77 pages 2 hours read

Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Sower

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993

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Summary and Study Guide

Overview

Parable of the Sower is a science fiction novel, the first in author Octavia E. Butler’s two-part series. Butler followed her 1993 publication with Parable of the Talents in 1998. The premier book tells the story of Lauren Oya Olamina, a teenage girl of color growing up in a post-apocalyptic society decimated by climate change. As the book begins, she relates her life in a community near Los Angeles in 2024 with a minister father, a stepmother, and three brothers. Her world is a walled community, separated from the horrors around it. This includes theft, arson, and rape—all commonplace occurrences in a desperate society.

As part of their daily lives, Lauren and her family practice with weapons, grow food, and work to protect their small corner of the world. Lauren is hyperempathetic, a handicap that she tries to hide from most people because it makes her more desirable in some ways yet can fully incapacitate her. This condition is a result of drug-taking in her long-gone mother, and it means that she can feel the emotions of those around her as though everything was happening to her.

Although the people in this community are better off than many of those who live outside, it is a tenuous life because those who aren’t in denial understand it may not last. People die easily, from stray bullets, suicides, animal maulings, or opportunistic attacks by thieves and killers. The wall that separates them from outside society will surely fall someday.

Lauren’s life with her family and friends is affected by the ways they deal with the crises going on around them. For example, her relationship with her best friend, Joanne Garfield, changes when Lauren tries to open her eyes to what needs to be done to survive, and Jo goes home and tells her parents what Lauren said, resulting in punishment for Lauren. Her relationship with her stepmother Cory sours after one of her brothers, Keith, leaves the community to find better pickings elsewhere. He starts living a life she can’t approve of, while returning sometimes to give Cory money. Her father, whom she has a close relationship with, disappears completely one day and changes the whole community.

Then one day, what Lauren fears happens. Pyros, people who take a particular drug that makes setting fires more euphoric for them than sex, ram a truck through the gate and set fire to their homes. Her family is dead. Most of her community dies with them. Armed with the prepared bag she’s been holding on to for months, with two allies who have also survived the carnage, Harry Balter and Zahra Moss, she heads north.

As they travel along highways and through cities and towns on the path, she and her friends do what they need to survive and protect one another. They also start collecting others, and soon, she has assembled a small group of people, including children, who are all wary but willing to protect one another and share food and shelter. Some of the group are former slaves. Two sisters escaped their father, who had been pimping them out and abusing them. Others had similarly bleak backgrounds. Lauren begins to talk to them of her own philosophy and vision: Earthseed.

One of the people she is now traveling with is a much older man, Bankole, with whom Lauren develops a romantic relationship. Bankole eventually reveals that he owns some land up north in Humboldt County where Lauren can set down roots with her makeshift crew. Not all of them survive, but eventually they do make it to the land. There, they discover that Bankole’s sister and family has been killed, and their land has been scarred. The group must decide whether to go on or stay. After some debate, the group decides they will remain, work the land, and hope for better things with the help of Lauren’s Earthseed—the physical seeds she has brought to grow in on the land and the emotional hope that she brings to them all.