PARABLE OF THE SOWER - May SFFWSFBC Book

**Rob B** · May 2nd, 2003, 01:22 PM

A day late, but here goes.

Has anybody else finished Butler's Parable of the Sower? I had a tough time tracking this one down, both local superstores and used bookstores didn't have a copy, but the venerable library did.

Anyway, started it yesterday and finished it today. A pretty powerful tale, if dark at the outset. I was left with very "gray" feeling, not black vs. white gray, but rather gray days and a gloomy life these people led.

That should be enough to spark the discussion, I'll add to it as others join in.

**trentdick2882** · May 2nd, 2003, 02:47 PM

I didn't get the chance to read Parable of the Sower, but I just finished Parable of the Talents by Butler. Could someone explain how these books are related?

Hemingway · May 2nd, 2003, 02:54 PM

Likewise I couldn't get a hold of a copy. I hope in the future we'll choose something more accesable. Too bad because I thought it sounded like a good book.
On another note Revelation space seems to share the same innaccessability(Damn it!)

**Rob B** · May 2nd, 2003, 03:14 PM

td: Talents is a sequel to Sower.

I was surprised TALENTS was hard to find, too. I've seen on bookshelves and it is available at amazon.com, but its not too, too recent.

Hem, Revelation Space is in nearly every bookstore I've been in and its available at amazon, but you do bring up a good point.

**Kamakhya** · May 2nd, 2003, 08:35 PM

Grrr...I'm sorry for the troubles, folks. I checked that Parable of the Sower was available on Amazon. I assumed that people would either be able to get it through them or special order it or find a copy at their favorite local used/new bookstore.

We all know the woes of the local Megachain bookstores. They never carry anything over a year old unless it is a popular novel that gets reprinted regularly (like Asimov's Foundation). I would really hate to limit our selections to things like that, but if it means we would get a bigger turnout on this board, then I am all for it.

As for Parable of the Sower, I really enjoyed it when I read it. Unfortunately, I got caught up with some other reading and just started a new job, so I didn't find the time to read it yet. I hope to read it as soon as I finish my current read.

I will at least skim it over the weekend to refresh my memory.

Trent: from my recollection, Talents is more or less a continuation of Sower. While both can be read independently, Sower is the tale of how Lilith got to where she is in Talents.

Kamakhya

**FicusFan** · May 2nd, 2003, 11:32 PM

I Think all OB's books have been reprinted except one of the Patternmaster books called Survivor, which OB hates. She was one of the guests of honor at Readercon last year (the other was Gwynth Jones). The two Parable books are more recent and didn't need to be reprinted, but they spent a while in TradePaperback (TP) before they went into Mass Market.

Most of the 'megachains' can order books in print for you. They usually range from 3-7 days to get it to the store (they call you when it comes in), and there is no requirement that you actually buy the book, nor is there any shipping charge.

Hopefully people will do that if they can't find the books or I agree we will be limited to the most recent/most popular books.

The main character in the Parable books is Lauren. Lillith is from the Xenogenisis series, now out in omnibus in TP and called Lillith's Brood.

I have read all of OB's books except Survivor, and the 2nd parable book Talents. I like her as an author, but this was not one of my favorite books.

I liked the Xenogenisis books, the Short Story Collection Blood Child, and the Patternmaster books. One of my least favorite is Kindred, because the emotions seem muted. I found that same quality in most of PS. Perhaps I just can't Identify or sympathize with someone (Lauren) who spends her whole life pretending to be someone else to please her father and her community.

I thought the book picked up when she moved out on the road. The emotion seemed clear from the characters then: survive or die. I thought overall the book felt dated, as though it had been written in the 70's in a world with Jimmy Carter's 'Malaise' gone mad. The copyright date is 1993, so perhaps this is what it looks like we are heading for if you are poor or working poor barely getting by. I agree the lives the people struggled to lead were awful and gray.

I thought the idea that there still was a government, and money was still accepted, and yet they allowed the street rabble to run riot was not really believable. I think you would have had a society more like Margaret Atwood's in The Handmaid's Tale. Or a true ghetto -- with the offending area being fenced in ala Escape From New York.

I thought that Lauren's religious philosophy was interesting, and probably a lot better for humanity and less toxic than most that are out there now. One thing I didn't get though was her saying that 'you can shape god'. If god is chaos and change, and you get a hurricane, how you handle the situation has no effect on the next bit of change that you get from outside your system. So I was not real clear on how you could shape god. I mean how you handle the hurricane has no effect on whether or not you get a tornado next or not.

Overall I liked it in the end, and I plan to read the Talents book, which I already own.

**Kamakhya** · May 3rd, 2003, 12:16 AM

The main character in the Parable books is Lauren. Lillith is from the Xenogenisis series, now out in omnibus in TP and called Lillith's Brood

Oops..Sorry for that misnomer. I read these books one after the other, so I got confused.

Great comments Ficus! Much of what I thought myself.

Kama

**Rob B** · May 5th, 2003, 02:24 PM

Originally posted by FicusFan
Perhaps I just can't Identify or sympathize with someone (Lauren) who spends her whole life pretending to be someone else to please her father and her community.

I disagree, albeit mildly. I thought the way Bulter presented the Olamnia family dynamic was compelling and showed a snapshot of the world.

Originally posted by FicusFan
I thought the book picked up when she moved out on the road. The emotion seemed clear from the characters then: survive or die.

Despite what I said above, the pace did pick up and I found it very hard to put the book down at this point.

Originally posted by FicusFan
I thought the idea that there still was a government, and money was still accepted, and yet they allowed the street rabble to run riot was not really believable. I think you would have had a society more like Margaret Atwood's in The Handmaid's Tale. Or a true ghetto -- with the offending area being fenced in ala Escape From New York.

That may have been my only minor quibble, nothing is really explained in terms of how society got to that point in the 2025 of the book

Originally posted by FicusFan
I thought that Lauren's religious philosophy was interesting, and probably a lot better for humanity and less toxic than most that are out there now. One thing I didn't get though was her saying that 'you can shape god'. If god is chaos and change, and you get a hurricane, how you handle the situation has no effect on the next bit of change that you get from outside your system. So I was not real clear on how you could shape god. I mean how you handle the hurricane has no effect on whether or not you get a tornado next or not.

Overall I liked it in the end, and I plan to read the Talents book, which I already own.

I think her message about God was that you worship God in your own way, you see and communicate with God the way that suits you best.

Yes, I plan on reading the Talents as well.

**FicusFan** · May 5th, 2003, 06:37 PM

Originally posted by FitzFlagg
I disagree, albeit mildly. I thought the way Bulter presented the Olamnia family dynamic was compelling and showed a snapshot of the world.

I agree I thought it showed a snapshot of her world and the family dynamic, but it was still rather boring.

The family and the community was practicing emotional and mental denial of the reality they found themselves in. I didn't say OB didn't do it believably, just that the emotion was muted. I didn't care about any of them until Lauren hit the road.

As a group they reminded me of people rearranging the deck chairs as the Titanic is sinking. And Lauren was going through the same thing with her family: Pretending to still be a Baptist, pretending that Corey didn't hate her, pretending that Keith was a decent human being.

I never got a strong emotional sense for Lauren that she was trapped or desparate or even very worried, although her diary talks about how she thought about all these problems. I just thought OB did not bring in real feelings for Lauren until she was out of the community and had to hit the road. Lauren intellectualized her problems when she was still at home. Even when her father died/disappeared it was pretty null emotionally. Not that I wanted weeping and wailing, I just never got from the page any kind of connection to her problems that say OB was able to show with Lillith in Xenogenisis. You got the emotional horror of her dilema: how she must make humans adapt to the aliens to keep them alive, but the humans, her only companions, viewed her as a traitor and a collaborator and hated and ostracized her.

Originally posted by FitzFlagg
Despite what I said above, the pace did pick up and I found it very hard to put the book down at this point.

I never reached that point with this book. The road was more interesting, but the book never became hard to put down.

Originally posted by FitzFlagg
That may have been my only minor quibble, nothing is really explained in terms of how society got to that point in the 2025 of the book

Well that was why I felt it was dated, and from the 70's. There was a time back then, when everything seemed to go wrong, and there was this sense that the country/government was so bad and wrong and people were so apathetic that one day soon you would wake up and everyone would have just given up on civilization. Jimmy Carter made the famous 'Malaise' speech that was one of the items that did him in politically.

But though she made me think of that time because of what happened in the story, she never really explained how it happened in her wolrd.

She took global warming and climate change, and the rise of Gated Communities, and the growing chasm between haves and have-nots, and the destruction of most of the social programs of the Great Society for the poor, and she just assumed that her readers would see it all and that it would explain her future.

Originally posted by FitzFlagg
I think her message about God was that you worship God in your own way, you see and communicate with God the way that suits you best.

No I think that is totally opposite what she says. She basically says don't waste your time with some fairy tale image of god. Work for yourself and those you love because your inattention to detail while you are praying to some imaginary figure will kill you and everyone you love. Her god of chaos is not a god that has anything to do with the human race in a positive manner. In many ways I thought she could have been talking about evolution and the constant need to change and adapt to survive, something that no amount of praying will help.

Originally posted by FitzFlagg
I Yes, I plan on reading the Talents as well.

**ezchaos** · May 6th, 2003, 10:41 AM

PotS is on my list of all time favorite SF books. Talents is right there, too.

This book was scary because the world that Lauren lives in could actually become ours someday. The gated communites, rampant crime, drug abuse, etc are all very real things that could happen to our world. All in all a very grim story.

Also, I loved the idea of Earthseed, especially the part that says that humanity need to spread amongst the stars if it's to survive. I'm in a period of my life were I'm on a kind of spiritual search, and reading about Lauren's religion/philosophy has opened some new doors.

Even thought the two books are grim, there is some hope at the end of Talents.

I'm lucky because it seems like my local megabookstore has always carried both mass-market and tradepaper back editions of almost all of Octavia Butler's works.

**Rob B** · May 6th, 2003, 12:51 PM

Originally posted by FicusFan
No I think that is totally opposite what she says. She basically says don't waste your time with some fairy tale image of god. Work for yourself and those you love because your inattention to detail while you are praying to some imaginary figure will kill you and everyone you love. Her god of chaos is not a god that has anything to do with the human race in a positive manner. In many ways I thought she could have been talking about evolution and the constant need to change and adapt to survive, something that no amount of praying will help.

I meant internalizing God in the sense that as a member of Earthseed you don't have to go to church and worship in the traditional sense. And as a member of the human race the way we/they adapt to change can be a way to internalize God.

**FicusFan** · May 8th, 2003, 11:41 PM

Originally posted by FitzFlagg

I meant internalizing God in the sense that as a member of Earthseed you don't have to go to church and worship in the traditional sense. And as a member of the human race the way we/they adapt to change can be a way to internalize God.

I can see that and I agree with you.

I took it more at face value though. I thought she was trying to say that the concept of god was no longer useful to humanity, and she was trying to wean people away from it.

**Erfael** · May 9th, 2003, 12:00 AM

I see much of the God is Change concept and Earthseed not only as a philosophy for reacting to change, but also anticipating it and shaping it by doing things to prepare for it. Much of what Lauren did through the first half of the book seemed to fit with this view of things.

God is Change. Change is inevitable.

As such, we much shape the changes as they come to us by being prepared enough not to be taken unawares by the change and to come through them in a way that is favorable.

It will do no good to pray to God to make the hurricane not come. It will do no good to pray to God that the hurricane do no damage or hurt anyone close to us. What we can do is anticipate the hurricane, make sure that we are prepared for it in every way possible. We can commit to help our neighbors and assume that they will help us. In preparing as fully as we can for the hurricane, we have the most chance of shaping the change in such a way that it will turn out favorably for at least some portion of the group.

I think the quote at the end of the book encapsulates Lauren's views on Change. Not everyone will survive necessarily, but those that do will thrive.

The denial of the neighborhood people is mentioned more than once. They deny that change is coming. They don't prepare for it as that would be admitting its approach. If not for Lauren's preparations for the change, we can assume that none of them would have survived.

The largest aspect of "shape God" is anticipating what is coming and preparing oneself to meet that in a way that the self or some portion of a group will be able to survive.

More than once the point was raised that someone "died for us." This brings to Lauen's attention that perhaps not everyone is meant to survive. Perhaps the destiny of some is to meet death in order that others should survive.

Enough for now. I enjoyed this book, and it beats the many-hundred pagers that we've been tossing around the last few months. Guess I need to go read Tigana now. Only running a week or so late this month. Erf.

**Erfael** · May 9th, 2003, 10:49 PM

And Erf has the usual stifling effect on the conversation!!!

**Rob B** · May 13th, 2003, 11:27 AM

Ficus, good point, but I'll take it one note further.

I think she was saying there is a fundamental need for religion, but the God(s) and religions that were/are prevalent at the time of the novel are either forgotton or not relavent.

Maybe not a need for God but a need for god, if you catch my drift. That simple act of capitilazing the word sets a certain belief about it before you can really think about it. "god" is more identifiable, I think.

In thinking about this more, I feel part of the reason she came to Earthseed (or did it come to her, divine intervention? thats another point) because she felt the world was changing, and as change is one of the only things that stays the same. Her God of change is what she sees as most needed by people of her world. I also don't think she could have come to this decision or what you would like to call it, unless she was the child of a religious man. She was so close to it, that despite her indifference towards the tenets and teachings, she could formulate what her religion needed.

Erf-the discussion continues, but you've noted some really good points.

Ok, that's enough of a caffine inspired rant for now.