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Fantasy review: The Parable of the Sower


Yikes. To start off, yikes.

I've had The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler on my TBR for about a year and a half. It was a gift from my mother, and I'd been saving it for a day when I really needed to get lost in a book. Emotional insurance, if you will.

The last few weeks have been really hard. Between the whole pandemic thing, a lot of family drama and grief, and a bucketful of uncertainty about the future, it was time to get lost in a new world.

Only, the world in this book is not so far off. The Parable of the Sower takes place in California in the year 2025, when the lines between middle class and the wretched are made of chalk, where politicians sell the people out for profit but no one bothers to vote anyway, where drugs and disease and economic slavery combine to crush the souls of the populace.

Wow. The future described in this book isn't here yet, but between this and the news, the path to landing here seems clear. All we need is the slow degradation of labor protections, a police force that protects capital interests instead of human ones, and people who don't care enough to listen to the news.  Oh, wait...

This book gave me legit nightmares.  In terms of writing lessons, I don't know that I can name any. This book was too good. Too real. Maybe that's the lesson - writers don't need to go too far in to the future, too far away from reality, to unearth painful truths to immortalize in fiction. The scariest forces area already here.
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