Can this seed fall on good ground and bear fruit?

Now that I've read Octavia Butler's biography it was time to read one of her books and I chose Parable of the Sower.

I've been aware of Butler's name for years, which is why I read her biography. I have not been a science fiction fan since my twenties, however, which is why I'd never read one of her novels. The science fiction I once read tended to feature space and science: The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Martian Chronicles, The Andromeda Strain. Butler, based on this title, is up to something else.

The first person narrator, 15-year old Lauren Olamina, begins telling her story on July 20, 2024. (The book was published in 1993 and the entries are dated.) She lives in a walled community north of Los Angeles with her father, who is a minister and the community's leader, her step-mother, and brothers. Lauren is hyperempathetic; if someone nearby is injured she literally feels the pain.

Civil society is collapsing. A new drug has blighted the country. People who take it, "burners," shave their hair, paint themselves garish colors, and start fires. Fire for these addicts is better than sex. The police are indifferent or corrupt or, like the firemen, want to be paid before they'll help. Rival gangs war one each other and anyone foolish enough to cross them. Stores and businesses that can afford armed security guards survive; those that can't don't. America is becoming a country of all against all.

Halfway through the book as Lauren's life becomes grimmer and grimmer the compound's walls are breached and burners pour through burning and slaughtering indiscriminately followed by scavengers who steal whatever they can. Lauren and two neighbors escape. The second half of the novel is the story of their perilous trek north.

A number of things struck me about the book. Butler is black and Lauren is black; she has to be careful traveling with a white companion and in fact passes as a man. Butler wrote when crack cocaine was plaguing the country. Lauren does not like or trust the police (with good reason). Although society is collapsing, radio stations still broadcast and ammunition for weapons is still available (and a good thing).

Also, a major thread in the book is Lauren's thoughts about God and development of a religion. "God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But there's hope in understanding the nature of God—not punishing or jealous, but infinitely malleable. There's comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God, There's power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there's no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for yo or take revenge for you."

I don't know what I expected when I opened the book. I was impressed by Butler's imagination and inventiveness and I'm delighted I finally read it.

A fascinating biography of an interesting writer

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction Octavia Butler (1947-2006) is a fascinating author. Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E Butler by Susana M. Morris is a fascinating biography and introduction to her work.

Butler was singular because she was the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction. Why science fiction? Butler sounds like any writer on certain days when she writes: "Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time [the 1970s] nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” 

After her father died, she was raised by a single mother in Pasadena, California. When she was 12 years old she watched a B-movie science fiction film that lit an unquenchable fire in the girl. She began writing her own science fiction stories on the typewriter her mother had given her. She was encouraged by a sympathetic school teacher and later won a writing competition at Pasadena City College, and a year later won fifth prize in a Writer's Digest short story contest.

In 1969 she met Harlan Ellison at a Screenwriters Guild workshop and he became a mentor and champion of her work. In 1970 she spent six weeks at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania (it's now at UC San Diego) where she met Samuel R. Delany. Despite the encouragement and support her mentors gave her, she was not able to publish. She worked at menial, backbreaking day jobs to pay her rent and buy food and Morris reports that "She stuck to a grueling writing schedule, often writing from 2 to 5 a.m. and then working a full-time job. She finally sold Patternmaster to Doubleday in 1975."

In 1979 she sold Kindred, a time-travel novel about a contemporary Black woman who travels back to the antebellum South. Gradually her life became somewhat easier. (Hard to imagine how it might have become harder.) She completed the five-book Patternist series. She was published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. She won a Hugo Award. She traveled internationally for research and as a representative American writer. In 1995 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant," acknowledging her talent and vision.

Butler recognized her calling. She wrote, "I am a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects one day to to be an eighty-year-old writer." She never made it, but she was still writing when she died.

These comments do not do Positive Obsession justice. Morris, an associate professor of literature, media, and communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has, in fewer than 250 pages, conveyed the texture of Butler's life and its events and introduced the reader unfamiliar with Butler to her works. One can hope that the biography sends new readers, even those who say they do not read science fiction, to Butler's novels.