Most apocalyptic scenarios in popular culture feed their narrative drive from spectacular catastrophic events that upend the world as we know it, be it a plague that befalls mankind and turns masses into flesh-devouring zombies, or an ecological disaster that makes life either completely impossible, or forces the survivors into a war for scarce resources. Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed novels diverge from the spectacular scripts of most apocalyptic fiction by exposing the self-made horror of humans vs. humans. Nonetheless, they evoke a sensation of doom by painting a vivid picture of a world in which everything that is wrong with our epoch is escalated to a dramatic level, and as such they touch the very nerve of our zeitgeist of an evolving permanent crisis. In this sense, the novels are not fantastic but prophetic, as Gerry Canavan observed in the Los Angeles Review of Books (June 9. 2014). What distinguishes these novels also from other dystopian fictions, is their central theological component expressed in the repeated credo «God is change», that has even inspired the foundation of religious communities of the same name beyond the literary frame (e.g. godischange.org). A work of literature has thus become a gospel and a blueprint for an ethics for a crisis-ridden present and an uncertain future.
As a female African American science-fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler challenged many cemented conventions within a literary genre dominated by white male authors and paved ways and influenced a new generation of younger feminist writers associated with what is now labelled as Afrofuturism, or speculative African American fiction. Most importantly she expanded the thematic field of the genre, not only by shifting the narrative perspective towards black female protagonists, but also by putting a focus on questions of power and social organization, instead of technological innovation, and space travel as was often the case before. Butler’s effort to shift perspectives within a genre in which black people were portrayed as flat typecast characters was guided by a conscious personal self-affirmation, as she underlined in an interview for The New York Times in 2000: «When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn’t in any of this stuff I read […] The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn’t manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing.» Her most known works include two series: the Patternmaster cycle (1976-78), the neo slave narrative Kindred (1979), the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89), and the Earthseed novels The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998). Butler began writing a third installment of the parable novels The Parable of the Trickster in 1989, which has never been completed and only exists in fragments.
The Parable of the Sower, the first of the two Earthseed novels is narrated in the form of a diary of its main protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina, a black teenage Baptist preacher’s daughter living in a closed community of what has remained of a middle-class in the greater Los Angeles area. Its title, and the title of the follow-up novel, are visibly biblical references, and the quote from Luke 8:4-15 is quoted as a postscript at the end of the novel. The story is set in the 2020s, a projection of only approximately 30 years into the future after its first publication in 1993. This not so distant extrapolation is probably also the source for the fascination with the novel, in which Butler projects acutely our contemporary conflicts and problems into a near future. With the rising popularity of such novels as George Orwell’s 1984 or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in the age of post-truth and alternative facts, Butler’s dystopia is «unmatched», according to Abby Aguirre in The New Yorker (July 26. 2017).
Although Lauren is religiously formed by her upbringing, she develops her own independent theological thought which she encounters as a series of epiphanies that she records in short epigraphic stanzas. The central credo «God is change» means for her that she must adapt to the uncertain living conditions, in order not to become a passive victim. After her community is attacked and destroyed, Lauren with two remaining survivors takes up a journey to a yet undefined destination in the North (Washington, Oregon, Canada). Similar to the direction of flight in slave narratives, the group moves North as it carries the promise of safe living conditions. This is not the only echo of slavery in the novel. Vile aspects of the American past return with a vengeance in the form of debt slavery, chattel slavery, a general exploitation of the labor force, and the disruption of the Union States that start to behave like their own entities by establishing heavily guarded borders. On their way the group encounters other survivors with whom they form alliances. After initial qualms about revealing her religious thoughts, Lauren shares them with her companions, cautious of not to appear as a zealot trying to convert them. Her plan is to form a religious community in a place that is safe.
The world of the Earthseed novels is one defined by a capitalism in its final stages of exploitation, and I explicitly avoid the bogus term late capitalism, which in Marxist eschatology promises a salvation through the breakdown of markets, wherever this might lead… No, it is a world in which the neo-liberal wet dream of a minimal state has become harsh reality with no foreseeable end in sight. Los Angeles has been transformed into a hell-hole, and the surrounding areas are not better off. Those who can afford it, live in gated communities of varying security levels. The streets have become free-fire-zones, but they are clean, since the ragged few that cannot afford to live in gated neighborhoods have scavenged everything that can be re-used and re-purposed. This interzone is the roaming ground of pyromaniacs, addicts that consume a drug called pyro or ’ro that makes them set fires, because the experience of watching the flames is orgasmic, but also of armed gangs, feral dogs and the miserable poor. Public services such as police and fire fighters are neither effective nor free of charge. Amid rising sea-levels and an omnipresent drought some people seek refuge in company-run cities, as in the Old West, where they are put to work for wages on which they can barely make ends meet. The company cities are not the only shadow of the Old West and its robber barons, for the novels are also tales of a frontier, albeit of a different kind altogether.
In order to be a true religion, Earthseed needs to make a promise to its followers. The general rules are open and flexible enough to accommodate many followers to share common values, but the real promise is otherworldly as in most religions: «The universe is Godseed. Only we are Earthseed. And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take roots among the stars.» The stars are not symbolic in this statement. While the North is the frontier that the group must reach in order to establish the community, the ultimate frontier of Earthseed is outer space. Lauren believes that space offers the opportunity of refuge to a place that would allow humanity to rebuild according to a new set of rules: «I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we’ll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place.» (Chapter 7.) While such an escape seems unthinkable given the conditions of the world in The Parable of the Sower, the follow-up novel The Parable of the Talents shows other possibilities.
The second novel is told from the perspective of Lauren Olamina’s daughter Larkin Olamina/Asha Vere interspersed with Lauren’s Earthseed verses and journal entries. The hope of a refuge for a budding Earthseed community with which the first novel ended is shattered and the already dismal situation worsens even more. Forms of indentured servitude and slavery are omnipresent through the employment of electronic collars and other torture devices. Prostitution and other forms of abuse of women are rampant. Drugs and blind consumerism, for those who can afford it, have become means to escape the bleak reality. Disinformation has become a means of social control in the hands of the government. To top it off, Americans have elected Texas senator Andrew Steele Jarret for president, who has promised «to make America great again.» (Chapter 1.) Sounds familiar? Jarret is a religious zealot, whose main mission is to eradicate all non-Christian communities and especially believers of Earthseed, which he hopes to achieve by mounting a fascist crusade against them. Things take a positive turn when the president is defeated in the following election after serving one term, and the persecution of Earthseed finds an end. The book ends on a hopeful note as the first starships with members of Earthseed leave for Alpha Centauri «to take roots among the stars.»
As most of the horrors, violence and destruction in Butler’s dystopia are human-made, the hopeful ending of The Parable of the Talents is counterbalanced by some of Lauren Olamina’s concerns expressed in both novels. In the first she has to admit that if God is change, then Earthseed will also be subject to change, when she is not there anymore, including a possible perversion of its original purpose. The first starship that leaves the earth with Earthseed members is called The Christopher Columbus, to which Lauren objects: «This ship is not about a shortcut to riches and empire. It’s not about snatching up slaves and gold and presenting them to some European monarch.» (Epilogue) Her objection sounds like premonition that the settlers not only carried seed to plant new life among the stars, but also other baggage that they inevitably inherited as members of the human race. In a presentation of sketches for the unpublished sequel The Parable of the Trickster from the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA), Gerry Canavan (LARB article cited above) shows that this skepticism towards human conflict solving capacities was one of Butler’s main concerns in imagining a future for Earthseed. Most of the scenarios of the sketches are played out on a planet called Bow, and deal with the problems of the Earthseed community adapting to their new environment and coming to terms with themselves. Throughout the Earthseed novels Butler is dialectical in her stance on human nature as she shows both the vilest atrocities and the capacity to overcome differences to cooperate for the good of a community. Still, when change is omnipresent, like a law of physics, why does it need to be equaled with God in order for people to cohere?