The Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 and became a New York Times Notable Book the following year. Literacy is deteriorating-and, oh yeah, there’s a charismatic President promising to make the country great again.Īs Gloria Steinem wrote last year in an essay celebrating the novel’s 25th anniversary, “If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it’s one written in the past that has already begun to come true.” Whole towns are being privatized by individual companies. Told through Lauren’s diaries, the novel envisions the crises facing America thirty-some years later with eerie accuracy. In this way, she created the shattered America described by Lauren Oya Olamina, a black fifteen-year-old with “hyperempathy” living in a walled-up town outside of LA in 2024. To do this, she amalgamated her own memories of growing up in the racially integrated Pasadena of the 1950s with contemporaneous news reports about rises in global warming, racism, violence, prison populations, and mega-corporations. The Parable of the Sower would be a starkly realist novel about where American might carry itself in a few short decades - if this goes on.
She had mastered the first two categories, and was intrigued by the third. In a lecture at MIT titled “‘The Devil Girl From Mars’: Why I Write Science Fiction,” Butler recalled reading that Robert Heinlein had once delineated three kinds of science fiction stories: “The what-if category the if-only category and the if-this-goes-on category.” But she wanted to do something even bigger. Butler was an anomaly in the sci-fi world in interviews, she often described herself by saying, “I’m black, I’m solitary, I’ve always been an outsider.” She had already upended a genre that had long been both very male and very white. She’d written awesomely weird books about telepaths and time travel and aliens and psionic vampires. Her many earlier novels had already established her as a titan of science fiction. In 1989, Octavia Butler set out to write The Parable of the Sower, the first in a planned trilogy of novels about humanity’s uncertain future. What might have been genius, and what might have been better left locked in the drawer? How and why do we read these final words from our favorite writers - and what would they have to say about it? We’ll piece together the rumors and fragments and notes to find the real story. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.Įach month “ Unfinished Business ” will examine an unfinished work left behind by one of our greatest authors.
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