Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

I've just finished reading my first Octavia Butler novel, Parable of the Sower. It won't be my last.

I'd been interested in Butler for a little while, decided she was someone I wanted to read when I leafed through a copy of Kindred at a bookstore. Unfortunately, I didn't get to her before her recent untimely death. The other day I saw Parable of the Sower among my fiancée's pile of cheap-and-in-poor-shape mass-market paperbacks (incidentally, I don't care what anybody says, mass-market paperbacks suck). She was afraid I would find it heavy-handed. Happily, I did not. On the contrary, I found it riveting and unexpectedly moving.

The story takes place in an all too plausible near-future, the years 2024 to 2027, when American society has pretty much collapsed into chaos, with walled-in neighborhoods, besieged communities, roving bands of homeless people, slavery, widespread violence, fire. Our narrator is Lauren, a teen-age girl who is a "sharer", who feels the pain of others, and who is developing a new religion of sorts, Earthseed ("God is Change"). The Earthseed stuff, frankly, didn't interest me much, except insofar as it served as a unifying factor, but it wasn't off-putting, either. Anyway, in the form of a journal, in a spare, effective prose, Lauren tells us about her family's life, and life on the run when her neighborhood is destroyed. We don't learn much about how things got this way, but the world she describes is vivid and frightening.

There were a lot of nice tributes to Butler when she died; I am linking to Steven Shaviro's over at The Pinocchio Theory, where he says, in part:

Butler’s novels are downbeat, pessimistic, and utterly gripping. They all deal, in various ways, with issues of otherness, pain, and dependency; as well as, obviously, with race and gender, and racism and misogyny. They are never didactic, however, because they are as deeply concerned with affect as they are with cognition: the two simply can’t be separated in Butler’s world. These novels offer little hope of release, transcendence, or liberation. They sometimes flirt with religio-ethical responses in various ways, but they always also emphasize the fictiveness of such responses.

I link to this because it's interesting, and also because of one of the comments, by one Carl Freedman:

The one point where I somewhat disagree with Steve is the emphasis he puts on Butler’s pessimism. The downbeat elements that Steve locates in Butler’s fiction are certainly there, but are not, perhaps, the whole story. Though I have some quibbles with Tom Moylan’s terminology, I think he is essentially right to see Butler as an author of *critical* dystopias, that is, of works that maintain a rigorously bleak vision without altogether surrendering utopian hope.

I agree with this when it comes to this novel--the landscape is brutal, society unforgiving, violent, bleak. But, Lauren and her band of survivors finally commit themselves to building something, starting somewhere. The book doesn't end on a shiny, happy note, to be sure, but it is hopeful.

I look forward to investigating the rest of Butler's fiction.