for constructing alternative images of social order.

In contrast to the Robledo community, based on the principle of self-contained localism, the journey section that constitutes the bulk of the novel presents community as process rather than settlement. This section traces the contingent formation of a community on the move—"born right here on Highway 101," as Lauren puts it—unified not by its attachment to past or place but by a common set of practical objectives that must be continually adjusted to meet changing circumstances. When Robledo burns down, halfway through the novel, Lauren runs into two survivors of the neighborhood, Harry and Zahra, who share her will to move toward a better life. The other fourteen people who join the group in the course of the journey north are distinguished primarily by the fact that most of them are racially mixed, and therefore "natural allies" in a society that frowns on miscegenation. Most members of the group have suffered some form of injustice, whether caused by poverty, forced prostitution, child abuse, or debt slavery. The sole purpose that unifies this group of diverse people is their shared resolve to move toward a better future.

Even though the itinerary of this "crew of a modern underground railroad" is explicitly calculated to bypass cities, which are sites of danger, their operation as a community is emphatically urban in most crucial respects. Despite the natural reference of its name, Earthseed is definitely not an organic community unified by collective memory, ethnicity, shared cultural heritage, or attachment to place. If, in order to resist the "mulattoization" of urban community, the southern folk aesthetic strives to recuperate cohesive racial communities consisting of cultural insiders, the Earthseed community, in contrast, is racially and culturally mixed and thus demands constant efforts of mediation and translation. The boundaries of this community, the porous lines between insiders and outsiders, friends and enemies, must be continually redrawn; they must "embrace diversity or be destroyed." The process of finding unity in diversity is necessarily risky and difficult, requiting the ability to interpret unfamiliar cultural codes and the alert balancing of suspicion and trust typical of urban social interactions. This group makes collective decisions by way of rational argument and persuasion rather than by appeals to past precedent or tradition.

Given the novel's insistence on this thoroughly urban conception of community, the settlement established by Lauren and her Earthseed community at the end of the novel surely appears puzzling. The journey that takes up most of the second half of the novel ends in Humboldt County in northern California, on a piece of property owned by Bankole, one of the group of travelers who journey north with Lauren. Bankole offers the group (which by the end of the novel consists of four men, five women, and four children) rent-free use of his land. Several geographical features of Bankole's property make it a suitable (though not ideal) place for establishing an Earthseed community. Most importantly, arable land and a dependable water supply make the property amenable to gardening and farming. The economy projected at the end of the novel is small-scale, primitive, and self-sufficient in the sense that farming, breeding livestock, and building shelters are expected to take care of basic production and consumption needs. It is clear that jobs paying money are scarce in neighboring towns and, given that several members of the community are former debt slaves or throw-away laborers, working Bankole's land seems preferable to selling labor to "strangers" who "shouldn't be trusted." One of the more valuable characteristics of Bankole's land is its isolation; because it is "far removed from any city" and "miles from everywhere with no decent road," it is relatively immune to attack from outsiders. That the area's distance from cities constitutes a strongly emphasized advantage is not surprising considering that cities, as centers of asymmetrical accumulation, have been shown throughout the novel to be the most vulnerable to criminal violence targeting the scarce commodity. The Earthseed community plans to guard its settlement by assigning members to keep watch at night and later by training dogs to protect the property.

How is this settlement different from the walled and heavily guarded neighborhood of the beginning of the novel? We have seen that the Robledo community was destroyed because its goal of local self-sufficiency was unviable given its dependence on a wider, starkly inequitable economic order. The community at the end of the novel does acknowledge, though it does not adequately reckon with, the inevitability of such connections. Despite some affinities with arcadian rural communities such as the island of Willow Springs in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, the Earthseed community cannot be regarded as arcadian, in that it does not assume the essential moderacy, simplicity, or stability of human needs. The potentially destabilizing desire to accumulate surplus, on the part of individuals and the group, is expressed in Harry's remark that he wants a job outside the community that will pay money as well as in the community's plan to sell surplus produce in nearby towns. The members of the Earthseed community insist on the provisional nature of their settlement; as Lauren points out, there are "no guarantees," and should their experimental community fail (as most member of the group expect it to do), they will have to be prepared to move on.

Yet the Earthseed community also aims impossibly to maintain local self-containment and stability. The novel's concluding image of community does not suggest a more workable balancing between use and exchange value, between localism and mobility, than does its opening image of the walled cul-de-sac neighborhood. As we have seen, Butler's representation of Robledo forcefully repudiates notions of place-bound community, and the journey section of the novel reaches for a more complex way of imagining community that is not coextensive with place, and place that is conceived as a "concrete abstraction" rather than as a self-enclosed site of social meaning. Butler wrestles with the difficulties of writing a fiction adequate to this understanding of place and community, yet the Earthseed settlement at the end of the novel ends up establishing an insulated, agrarian, face-to-face model of community that is not so different, after all, from the organic communities associated with southern folk aesthetics. In this respect, the Earthseed community is symptomatic of the difficulty that limits the contemporary literary imagination seeking utopian urban alternatives. Its small-scale, self-sufficient, agrarian ideal is rife with contradictions: even if we know that any truly alternative social vision requires wholesale transformation of global economic order, we end up thinking small because the abstraction of this order makes it difficult to grasp and imagine large-scale change. Or, in Manuel Castells' succinct expression, "When people find themselves unable to control the world, they simply shrink the world to the size of their community."

Source: Madhu Dubey, "Folk and Urban Communities in African-American Women's Fiction: Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring 1999, pp. 103–28.

Lisbeth Gant-Britton

In the following essay, Gant-Britton explores how Butler creates "new patterns for the future" for African Americans in Parable of the Sower.

Ideas [are weapons] and their creators run the world. Christianity is an idea. Islam is an idea. Buddhism and Hinduism are ideas . . . Capitalism and Socialism were ideas before they became reality . . . One's place in the world is partly due to the ideas that a culture has forced on one, and/or the ideas that a person 'freely' accepts and uses.

Haki R. Madhubuti, Claiming Earth

Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action—a perilous act.

Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice

Many writers are speculating these days about what the United States may be like in the twenty-first century. However, few of them are African American, and fewer still are black women. Octavia Butler is one of them. Her novel Parable of the Sower, like its 1998 sequel Parable of the Talents, offers a vision of one potential American future, one which may take women of colour and other marginalized peoples beyond ourselves as we are constituted today. The only African American woman with a substantial body of science fiction writing to date (ten novels), Butler has a vision worth examining. She considers the central question of how a black woman writer may project a liberated and liberating future while at the same time figuratively endeavouring to suture the still-open wounds of an embattled past and problematic present.

Reviewing the literature by African American women writers, I noted that until recently, fiction by multiply-oppressed women has been more concerned with re-envisioning the past or finding voice in present oppositional discourses, than it has been with imagining a world of the future. Many black women writers have seen literature as the primary way they could re-envision an egregious history. This work is definitely vital and ongoing, and I believe it should go on. But at the same time, we stand at the border of a new millennium. And even though that millennium is itself an ideological construction, it does provide an 'in-between' space—as postcolonial and cultural critic Homi Bhabha puts it in The Location of Culture—a present-future juncture which becomes the terrain, if you will, for elaborating new 'strategies of selfhood' and 'new signs of identity.' These moments are 'innovative sites of collaboration and contestation,' as Bhabha says, 'in the act of defining the idea of society itself' (1994, pp. 1–2). Further, as Paul Ricoeur observes in Time and Narrative, each fictive temporal experience unfolds its own world, its own 'time.' This 'time' is meaningful to the extent that it portrays features of each text's unique temporal experience in relation to the cultural dilemma under consideration in the narrative.

In terms of an American context, at the present time, black Americans are situated at one of the most paradoxical junctures we have inhabited since the Reconstruction. Many African Americans in the middle and upper classes enjoy unprecedented material prosperity and societal influence. Indeed, in 1996, a black man was publicly considered as the Republican party's possible presidential, then vice-presidential candidate. At the same time, though, a post-civil rights backlash surged that has included some 200 black churches being burned. Against the backdrop of this paradox of progress, we hurtle through time. What kinds of futures are we, as a society, creating in the process?

Hortense Spillers notes that for many years black women writers have had no choice but to develop their own tradition of diegesis to narrativize the complexity of African American women's experiences in order to combat the mental oppression of already-circulating mis-characterizations. She aptly points out that new traditions of agency are not born. They are made in the face of social and cultural assaults—even if they must be fashioned as a patchwork of 'discontinuities':

'[T]radition' for [the] black women's writing community is a matrix of literary discontinuities that partially articulate various periods of consciousness in the history of an African-American people. This point of paradox not only opens the future to the work to come, but also reminds us that symbolic discontinuity is the single rule of terministic behavior that our national literature has still to pursue. The day it does so, the reader and writer both will have laid sight on a territory of the literary landscape that we barely knew was possible. (Spillers' emphasis, 1985, p. 251).

That our literary 'landscape' might one day evolve into something 'we barely knew was possible,' as Spillers puts it, is an appropriate metaphor for the central questions in Parable of the Sower. How does one begin to make a new tradition out of a legacy of discontinuities?

Octavia Butler's novel, Parable of the Sower is an exploration of continuity amidst discontinuity. It is set in a decidedly dystopic future. In fact, in this novel, Los Angeles and its surrounding areas are the trope of a failed future. The entire West coast, and a good portion of the rest of the country, is barely livable in the year 2025. L.A. of course, was once an icon of utopian promise in America itself. But in this twenty-first century situation, all that is left are remnants of the reification of such an ideal. The city's infrastructure has crumbled, services are at a standstill, water costs twice as much as gasoline (which is largely unavailable anyway), and those few families who still have jobs are huddled together in makeshift walled communities to keep out the majority of the population, which is homeless, drug-crazed and violent. The wealthy lived in armoured walled enclaves, with privatized police and fire departments.

At first glance, all that we may perceive in Butler's novel is a legacy of compromise and practicality. Yet we also glimpse an immense potential hidden in this narrative. Parable contains innovative strategies of agency for women of colour, but they are embedded within the work. Such hidden futurity is vitally important because it signals dormant subjectivity within otherwise seemingly impenetrable circumstances of domination. By subjectivity one may include moving from victimization to agency or autonomy. Charles Scruggs develops a similar idea in Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel when he argues:

in the novels of Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, and Morrison, the visionary city is always present within the tangible, and often terrible, conditions of black urban life. The critique of a society or of social conditions—even the realistic depiction of the most wretched horrors—inevitably implies something different and better . . . Often the visionary city lies dormant, asleep; but it contains within its dormant state the potency of dream and the possibility of making the dream manifest, if only temporarily (1993, pp. 2–3).

Scruggs's definition of an invisible city is an example of the invisible agency we may uncover in Parable. Possible new paradigms are born when the central characters stare straight into the face of impossibility (in the case of overcoming a failed economy for example) and effect change anyway. One may argue that the changes Butler's characters make are barely enough for the protagonists to save themselves. But that is precisely the point. In these novels, this hidden theorizing, these deeply-embedded new goals, often manifest themselves as no more than the presence, rather than absence of alternatives. But for many exploited people, change is often a matter of starting with almost nothing and making incremental advancements. As D. Soyini Madison comments in The Woman That I Am:

I remember my mother . . . speaking quietly but forcefully in a tone that could scare a bull. She would wilfully declare: 'Being the woman that I am I will make a way out of no way.' These were mother's words, but they are also the words and the will of all women of color who assert who they are, who create sound out of silence, and who build worlds out of remnants (1994, p. 1).

As Madison's observation attests, potentially fruitful agency is hidden within her mother's simple declaration. The unarticulated aspects of the older woman's commentary are rich with the unspoken but potentially instructive theory of a women of colour. Such embedded theories may include continued efforts to heal still unresolved aspects of black women's various pasts, while many of these women continue striving, if only for limited agency, in the present and future.

These embedded theories relate to what Bhabha characterizes as 'in-between' spaces which are opened up at this present-future juncture and which provide the terrain for elaborating what he calls new 'strategies of selfhood,' 'new signs of identity; and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself' (1994, pp. 1–2). Indeed, this transformational potential against all odds which Butler builds upon, has been the mainstay of many black writers' indomitable challenge to a past and present that do not seem capable of being significantly changed.

In Black Looks, bell hooks describes the 'response to the traumatic pain and anguish that remains a consequence of white racist domination' (1992, p. 169). She suggests that the residue of this pain and anguish continues to inform and shape the psychic state of black people, influencing how we view the world, and I would add, the future. This residue is also continually 'stirred up' by contemporary sociopolitical problems which recur, and which unfortunately still include issues such as the enslavement of peoples of colour in America and other countries, even in this day and age. Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror describes this continuing residue in psychoanalytic terms as 'phobic,' specifically naming the dilemma 'abjection.'

The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, 'fear'—a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confronts that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject (1982, p. 6).

Butler's project is consistent with both of these issues. It is concerned with the transfer of trauma from one generation to the next, as demonstrated by Parable's main characters. The black father dies, having only managed to keep his family alive during society's rapid deterioration. His daughter Lauren, the protagonist, carries on in his name. But she boldly attempts to mould a new future instead of coping with the present. The daughter's decidedly forward-looking vision contrasts with Toni Morrison's concept of 'rememory' in Beloved, in which discursive healing is seen almost exclusively as a backward-looking project to allow African American men and women to engage and re-envision what Morrison calls 'unspeakable things unspoken.'

But in Butler's Parable of the Sower, we see a shift of that past-oriented temporality of 'rememory' forward. We then have a model which allows readers to conceptualize the future in a broader manner. Butler's model privileges proactive rather than reactive thinking. This different attitude is potentially more empowering for the novel's characters of colour, since it assumes a certain authority on the part of previously marginalized peoples to engage and shape critical sociopolitical issues, in an effort to be part of the transformational process rather than to be at the mercy of it. As Susan Willis states in Specifying, black women's writing in particular often imagines the future within the present. It sees the future born out of the context of oppression. It produces utopia out of the transformation of the most basic features of daily life—everything we tend to take for granted (1987, p. 159).

Butler's novel focuses primarily on the Olamina family, and in particular, on daughter Lauren. The Olamina parents are an African American professor and his second wife, a Latina. Both have doctorates and own their own home. Despite regular assaults by homeless people, the father refuses to leave what little security he knows to seek what might be a safer place farther north. In the twentieth century, the elder Olaminas—a multiracial, professional couple—would most likely be characterized as progressive. But in the twenty-first century, they represent the last generation of Americans to have been socialized into what Butler describes as a dying capitalism. In fact, their daughter regards them as clinging to a conservative world view that focuses narrowly on the past and present, rather than one which embraces change as necessary for the future.

Daughter Lauren has been born into this post-technological age. She is ready to embrace Bhabha's 'vision and construction . . . to take [her] beyond' herself. She is already conscious of the ways in which the decaying dominant socioeconomic system in the novel structures her subordination through its abandonment of poor and working people. For instance, Lauren observes how the country's cloistered twenty-first century elite configures the master narrative of 'progress' as a panacea for the future, so it privileges the European and Japanese transnational corporations who set about to privatize entire American cities and towns. From her subject position as a downwardly mobile (in a socio-cultural as well as economic sense) working poor person, Lauren is ready to create a new world with fresh possibilities.

Even before her entire family is killed by marauders, she works from her interstitial position—multi-racial, female, youthful—to refashion the received master narrative of an omnipotent Christian God upon which her family depends. She reconfigures it into a new imaginary conceptual space and calls her new written ontology 'Earthseed: The Books of the Living.' In it, she reverses her father's references to a supposedly all-powerful Christian God. She inverts the human/supernatural positionality. She argues instead that 'God exists to be shaped . . . There has to be . . . a better destiny that we can shape.'

What does it mean that her father's God now exists to be changed by people, rather than the other way around? Empowerment. Subjectivity in Lauren's eyes. New definitions and enactments of selfhood. In this way, Butler's young protagonist is an example of the kind of proactive oppositionality that black feminists Stanlie James and Abena Busia outline in Theorizing Black Feminisms. These critics argue that many black women are often characterized solely as 'victims' because of their experiences of multiple interrelated oppressions, including but not limited to, racism and ethnocentrism, sexism and classism. But James and Busia agree with feminist critic Catharine Stimpson that when people of colour theorize, it provides us with opportunities to 'think, imagine, speak, and act' that can transform an individual from victim to activist. Indeed, this kind of development can transform a whole community, perhaps even an entire society as well.

It is significant that in Parable, all of the elders in the Olamina community are killed off or move away, whereas Lauren, with her newly-minted master narrative, is one of the few to survive. Here Butler seems to be dramatizing the death of an old worldview, leaving Lauren alive to pursue the work of creating a new one. At first, Lauren's new goals exist solely in the realm of the imaginary. They're more fantasy than reality, initially, no more than an example of the presence, rather than absence of alternatives. Yet, as she struggles to have them accepted, we witness Lauren's continual, gradual empowerment. As she 'sows' the seeds of these ideas in the minds of others, so do they grow. With this belief as her basis, Lauren attempts to reposition herself both physically and mentally within twenty-first century struggles against subalternization and dominance.

After Lauren's family is murdered, she has to create a new family for herself. So, she gathers together a prototypical new community from a cross-section of people of different races, ages, genders and classes. Then in a kind of Harriet Tubman-like Underground Railroad, she leads the group to northern California. She even disguises herself as a man part of the time as Tubman sometimes did. Because of gangs of starving people on the road, Lauren and her group even have to walk and hide along the freeway like escaping slaves. This metaphor is by no means accidental. In Butler's post-technological future, many people of all races are forced to work virtually as slaves for transnational corporations who dole out just enough wages for them to subsist. But Lauren struggles not to be demoralized by this system. Instead, she tries to use it as a catalyst for change. She writes:

All successful life is 
Adaptable.
Opportunistic,
Tena