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Last year, I read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which was certainly a hell of a book to read in lockdown. A friend of mine recently read that and the sequel, Parable of the Talents, which reminded me that I had bought but not yet read Parable of the Talents, so I packed it for my writing retreat.
Parable of the Talents picks up not too long after Sower left off—mostly. The bulk of the book is Lauren Olamina’s journal, starting during her time in Acorn, the Earthseed homestead in the hills that she founded near the end of the first book. These journal entries, and those of a few other people, are framed as being compiled by Lauren’s daughter, born in Acorn and kidnapped by right-wing missionaries, many years later. In an interesting twist, Lauren’s daughter--named Larkin at birth but raised as Asha--dislikes and distrusts Lauren, and thinks she’s a fanatic.
Much like Sower, Talents is a relentlessly heavy book. It starts with the election of Christofascist demagogue Andrew Steele Jarrett to the US Presidency, which is certainly an interesting thing to read post-Trump Administration. Jarrett belongs to a sect called Christian America that has an official shitty fundamentalist wing for public life that, in theory, has (shitty) principles, and then a supposedly “rogue” wing that does whatever the fuck it wants and doesn’t even pretend to have any principles other than “lol I get to gun down whoever I want.” One prominent piece of worldbuilding is the use of high-tech slave collars to torture people. Sexual violence is rampant. Characters are gassed, beaten, enslaved, kidnapped, separated from their families, and murdered. It could easily have been gratuitous in the hands of a less skilled writer, but Butler knows what she’s doing.
It says something about… well, about something, I think, that my least favorite part of the series was the latter portions where things start to get better, which somehow started messing with my suspension of disbelief.
I found Lauren’s thoughts on her religious beliefs and the purpose of religion to be interesting reads, but it was even more interesting when compared to the takes of the other characters who believed different things, and everyone’s speculating on everyone else’s motivations and reasoning. I don’t know why I like it but I do find that sort of metacognitive examination interesting. More people should think more about their own thinking.
Overall I recommend this duology highly, but I think I have to go read something a bit lighter now, like philosophy.
Parable of the Talents picks up not too long after Sower left off—mostly. The bulk of the book is Lauren Olamina’s journal, starting during her time in Acorn, the Earthseed homestead in the hills that she founded near the end of the first book. These journal entries, and those of a few other people, are framed as being compiled by Lauren’s daughter, born in Acorn and kidnapped by right-wing missionaries, many years later. In an interesting twist, Lauren’s daughter--named Larkin at birth but raised as Asha--dislikes and distrusts Lauren, and thinks she’s a fanatic.
Much like Sower, Talents is a relentlessly heavy book. It starts with the election of Christofascist demagogue Andrew Steele Jarrett to the US Presidency, which is certainly an interesting thing to read post-Trump Administration. Jarrett belongs to a sect called Christian America that has an official shitty fundamentalist wing for public life that, in theory, has (shitty) principles, and then a supposedly “rogue” wing that does whatever the fuck it wants and doesn’t even pretend to have any principles other than “lol I get to gun down whoever I want.” One prominent piece of worldbuilding is the use of high-tech slave collars to torture people. Sexual violence is rampant. Characters are gassed, beaten, enslaved, kidnapped, separated from their families, and murdered. It could easily have been gratuitous in the hands of a less skilled writer, but Butler knows what she’s doing.
It says something about… well, about something, I think, that my least favorite part of the series was the latter portions where things start to get better, which somehow started messing with my suspension of disbelief.
I found Lauren’s thoughts on her religious beliefs and the purpose of religion to be interesting reads, but it was even more interesting when compared to the takes of the other characters who believed different things, and everyone’s speculating on everyone else’s motivations and reasoning. I don’t know why I like it but I do find that sort of metacognitive examination interesting. More people should think more about their own thinking.
Overall I recommend this duology highly, but I think I have to go read something a bit lighter now, like philosophy.