Key themes
- Adaptability as the only ethic that survives catastrophe
- Community-building from the ground up — what it requires of a leader
- The new religion as practical philosophy for an ending world
About this book
A young woman builds a new faith amid social collapse; eerily prescient near-future SF.
Published in 1993, Parable of the Sower is the first of Butler's Parable duology. She described it as her most personally committed work — a warning she hoped would prove wrong.
Discussion questions
- Lauren Olamina has hyperempathy — she feels others' pain as her own. How does Butler use this condition in a violent dystopia — as gift, curse, or both?
- Lauren begins developing Earthseed — a philosophy built on the idea that God is Change. What is Butler saying through this invented religion about what communities need to survive?
- The California of the novel is recognisably extrapolated from 1990s anxieties about inequality, climate and social collapse. How does this extrapolation work — what does the novel see that was already there?
- Lauren's leadership is earned through competence and vision, not authority. How does Butler present the making of a leader in a world without institutions?
- Parable of the Sower was written in 1993 but reads as increasingly prescient. What does the novel's accuracy about climate and social fragmentation say about what Butler understood — and what we still haven't addressed?
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