A near-future dystopia

[bloodygranuaile]

 For the last BSpec book club I was able to prod my friends into agreeing to read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which I was very pleased about for two reasons. One, I had bought it in paperback a few months ago, so I did not need to read it in ebook, which is nice because I'm a little sick of ebooks after reading *checks notes* one (this, of course, is why I just bought nine ebooks from Verso. Whoops). Two, I am utterly incapable of reading fluffy escapist stuff right now, and I have a very generous definition of what counts as fluffy and escapist to start with, so I'm grateful that my friends were willing to read the sort of thing that everyone else is apparently attempting to escape from.

 

Parable of the Sower takes place in a post-apocalypse in denial, a near-future version of the U.S. where climate change, plague, drugs, political corruption, and other assorted fuckery have combined to break down all but the last formal vestiges of the U.S. empire. There is a president, but nobody votes and the president doesn't really do anything. The states have begun acting largely as independent countries, ruthlessly policing their borders from the hordes of economic and climate refugees wandering around seeking employment. Private companies are again taking over entire communities, turning them into company towns where the lure of waged work sucks in people to desperate to mind that the wages never cover the expenses of living in the company's housing. Sound familiar?

 

Within all this chaos is a small community, what was once a single street in a suburban sort of neighborhood, now turned into a sort of walled tenement as multiple generations of extended kin networks cram into what were once single-nuclear-family homes. Our protagonist, Lauren Olamina, the oldest daughter of the Baptist preacher, lives in one of these with her dad, her stepmom, and her three stepbrothers. She is very lucky to have parents with jobs and only one family jammed into the house. She is somewhat less lucky to be afflicted with a condition known as hyperempathy, or "sharing," which means she can feel pain when nearby people (or animals, sometimes) experience it, which can be pretty brutal in a society where drug- and desperation-fueled street violence is a casual occurrence. 

 

Lauren is a responsible, obedient sort in most ways, with two big exceptions: One is that she is sexually active--a part of the plot treated so casually that I'm almost not sure what the point of including it is, except verisimilitude--and the other is that she has her own religion, which she has been working on developing the founding writings for for several years. She eventually calls it Earthseed, and its central belief is that God is change. It's a very responsibility-focused belief system, and I found myself liking it a lot more than I figured I would like any sort of fictional religion. (One of the chapter epitaphs, which are all excerpt's from Lauren's Earthseed notes, just says "To get along with God, consider the consequences of your behavior." I laughed way too hard.) 

 

One thing about reading this book in lockdown is that the first half, where times are "good," more or less, in that the compound where Lauren and her community live is intact, felt to me much darker than the stuff that happened after the compound is destroyed and Lauren goes out into the wild world to try to walk up the California freeway to somewhere where there might be work. That part was a very good Long Walk sort of storyline, but it was essentially a Long Walk storyline, a thing I have much experience reading about and, quite, thankfully, no experience actually doing myself. The claustrophobic bits, where everyone is crammed into a tiny cramped community trying to pretend things will go back to normal ever and where a bunch of people are in denial about just how badly everything's falling apart, hit much more close to home for the time being, in a way that can't help but make me wonder what happens next, even more than I am already spending all my mental energy wondering what happens next.

 

One of the few things left going on out in national-politics-land during this story is that the shredded remnants of the federal government have been taken over by right-wing elements who have decided to shut down the space program, on the basis that it constitutes Fraud And Waste and probably namby-pamby liberal nonsense like science and general intellectualism, just after a crewed mission to Mars ends in the death of an astronaut. Lauren is displeased about this, both because the astronaut in question was something of a role model for her, and because one of Earthseed's other core tenets in that its destiny lies in going to space. We had a very interesting discussion at book club about the ethics of space exploration and colonization, especially in light of what a pig's ear we've made of Earth these last couple centuries. 

 

I do really want to read the sequel, although I might wait a bit until I can get my hands on a physical copy of that, too (I'm not exactly running low on books to read in quarantine... time to read them is a different story). One of these days I will remember that reading Octavia Butler is never a bad idea, and make myself do it more often.