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Ever wondered how Parable of the Sower follows the standard plot of most stories? Come on in and read all about it.

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Critique on it

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Octavia Butler needs no further praise, but she definitely deserves it, so here we go. live. Butler delivers all of these gifts in a direct, conversational prose that makes opening and enjoying them a deep and simple pleasure. The only person that competes with her for simplicity and clarity of writing is Parable of the Sower is just one present under a very well-stocked Christmas tree of literary achievement. Her oeuvre is filled throughout with characters who struggle with believable problems in relatable ways, and with powerful new ideas that are not only appealing in an oh-that's-cool way, but because they go right to the core of how people live, and how they Ursula K. Le Guin.

Pick up the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Parable-Sower-Earthseed-Octavia-Butler/dp/0446675504

Where are we when we enter Octavia Butler's world?

The most striking accomplishment of Parable of the Sower is how believable its world is. Butler makes such small, but ultimately such significant changes to our world. The book opens in 2024, centering around a walled community 20 miles outside of Los Angeles.

The opening has all the shapes of normal life. Children doing chores. A sermon. A minister's daughter getting baptized. Except the chores include picking fruit and vegetables from the family's extensive home garden because store-bought food is prohibitively expensive, the sermon happens in the minister's front room because his church, outside the neighborhood walls, was burned down, and the baptism, which takes place in a friend's church across town, is preceded by a harrowing bike ride accompanied by armed adults through burned-out streets strewn with the starving and desperate. These details are ubiquitous - the forms of normal life linked with the changes that have already taken place, and those that are coming. Another couple of details: five kids are getting baptized together because all of their families went in together to share the debilitating expense of the gallons of potable water necessary for the ritual, and almost everyone works from home with weekly or monthly in-person check-ins because a daily commute is just too dangerous.

I could keep listing these for another ten pages, but I'm not Octavia Butler, so it would be extremely boring. Butler weaves all of these in so inseparably from the narrative impulsion of the story that each individual one passes notice, but their collective impact builds a world that seems kind of normal but is in constant flux and danger. Any of the trappings of normalcy are willfully imposed by the older generation. The protagonist lives in a gated community, completely normal! The tops of its walls are covered in crushed glass, and the keys to the front gate are jealously guarded by the heads of household. Oh...

Characters are at the center of any good fiction

The key to Octavia Butler's work is her understanding of how people actually function, how they . All writers, when they construct characters, are building facsimiles that readers are willing to accept if they're done well enough. There's no way to actually capture everything people are in a handful of words, but Butler comes close.

Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist, is a young black girl, old enough to have some responsibility in the world, but young enough not to view responsibility as clinging to the structures of a dying past. Her father is a powerful presence, the neighborhood minister, a sensibly-acting and deep-thinking man who is the main personality actually holding the community together. The central conflict of the early book, aside from survival, is the clash between this strong-willed daughter and her stubborn father. They love each other deeply, but see the world in fundamentally different ways:

"Do you think our world is coming to an end?" Dad asked, and with no warning at all, I almost started crying. I had all I could do to hold it back. What I thought was, "No, I think your world is coming to an end, and maybe you with it." That was terrible. I hadn't thought about it in such a personal way before. I turned and looked out the window until I felt calmer.

Butler is so good at people. They can fight and yell and disagree and love each other deeply. Lauren is in the midst of a big fight with her dad, and almost loses control and cries because she contemplates the death of the person being so antagonistic to her.

The most rewarding part of the early book is this relationship: strong, intelligent Lauren Olamina clashing with the man who raised her to be strong and intelligent. She recognizes her debt to him even as she hopes for an escape from his strictures:

I love him. He's the best person I know, and I care what he thinks. I wish I didn't, but I do.

Earthseed: the world's going to hell, why not start a new religion?

As Lauren navigates this conflict, she logs everything in her journal. In fact, that's the book. The Parable of the Sower is a series of Lauren's journal entries, sometimes with a day between them, sometimes a month. The confessional style matches well with Butler's vivid and conversational prose - the accessibility of the writing mixes with the emotional immediacy of the journal to cook a completely satisfying, easy-to-consume meal. As easy and fun to eat as McDonald's, as nutritious as a kale salad. Another key function of the journal is it's where Lauren starts building her new religion - Earthseed. Again, the entire world of the book is built on the linking of the completely normal (teenage girl journaling) with the new and strange (she's journaling about her homegrown religion). Here's verses 1 and 3 of Earthseed: The Books of the Living , Olamina's religious text:

This is what drives Lauren through the story. God is change, and it's humanity's job to shape God, to accept, anticipate and influence change. It weaves over and around all that happens in the story: Lauren's acceptance of and attempted control of change, from growing up in a civilized island in a sea of lawlessness, to surviving the fall of her neighborhood (sorry for the spoiler, but it's pretty clear from the get-go that this has to happen), to traveling coastal California attempting to find a better life. God is Change.

The Big Three of Science Fiction

The Parable of the Sower is everything that's great in SF. All the science fiction I love shares three traits: well-built characters, a detailed world, and narrative impulsion. Without believable, relatable characters, what is there to care about (ahem, Asimov)? Without a detailed exploration of the world, how the world came about, the anthropology of the society, then the otherworldiness of the SF is just a gimmick. And without narrative impulsion, where each page gives you a reason to turn to the next one, what you have is a boring book. The characters and world of Butler are built with a loving attentiveness to detail, and once you care about the characters and how they move through the world, that's half the narrative impulsion right there. What provides the rest is the suspense Butler creates in describing Lauren moving through increasing danger towards her goal: is she going to get there? Oh no that was close! I have to find out! Octavia Butler is a champion, and reading her is a privilege.

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Why Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is perfect Science Fiction

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She hits the big three of SF: detailed world-building, great characters, and compelling plot Octavia Butler needs no further praise, but she definitely deserves it, so here we go. Parable of the Sower is just one present under a very well-stocked Christmas tree of literary achievement.

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The writer's constant use of dialogue throughout the novel.

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EITHER

“The exploration of conflict hinges on the writer’s choice of narrative strategies.”

With reference to ONE British, American, OR Postcolonial work of fiction which you have studied, discuss the extent to which you agree with this statement.

Total 40 marks

OR

“Writers carefully craft their narratives to explore social ills.”

With reference to ONE British, American, OR Postcolonial work of fiction which you have studied, discuss the extent to which you agree with this statement.

Total 40 marks

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Harriet Tubman

After Lauren’s family is murdered, she has to create a new family for herself. So, she gathers together a prototypical new community from a crosssection of people of different races, ages, genders and classes. Then in a kind of Harriet Tubman-like Underground Railroad, she leads the group to northern California.

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It divides, it is either one thing or the other.
Black or white
good or evil
right or wrong
It does this through judgement, separating things and creating conflict.

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Religion
Inclusion vs exclusion
destruction
Rebirth
Change

Difference, adaptability, change, and survival are thematic threads co nnecting Butler's books as tightly as a pattern.

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 Dystopias: Definition and Characteristics 

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 Dystopias: Definition and Characteristics 

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Utopia: A place, state, or condition that is ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, customs, and conditions.

Dystopia: A futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control. Dystopias, through an exaggerated worst-case scenario, make a criticism about a current trend, societal norm, or political system.

Characteristics of a Dystopian Society:

• Propaganda is used to control the citizens of society.

• Information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted.

• A figurehead or concept is worshipped by the citizens of the society.

• Citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance.

• Citizens have a fear of the outside world.

• Citizens live in a dehumanized state.

• The natural world is banished and distrusted.

• Citizens conform to uniform expectations. Individuality and dissent are bad.

• The society is an illusion of a perfect utopian world.

Types of Dystopian Controls

Most dystopian works present a world in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through one or more of the following types of controls:

Corporate control:
One or more large corporations control society through products, advertising, and/or the media. Examples include Minority Report and Running Man.

Bureaucratic control:
Society is controlled by a mindless bureaucracy through a tangle of red tape, relentless regulations, and incompetent government officials. Examples in film include Brazil.

Technological control:
Society is controlled by technology—through computers, robots, and/or scientific means. Examples include The Matrix, The Terminator, and I, Robot.

Philosophical/religious control:
Society is controlled by philosophical or religious ideology often enforced through a dictatorship or theocratic government.

The Dystopian Protagonist
• often feels trapped and is struggling to escape.

• questions the existing social and political systems.

• believes or feels that something is terribly wrong with the society in which he or she lives.

• helps the audience recognizes the negative aspects of the dystopian world through his or her perspective.

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Imagery
Dystopia and apocalyptic environments - Descriptive features that represents these two states

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Symbolism
Fire is symbolic of destruction.
Fire drove them out of the society

The Wall
Safe Haven
A clear divide between order and chaos
privileged/ impoverished
order/ lawlessness

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*Journal entries

Dystopian fiction is regularly classified broadly as science fiction and a sub-genre of speculative fiction because dystopian fictions are frequently set in a future projected virtual time and space involving technological novelties.

Butler’s troubling dystopia, written in the form of Laurens’ memoir entries, is at once an adventure story and a challenging exploration of some pessimistic trends in American society. Madhu Dubey writes that the dystopia presented in the Parable of the Sower is a close extrapolation of current trends, that it produces an alarming familiarity rather than rupture.

Butler used dystopia efficiently to express her ideas of a frightening future in all her novels.Butler’s dystopian novels are different in one way from the dystopian works of other writers as she tries to bring in a ray of hope in all her works. They are a combination of utopia and dystopia. In the midst of the narration, there exists a very frightening atmosphere; still the seeds of hope at the same time.

Lauren’s vision of Acorn, a self-reliant community built from scratch on a few hundred acres of farmland, in which the new, enlightened religion of Earthseed is to take root, is a utopian vision. It is still in the future, and there is no guarantee that it will succeed, but the verses from Lauren’s “Earthseed: The Books of the Living,” which appear as epigraphs to each chapter, are constant reminders that within this miserable dystopia a utopia is ready to spring up.

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In an interview with Rebecca O. Johnson, published in Sojourner: The Women’s Forum, Butler commented on her character Lauren, but in a way that some readers might find surprising. She says she found it hard to write the book “because I knew I would have to write about a character who was power-seeking. I didn’t realize how much I had absorbed the notion that power-seekers were evil.” Butler thus found herself out of sympathy with her main character. She got around the problem by deciding that “power can be a tool. . . . [M]oney, knowledge, religion, whatever is common among human beings, can be beneficial or harmful to the individual and is judged by how it is being used.”

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Juxtaposition
Past/Present/Futuristic
Inner wall/ Outside
Characters - Lauren and her Dad
Ideologies -Teachings
Setting
Keith's Character