Parable of the Sower

Parable of the Sower is a science fiction novel, the first in author Octavia E. Butler’s two-part Parable series. Butler followed this 1993 publication with Parable of the Talents in 1998. Also known as the Earthseed series, the duology follows a community in a dystopian/post-apocalyptic version of the 21st-century United States. The societal collapse is due to environmental and class issues, including corporate power and greed, climate collapse, and growing inequality between the upper and lower classes. The Parable books have enjoyed continued popularity since their release, and Parable of the Talents won the 1999 Nebula Award. Parable of the Sower was adapted into an opera in 2017 and a graphic novel in 2020.

Content Warning: The guide and source material reference violence, including child abuse.

Plot Summary

Parable of the Sower tells the story of Lauren Oya Olamina, a Black teenager growing up in a post-apocalyptic society that has been 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 protect their small corner of the world. Lauren is hyperempathetic, a disability 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 her long-gone mother’s drug use, and it means that she can feel the emotions of those around her as though everything is 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 tell her what needs to be done to survive. Jo goes home and tells her parents what Lauren said, resulting in Lauren being punished. Her relationship with her stepmother, Cory, sours after one of her brothers, Keith, leaves the community to find a better life elsewhere. He starts living a life she can’t approve of, though he sometimes returns to give Cory money. Her father, with whom she has a close relationship, disappears completely one day. The whole community changes as a result.

One day, Lauren’s fears come true. Pyros, people who take a 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 dies, and most of her community dies with them. Armed with the prepared bag she’s been holding on to for months, she heads north with two allies who have also survived the carnage, Harry Balter and Zahra Moss.

As they travel along highways and through cities and towns, 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 members were formerly enslaved. Two sisters escaped from their father, who had been pimping them out and abusing them. Others have similarly bleak backgrounds. Lauren begins to talk to them about her philosophy and vision: Earthseed.

One of the people with whom she is traveling is a much older man, Bankole, and she develops a romantic relationship with him. 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 make it to the land. There, they discover that Bankole’s sister and family have 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 on the land—and the hope that she brings to them all.