By Aidan O’Sullivan
Saturday, June 7, 2025: Lauren Olamina, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower gathers supplies for an emergency pack—matches, a pocketknife, food, toothpaste, tampons, a pocket knife—everything but a gun. Months earlier she warns a friend ‘Nothing is going to save us. If we don’t save ourselves, we’re dead.’ Living in the ruin of a climate deteriorated USA, Lauren feels certain that the old ways are gone, and a new society must be forged for humanity to survive.
Published in 1993, the novel features a series of journal entries stretching from July 2024 to October of 2027. Set in a dystopian future, climate change, gross inequality, and rampant violence both racial and sexual have torn apart the social fabric of the USA.
The book follows Lauren, a young black woman in a small Californian community living with her preacher father as she travels north building her own faith and religion, one called Earthseed.
In today’s world where so much of the violence and poverty suffered is separated from the West through the long distance of the media, Butler’s book feels strikingly personal. We are often told that the problems facing the globe are complicated: Globalisation. Inequality. Climate change. A set of capital-lettered impersonal and abstract nouns wreaking havoc on the human race.
However, through her first-hand accounts, Lauren shows us the personal effects of humanity’s collapse. We get to experience the relationships of a society driven to the edge. Community is at the heart of the Parable of the Sower. Both in terms of its degradation and its upkeep. How does society fall apart when the rug is pulled out from underneath them? And how is it rebuilt?
Tied into this, the most dominant theme is faith. Lauren writes to herself in her journal, working on a methodology and a religion not just for personal belief but also as a way to bind people together, to recreate a workable social structure.
Inspired by the teachings of her preacher father, she develops her own conception of God. One about change, and action. The book is littered with the biblical-like phrases she creates as she forms this new religion. It is a religion held together by a belief in a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the world. Through action, God can be shaped, even as God shapes and challenges you. As the book states ‘belief initiates and guides action or it does nothing.’
The core tenet of Lauren’s book Earthseed: The book of the living is on that of humankind’s ability to shape their destiny. ‘God exists to be shaped…. God is change.’ She rejects prayer and instead invests in the potential of a religion guided by action.
As we follow her journey from South to North, we see how people adapt to their surroundings and in turn how they respond to Lauren as she sows the seeds of her religion. So much of what makes the story engaging is seeing how those Lauren meets relate to faith, whether out of some spiritual need or for more cynical desires for simple survival.
It is hard not to see the parallels of racial politics in Butler’s work. Communities riven by armed violence and fuelled by drug addiction explode as the institutions of whatever government is left, whether it be police, hospitals, or fire services cannot be trusted.
The pyro endemic in the book seems to be a direct comparison to the crack epidemic that consumed cities (especially poor African American communities) during the 80s and 90s.
Lauren’s journey itself, while dominated by religion, is also one of liberation. Her travel, from south to north mimics the journey of African Americans fleeing slavery along the underground railroad during the 19th century.