N.K. Jemisin talks about the foresight and greatness of “The Parable of the Sower”

There’s power in three. In the writing world, we call it the rule of three. Repeat a word, phrase, or plot element three times to make it meaningful. Two times isn’t enough to establish pattern recognition; four times bores the brain; three is optimal.

It took me three tries to figure out what Octavia Butler was up to. The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents…I think so. I’m still not sure. But I’ve read this book three times, at very different times in my life, and each time I’ve realized just how prescient Butler was. The first time was when I was in my mid-20s, struggling through graduate school. The second time was when I was in my mid-30s, just starting out as a professional writer. The third time was a few months ago as I write this, shortly after turning 46.

Reading in my mid-20s would have been a few years away. The Parable of the Sower It debuted in 1993. Of course, I knew about this book when it was published, but I first tried to read it. The Sower I was used to Butler’s more overtly sci-fi premise: post-nuclear aliens (Xenogenesis/Descendants of Lilith Books), time travel (relatives), or Telepathy and Immortality (Patternist/From seed to harvest In contrast to these, Parable There was almost no mention of scientific or technological advances or otherworldly happenings – the book just seemed to be set in the future.

Now, I was still in my infancy as a Black Power activist. I was participating in sit-ins demanding that my school divest from apartheid South Africa, I was participating in the Million Man March to help register voters, I was immersing myself in African-American history, and all that kind of stuff. But my engagement with the ideas underlying my activism was only superficial, and I hadn’t had much time to realize or integrate them. I also hadn’t yet realized how limited my ambitions and expectations actually were, mostly because I couldn’t envision a world that was actually better than the one I lived in. I’d spent my life absorbing statistics and societal narratives that predicted a dire future for me, even if I survived young adulthood. This was reflected in the fiction I read. Most of my favorite fantastical works, e.g. Star Wars and Star Trek And the science fiction of the “Golden Age” depicted a glorious, exciting future for white men. The rest of us existed, if we existed at all, only symbolically. Usually, we simply didn’t exist. We had no future, except for the limited use that heroes might find for a few. (We weren’t heroes.) And such depictions were so ubiquitous in the realm of fantasy that, for years, I accepted them without question; only as more dire predictions. The radicality of envisioning a future “simply” as an American, as a black man, as a woman had not yet become part of my consciousness.

But in graduate school, I was one of three black women in a highly competitive master’s program of 60 students. As part of the program, we learned about racial identity development theory — the process by which members of a racialized society move from a superficial engagement with race to a deeper, more personal understanding. In one class, we were asked to read Butler’s Racial Identity Development Theory. relativesI had already read it, so instead, I finally The Parable of the Sower.

I wasn’t ready. I know that now. But by then I was old enough that Lauren Olamina no longer felt like an anachronism and know-it-all, like she did when I first read the novel. (She always seemed to me more like what an older woman thought a smart teenager should be, rather than a realistic representation of what a smart teenager actually is. Naturally, I grew to like her more as I got older.) As an examination of racial identity development, the story doesn’t work at all. Lauren is essentially born knowing that racism is systemic, and that as someone born at the intersection of multiple marginalizations (black, disabled, female, poor), she is doomed if not addressed from all angles. relativesDana from is a better example of a character whose understanding of herself changes dramatically as the story progresses. Lauren starts out deep and penetrates deep. The Parable of the Sower This book works beautifully as an examination of how smart resistance works, and I desperately needed it after being tired of status politics, black patriarchy, and other shallow solutions to racism. I needed to know how to bide my time. I needed to understand the difference between good intentions and good outcomes. Naturally, I empathized with Lauren’s struggle between being a “good girl” and being a grown woman with needs that parental guidance could not provide.

But still, Like I didn’t read the book at the time, and I didn’t think it was particularly prescient. To give some context, this was the 1990s. The dot-com boom was beginning to democratize society in new ways by giving blogs and platforms to anyone who could shout loudly and artfully market themselves. The Gulf War was over, crack had become a drug, the economy was booming, and taking on thousands of dollars in student loan debt didn’t seem like a bad idea to me at the time. Lauren’s world still felt unreal, even impossible, to me. An uncontested roving gang of pedophiles and drug-addicted arsonists? Slavery 2.0? A powerful coalition of white supremacist, homophobic Christian fanatics taking over the country? No, I didn’t think so, and I expected Butler to return to the alien story soon.

Yeah. I get it. Look, I was young.

Around the late 2000s, my reading of the mid-1930s caught me in the middle of a professional encounter with institutional racism. By that time, I had decided to become a writer as a profession, not just a hobby, and joined others in calling for change within this possible genre. To our collective fears, Octavia Butler died in 2006. But we, her spiritual descendants, thousands of us, were here to claim the future. By this time, I was beginning to understand how rare and how strange the mere idea of ​​thinking about the future was for those of us from marginalized backgrounds. Worse, I had seen how complicit science fiction and fantasy were in making it hard for us to imagine our future. It was time to change this. We hadn’t asked much from our fellow writers. We wanted more than European mythology in fantasy, and more than symbolic representations of the future, present, and past.

But the fight was one in which I saw many of the writers and editors I’d once loved react as if both our demands for the future and our present existence were a threat. So we fought them. Of course it was. Butler’s memory demanded it. But I won’t say that I wasn’t heartbroken by how hard it was to get presumably intelligent and well-meaning people to see how much harm they were doing.

At that time, I ParableOne that annoyed me to no end on my first read-through was the story of Lauren’s brother, Mark, who is initially presumed dead, but later rescued from horrific sexual slavery. Mark fully understands the pain, and yet he still ultimately betrays Lauren because he cannot acknowledge Lauren’s pain without acknowledging the harm his fellow radical evangelicals have inflicted on others. He is not an evil man. Throughout the two books, he helps many, but always (and only) within the framework of the Christianity he embraces. But ultimately, his desire for the status quo and conformity trumps his basic goodness. “I can’t help you until you suffer the way I want you to, express your pain in a way that’s pleasing to my ears, and stop both when I’ve heard enough,” he seems to say.

This resonated strongly with me in the context of the American social justice movement. For every attempt by marginalized people to express their suffering and ask for change for historical (and ongoing) harms, there is always a backlash from those who demand that we only suffer what we deserve, that we express that suffering in tolerable tones, and that both suffering and discontent end on demand. Mark’s ultimatum was exactly the same as the one repeated by sci-fi writers I once respected. They kept asking why we ask for a better future, how that demand should be expressed, and whether we deserve it. Afterwards, I couldn’t help thinking how much Mark was influenced by Butler’s fellow writers. Perhaps none of them were. Or maybe Butler’s message is that people like Mark are not all that rare in our society. So those who want to understand and lead positive change, like Lauren, must also be prepared to engage with them.

And then we come to reading in my mid-40s, which is where I am now.

Everything you touch changes. Everything you change changes you.

What we touched has changed. The sci-fi genre has improved slightly, despite the prevalence of Marks. There are now dozens of black authors publishing, not just Butler and a handful of others. And disabled writers, queer writers, Indigenous writers, and more. But what we have changed has, in turn, changed us. I and other marginalized writers must constantly brace for online harassment, death threats, and “make sci-fi racist again” movements. And just as sci-fi reflects the status quo, the same ugliness plagues our society on a macro scale. In the wake of America’s first black president, we now endure incompetent con artists and bigots. We are more connected to the internet than ever before, and for better or worse, we are empowered to enact change through crowdsourcing and call-out culture. But most of us are hopeless, exhausted, and struggling to keep the future in mind as a handful of powerful figures seem determined to drag us back to Jim Crow laws. Climate change looms. Humanity is resilient and resourceful. There is no doubt that humanity will survive as a species, and our desire for a better world will undoubtedly prevail, just as Lauren Olamina ultimately did, but it may take everything we have to get there.

What resonated with me the most this time was Earthseed itself. Butler said, Parable Novels should be guidebooks, and they are. This is true of all of the most powerful science fiction novels. They offer not only a precise vision of the future, but also suggestions for dealing with the resulting changes. One can only imagine what Butler’s vision would have included, had she been able to complete it. She was apparently planning a third novel. The Parable of the DeceiverBut maybe it was a good thing that she and Lauren never “discovered” Earthseed’s third book. Like the Earthseed community, it is our job to make a difference in fiction and in life. Like Lauren, I’ve taken solace lately in the idea that change isn’t the cliché I was raised with, but a tool I can shape to my benefit, if I’m smart and lucky. Claiming the future will be an ugly and brutal fight, but I’m prepared to see it through to the end. The future is worth it.

And what about another decade from now? Check back and see what we can learn from these great books.

— N.K. Jemisin, December 2018

Excerpt from N. K. Jemisin’s preface The Parable of the Sower Written by Octavia E. Butler and published by Headline, this is the latest selection from the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up here to read it with us.