Parable of the Sower

"I believe that’s the one that actually made the New York Times bestseller list , finally, ten-to-fifteen years after Octavia’s death? The Parable of the Sower is the origin story of Lauren Oya Olamina, who has this disability of feeling other people’s feelings. Her boundaries are really gone. She’s suffering from this disease and living in a gated community, as the world around the gated community slowly crumbles away. People make a big deal out of the fact that the president at the time is running with the slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, which was Donald Trump ’s cry. People see that as prescient, but I believe she was modelling him more on Ronald Reagan, whom she absolutely loathed. It’s a world where police services are contracted out privately. Health services, ditto. Basically, the middle class is gone. In other words, it’s kind of what’s happening now financially, economically, and socially, although it’s slightly more advanced than what’s going on now. At one point, the gated community that Lauren is living in is overrun. She hits the road with some of the survivors of that overrunning. Only a few steps. She was somewhat pessimistic, as you can tell by that novel, but I think that one of the things that makes it so compelling is not just that there are these horrible things happening, but that they are horrible things that are not that far removed from what’s going on now. Isn’t that how it felt to you? Speaking as a Black person here—yes, it’s just not really worth the time. It’d be nice if there was someone else that could actually help. In all of these stories, I think that what’s key is being able to get people to identify with the protagonist. The protagonist here is a Black woman. I’ve been talking with Gerry Canavan, who wrote one of the best books on Butler. Gerry was talking about how in the Huntington Archives, there are all these notebooks that that Octavia wrote while she was creating these books. Her take on Lauren Oya Olamina was that this is a killer. Lauren cannot stand to see people suffer, so she can’t go and punch someone for kicking a puppy; she has to shoot that person for kicking the puppy, because otherwise she’ll feel the pain of them being punched, and then they’ll go kick the puppy again and she’ll feel that pain too. She has to cut it off. So in some ways, the so-called ‘empathy disease’ makes her ruthless. Exactly. But you know, I was kind of there already. There’s no problem in my mind with identifying with someone that ruthless. There’s only one other that’s been published, The Parable of the Talents , which is more told from Lauren’s daughter’s viewpoint. Octavia made several attempts to write a third, Parable of the Trickster, but was never satisfied with whatever she wrote. She intended to write more, but found herself confounded."