On July 20, 2024, Lauren Olamina turned 15.
Or, at least, she did in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The 1993 dystopian classic recounts the life and times of a Black girl who shares the pain of others. Lauren lives with this burden in a version of the present that greed, poverty, violence, and climate change have ravaged even more than our own. Through a collection of journal entries, we traverse the mid-2020s as Butler, the famed science fiction author, dreamt them. And we watch as Lauren struggles to survive what later becomes called “the Pox,” a kind of dream-slang for the apocalypse.
Thirty-one years after its publication, Parable of the Sower continues to compel and unsettle many readers. Much of the book is harrowing. The violence begins just a few chapters in, when an elderly woman in Lauren’s walled-off urban village kills herself in the emotional aftermath of losing her entire family to a house fire just weeks after she was robbed and raped, and it refuses to relent for the next 300 pages. At least a dozen people ... Read more
