Parable of the Sower

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Summary: Wonderfully moving and engaging
Review: This book shows clearly why Octavia Butler is one of the best writers in the business. The novel succeeds on multiple levels; the characters are well-drawn and engaging, particularly the protagonist. The examination of a society destroyed not by some impending apocalypse, but by the breakdown of an obsolete structure, is only one aspect of this modern parable. Butler's writing is beautifully clear, spare and concise; she uses the epistolary form to its best advantage. I highly recommend it!

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Summary: Parable is one of those perception changing stories
Review: PARABLE of the SOWER BY: Octavia E. Butler 296 pp New York Aspect. $5.99 Paper ($6 who are they fooling?) $17.96 Hard Cover ($18) By: Joe Katz for ICS [e-mail] There is more to _Parable_ than just a good story. Octavia Butler is one of the Best Authors I've read. Every book she writes leaves you thinking about humanity. I know the genera "science fiction" turns many people off, but as Octavia Butler says, "I write stories about people; if they want to call it science fiction, they can." For _Parable_, she has won the McCarthy Genius award. This prize grants the recipient an undisclosed amount of money so the "genius" will be able to do whatever they want for three years. As far as I know, no one who has read this book has hated it. As for me, I've read it 5 times now and I'm still moved by it. All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change EARTHSEED: The book of the living These passages are from the opening of _Parable_, a story of a Journey of spirit and foot. Lauren Olamina is a young African-American girl growing up in a walled-in cul-de-sac in the suburbs of Los Angeles. This cul-de-sac is your average lower middle class walled-in neighborhood. Steel gates and laser-wire, topped with broken glass. Outside the wall, starving people want in. Behind these walls, Lauren is growing up. Her father is a Baptist minister and Lauren, well, she doesn't know what she is. Outside, people are starving and they use a drug that makes burning things better than an orgasm. People are burning the cities down. LA hasn't seen rain in six years; when they finally do, it comes in a hurricane. The only people killed in the Hurricane were the poor, who had no warning and no way to get out of the city to safety. Lauren wonders how in god's eyes is it a sin to be poor. The rich have food and water. The Rich have guards against intruders. But she is not rich. Every day someone else loses a job in their neighborhood. Every year, it is harder and harder to pay the property taxes. One day, they too will be on the streets. And if that day does not come, the people outside will break in and burn their home down. Her parents, on the other hand, do not see this. They have the wall, they have guns, they have some jobs. And this is why, when the walls did break and the Pyro-freaks burned down their homes, almost no one was prepared. Lauren with the first idea of Earthseed: she begins her second journey, the first being EARTHSEED. The second journey covers the highways of California in quest of a place with jobs, in search of a place where water is not as expensive as gasoline. And on this journey she will pick up the first few members of the Church or EARTHSEED. For Lauren, the god or EARTHSEED is change. Why change? Change is an idea, not a god, right? Maybe, but with change as a god you can shape it, nay, you have a duty to shape it. Lauren was prepared to face the outside world and she shapes it to suit her. Follow Lauren on her journey of discovery, through the highways of California, through the thoughts of her mind. Find out where she goes in this brilliant paperback gem (look for a gleam on the rack). orginaly published for ICS to subscribe send e-mail to [e-mail]

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Summary: If you like strong female characters, you'll like this.
Review: A little slow at points but overall a great book. Very philosophical. Horribly realistic in our age of crime terror.

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Summary: _1984_ for a new generation
Review: This book is simply amazing. Though it's listed as science fiction, a more appropriate genre would be horror. Butler's vision of a destitute U.S., home to cannibals, psychotic pyromaniacs, and dogs that are no longer domesticated but vicious and hungry for human flesh, seems all too real and possible. It's a creepy book. One of my favorites.

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Summary: A Book So Good...I Had to Write a Review!!
Review: Let me start by saying that even though I am a rabid reader, and rely heavily on others' reviews, I rarely write reviews myself. (Too hectic a life!) But this book (and it's sequel, Parable of the Talents) are so exceptional I have to recommend them. They succesfully have a leg in both SciFi and Black Women's fiction. Not only was the story extremely believable (with just a bit of sci-fi "suspend disbelief" thrown in), but elements such as "Christian America" are extremely poignant considering the current political environment. I think this is as important a book as "Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood. A must read for fans of Feminist literature or Scifi...or both, as I am!

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Summary: ONE FANTASTIC READ
Review: Octavia E. Butler's PARABLE OF THE SOWER is one of those rare, dangerous novels that succeeds as both fascinating fantasy and uncompromising social commentary. Within its first dozen pages, we encounter a typical family armed with guns on their way to church, a headless corpse, a naked homeless woman, a community walled in by terror, and a young woman dreaming of stars. The dreamer is 16-year-old Lauren Oya Olamina, the would-be sower and teller of this parable. The place is California. The year 2025. And nothing in the United States is how it once was. Lauren is a "sharer," or what some might describe as an empath. With her family destroyed by lawless ravagers, Lauren becomes the leader of a band of desperate wanderers. Despite constant violence, hunger, and the threat of firestorms sweeping across the land, they maintain their vows to protect each other and even find love among their numbers. Nearly at the bottom of hell, these characters levitate naturally toward a sense of family in order to survive and flourish. Racially, socially, and temperamentally diverse, they manage to achieve a strained but functional unity. Filled with deep thought and elevated feeling, Butler's PARABLE OF THE SOWER highlights and magnifies the social ills of the years 2025-2027 to forge a mirror that reflects much of what too many people choose to ignore in 2004. Despite that, every page shimmers with hope and inspiration that makes this book one fantastic read.
Aberjhani
author of ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
and THE WISDOM OF W. E. B. DU BOIS


Rating:
Summary: Grim but riveting
Review: In this coming-of-age novel the external world is so bleak, so violent, and the individual's choices so narrow, that survival becomes an end in itself. Interior development becomes a matter of acquiring the necessary skills and attitudes.

The setting is 2025 California. The breakdowns we bewail in modern society have led to disintegration. Lauren Olamina, a 15-year-old black girl, lives in a walled community. Outside are the homeless, predators or prey, the roving gangs, and "Paints," addicted to a drug that finds ecstasy in fire and murder. Lauren was born with what is regarded as a crippling disability - the ability to share the physical pain (or pleasure) of others.

She sees no future for herself within the walls - even if they hold - and develops a personal religion. God is Change which must be shaped and humanity's future is the stars, not earth.

Lauren's father, a minister and community patriarch, insists the community be able to defend itself. He organizes gun practice in the lawless hills where bodies, wild dogs and signs of cannibalism are common. But, for all his precautions, one day her father disappears. The community is overrun, massacred and burned by Paints. Lauren, now 18, her family dead, is on the road, with two other survivors.

Trust is a luxury humans can no longer afford but Lauren's journey is marked by kindnesses to keenly observed strangers. She knows that strength is in numbers as well as firepower. She gathers a couple with a baby, two girls, a motherless child, three runaway slaves with sharing abilities like hers, and an older black man with a cart, a doctor with land in the north.

The journey is tense with vigilance and danger. Firefights, ambushes, an earthquake, all contribute to a harrowing pace. The novel, in spare, lively prose, is written in diary form which gives it an intimate immediacy and carries a warning that even Lauren's survival is not assured. An absorbing, disturbing book in which survival goes to the luckiest, with the best prepared having an edge.

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Summary: PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E. Butler
Review: Book Review by C. Douglas Baker

Robert A. Heinlein once stated that in writing speculative fiction the author takes a current cultural or societal trend and follows that trend to its logical, if sometimes extreme, conclusion. Butler has taken the anomie of today's central cities in the United States, with the attendant violence, drug abuse, and general disregard for community and painted a frightening and stark world in PARABLE OF THE SOWER. Butler introduces us to an America thirty years hence where to survive communities must be armed, walled, and prepared to take human life to defend themselves; an America where drug abuse has taken a radically violent turn in which a new drug "Pyro" induces the user to burn items, be they animate or inanimate, for a sexual high; an America where life expectancy is short; an America where violence is the norm instead of the exception.

In this stark, surreal world is Lauren Oya Olamina, an eighteen year old girl with a vision. Olamina lives in a walled community that has protected itself by keeping quiet, inconspicuous, well armed, and prepared to defend itself. This all changes when Lauren's brother, Keith, enters the nefarious world beyond the walls and implicitly brings attention to this previously secluded community. Lauren finds she and her community must confront the ugly world outside the walls.

Most of Butler's works have a strong, empathetic female character that seem to carry an unfair burden in life. Lauren Olamina is no exception. Lauren has a condition called "hyperempathy" meaning that she feels the physical pain of others (including animals). Yet, she is willing to kill to defend herself and her family, despite the psychological costs to herself. She remarks that if everyone had her disability, violence would greatly diminish. Unfortunately for Lauren, the world she lives in is not only full of violence but inherently forces a person to eventually commit acts of violence in self-defense. Lauren also has a gradual and evolving "philosophy" called "Earthseed" that takes on quasi-religious status as the novel unfolds. This "Earthseed" is the thread that binds the narrative and makes the conclusion innovative and hopeful.

Butler's work is intricate and impressive in its description of a future America. There are many sophisticated parallels between the ugly future Butler paints and today's society. I really cannot do her work justice by a simple and brief description. I highly recommend PARABLE OF THE SOWER.


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Summary: Sowing the Seeds of Depression
Review: I read this book probably in 1994. I still remember now how blown away I was by this book. It's one of the greates works I've ever read. The ideas in it are very unique, the character very believeable. There's a good measure of action and thought, and I could identify with the journey the main characters had to take. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

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Summary: Future chronicle of humanity
Review: Orson Scott Card has described Octavia Butler as one of America's greatest writers, and I'm beginning to see why. Her style is eloquently simple, which at times can be penetrating. Lauren Olamina lives in a walled community in near-future California, a time plagued with environmental and societal degradation. Outside the walls are thieves, murderers, rapists, drug-addicts (especially for a new drug called "pyro" that enables the user to attain orgasmic pleasure out of watching things burn), as well as the abused, homeless, disheveled. Racism and various forms of slavery have returned. The police are as feared as the criminals, and what's left of the government is talked about in vague apprehension.

Inside the community is a small, racially mixed group of families, most of whom choose to ignore what's going on outside the walls. By sixteen, Lauren has come to realize her community will not last long, and begins to prepare for the inevitable invasion or destruction. Her brother, Keith, has already jumped the wall, and made a life for himself "outside," bringing back money and gifts for his family, but not revealing how he got them. Daughter of a Christian preacher, Lauren has hyperempathy syndrome, which causes her to feel the pain and pleasure of others around her, a vulnerability she keeps hidden, especially during the second half of the book when she is traveling the countryside learning about the world she lives in and further developing a religion she "discovered" called Earthseed; the main idiom being "God is change."

The story is told by Lauren's journal entries. In another author's hands, this story could read like the typical detached-narrator of a dystopian future. Instead, Butler invests her tale with how individual people variously react, survive, and adapt to changing and chaotic conditions. Earthseed is explored through arguments and speculations. I listened to the audio version of this book read by Lynn Thigpen, and the story was exciting; well-paced, fully-developed characters, strange and familiar. Recommended.