Dennis Biba

If there’s one thing that futuristic novels don’t do, it’s predict the future. Where computerised modulations reach their limits due to the sheer amount of available or unavailable data, a single genius mind is supposed to lift the veil of the future. Admittedly, Octavia Estelle Butler, alarmed by the political climate of the 1990s, has guessed a little too well. Her two-piece The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998), originally planned as a trilogy, is set on the North American west coast between 2024 and 2035. The country is plagued by drought. Climate refugees are streaming from the south towards Canada. The newly elected president is a right-wing populist and Christian fanatic who gives free rein to the Crusaders, a Christian fundamentalist terror group. While large corporations own entire cities and lure their employees into a modern form of slavery, the Crusaders‘ reeducation camps, in which all non-believers are sent, are reminiscent of concentration camps. The methods are the same, only the technology has evolved. The fact that the newly elected president uses Ronald Reagan’s old slogan ‘Make America great again’ for his election campaign amounts to a punchline in the year 2025, that actually makes Butler look like an unfortunate prophet in retrospect.

Butler not only served as an early role model for the climate fiction of the 2000s, for example for authors such as Paolo Bacigalupi or Kim Stanley Robinson, whose novels are also set on the West Coast. Through the Black Lives Matter movement, the black author from California gained international attention even after her death in 2006. Racism and slavery are recurring, even omnipresent themes in Butler’s work, for example in novels such as Kindred (1979) or the Patternist series (1976-84). But feminism and economic inequality also play a major role in her works, which is why it is no exaggeration to describe Butler as one of the first and most important intersectional SF authors. Nevertheless, she adheres to a universalist, i.e. universally valid, ethic, that has been lost in parts of left-wing identity politics today (and has never played a role in right-wing identity politics). In the midst of a world in crisis, it establishes a (admittedly very limited) utopia in which people of all ethnic backgrounds can live together without denying the existing differences between genders or the effects of internalised racism.

The utopia that she tries to realise in the second part initially only exists in the mind of the protagonist Lauren Olamina, the eldest child of a village pastor’s family. However, her youth at the beginning of the novel is not noticeable; Lauren is a strangely ageless character who, although not without weaknesses, is endowed with an unreal spiritual maturity and knowledge of human nature. At least the novel has an explanation for the latter: the so-called hyperempathy syndrome, a psychological constitution that makes her involuntarily feel other people’s feelings with her own body. Complementing this is a drug in circulation that turns its consumers into pyromaniacs. Hyperempathy and pyro drug are deliberately designed as two opposing extremes of the human psyche, on the one hand an excess of empathy that can incapacitate the individual, on the other the complete numbing of compassion and (also sexual) fetishisation of violence.

Butler tells a story in which economic and ecological crises exacerbate social injustice and bring out both the best and the worst character traits in people. Large parts of the novel’s plot follow an episodic narrative pattern, whereby a rather complex social structure emerges from a series of seemingly insignificant individual encounters. As if to remind her readers, like her characters, never to be inattentive, she alternates between trivialities and plot twists; what has been established over hundreds of pages is torn apart again within a few sentences. And so the novel succeeds in impressively illustrating that social progress is never irreversible, but a process that requires active cooperation as well as continuous vigilance against the destructive forces of society.

Octavia Estelle Butler (1993): The Parable of the Sower. [Novel]. USA.

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