Reviewing Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents (December 2023)

In Parable of the Talents, the science fiction author Octavia Butler extrapolates from the America of the 1990s to the near future of the early 21st century. Her dystopian novel, a Hugo Award winner in 2000, is a sequel to Parable of the Sower (1993). In the 1990s, America was experiencing many of the same threats it faces today: climate change, growing income and wealth inequality/segregation, and anti-Black racism. The political authoritarianism she projected in these novels had not yet materialized. Butler passed away in 2006 long before Donald Trump and his followers 'proved' her fears to be valid. But warnings of dictatorship in America had already been sounded, for example, in Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here.

From the political right and left, the Reagan and Clinton administrations, respectively, worked towards weakening the social safety net. Meanwhile corporations and their manager and investor stakeholders continued to be subsidized in myriad ways. And religion was exchanging spirituality for increased political power in the domain of Caesar. In the streets of 1992, violent riots erupted in Los Angeles in reaction to the acquittal of the LA police who savagely beat Rodney King, yet another Black man victimized by police brutality. And this despite contradictory video evidence that made its way onto television screens across the country. In world affairs, though the Cold War was over and American democratic capitalism had triumphed, the U.S. was soon to be engaged in two more failed wars in Asia. And today, the Cold War, whose ending was supposed to mark the End of History according to some who longed for a Pax Americana, has reignited and Europe finds itself again in a hot war with global consequences. And, as if that is not enough, democratic capitalism in countries around the world is imperilled, improving the prospects of alternative exemplars of flourishing capitalism that have shaken off the restraints of liberalism and democracy.

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Though dystopian in nature, Parable of the Talents does offer hope that the world can be 'shaped' otherwise—a common theme in science fiction. And that is the optimism in Butler's writing that emerges from the ashes of the fire-consumed phoenix. In 2032 America, liberal democracy and the rule of law are broken; a religious dictatorship has been established; there is war with Canada and the newly-independent Alaska; people build walls around their communities and create armed militias to protect their neighbourhoods though anarchy occasionally breaks through the walls with greater firepower and numbers. Lauren Oya Olamina (Olamina), the protagonist of the Earthseed novels, and her few companions escape the burnt-out ruins of their depopulated Los Angeles community and travel north picking up other refugees along the way. In the penultimate chapter, Earthseed—the new post-apocalyptic belief system the reader learns of through aphorisms drawn from Olamina's Earthseed: The Books of the Living—has a breakout year in 2035 as Olamina's message takes off from its small, recently-established Oregon base and spreads across the continental United States. Then, after time-jumping from 2035 in the final chapter to 2090 in the Epilogue, Butler rewards the reader with a glimpse of the truth in Olamina's aphorism, "the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars." But Butler also cautions, and that warning is delivered in the naming of Earth's first starship—Christopher Columbus.

Talents is largely based on Olamina's journals and books, but the curator is her daughter, Larkin, who compiles the writings of her mother and others and adds her own commentary. Olamina's and Larkin's stories are told separately as they are separated soon after Larkin is born. She is stolen from her parents in an unprovoked and violent raid on their remote community—Acorn, the first Earthseed community—near the Oregon coast by heavily-armed Crusaders. Acorn is completely destroyed, razed to the ground. The Crusaders are a religious militia comprising men, mostly cops or former cops, whose allegiance is to U.S. President Andrew Steele Jarret. President Jarret is also the leader of the fundamentalist sect, Christian America, whose mission is "to make America great again." Like many 'heathens' rescued by Christian America, Larkin is placed in a 'proper' Christian home. But home is with a mother who mourns an idolized dead daughter and despises her replacement and a father whose timid sexual advances never go very far but persist unabated. By the time Olamina and Larkin finally meet, it is too late ... too late for a true mother-daughter relationship though Larkin does admire her mother.

Olamina has lived her life in the service of something bigger than herself ... and bigger than her family. She is the daughter of a Baptist minister, but she shies away from calling herself a 'Christian.' Even as a teenager in a temporarily safe and far from affluent walled-in community in the LA suburbs, she seeks a different way. Her spiritual journey and her journey as a refugee escaping the complete destruction of everyone and everything that was 'home' behind the wall is further complicated by the fact that she is a 'sharer,' i.e., she has hyperempathy syndrome caused by a popular prescription 'smart drug' her birth mother, who died during childbirth, took during pregnancy.

Earthseed is a new religion or cult depending on whether you are looking at it from the inside or the outside. For Olamina, the first believer, there is no anthropomorphic deity and no heaven or hell in the supernatural sense. Earthseed's God is not a wrathful and punishing God nor is it a compassionate and forgiving God. Personifications of God fail. Gender is irrelevant. The following Earthseed verse describes a very different God from her father's.

God is Change.

God is Infinite,

      Irresistible,

      Inexorable,

      Indifferent.

God is Trickster,

      Teacher,

      Chaos,

      Clay—

God is Change.

Beware:

God exists to shape

And to be shaped.

Earthseed holds out the promise of immortality but not for the individual ... only for the species. 'Heaven' is real, but it is literally, not figuratively, among the stars. It is the new habitation—unknown for the present—for all of Earth's species. It is the home to replace the one that the species, homo sapiens, in its ignorance and arrogance, has destroyed for itself and all others. In Earthseed: The Books of the Living, Olamina writes

All religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required rituals, follow specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally gifted with desired rewards—long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards. Earthseed offers its own rewards—room for small groups of people to begin new lives and new ways of life with new opportunities, new wealth, new concepts of wealth, new challenges to grow and to learn and to decide what to become. Earthseed is the dawning adulthood of the human species. It offers the only true immortality. It enables the seeds of the Earth to become the seeds of new life, new communities on new earths. The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars, and there, again, to grow, to learn, and to fly.

Referring back to the novel's title, Earthseed is Olamina's talent—a reference to the metaphorical 'talent' in Jesus' parable of the master and his three servants. Butler ends the book with the complete quotation from Matthew 25:14-30, which Olamina has recorded in her journal for July 20, 2090. Throughout her journey, Olamina is guided by this parable. Despite the hardship, cruelty, violence, and hypocrisy she encounters and endures, she insists on making full use of her talent to improve the lot of humanity by seeding the present with what truths she has discovered, always noting that these truths are not her creations but truths culled from human history. She will not be caught out at the end of her life having squandered her endowment. And she refuses to retreat to a safe place and 'tend her garden'—she had that option. Instead, like someone with a solid Baptist upbringing she becomes an evangelist—spreading the good news of Earthseed. This, however, complicates her relationship with her newfound daughter, Larkin, who laments the sacrifice of the mother-daughter relationship for the greater cause.