Book Response: "Parable of the Talents" Book 2 of the Earthseed Series by Octavia Butler

Have you ever picked up a book that seems like you were meant to read it at that particular time in

your life? Like, the book finds you and feeds your soul? It's one of the beautiful things that can happen to book readers. Less beautiful, but still filled with awe - recognizing an unfolding of events in a story written years ago that mimic what is happening in your own time. Case in point: Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Talents."

I picked up the first book in Butler's Earthseed series, "Parable of the Sower" as dystopian genre research for publishing my own dystopian saga. The first book in the series takes place on the West Coast as people take to walking the roads as civil unrest boils over and resources are depleted in southern California. It's a desolate picture of income inequality and global warming reaching a tipping point.

In the second book in the series, we pick back up with main character Lauren Olamina and her followers years after we leave her at the end of book one. The group has built a community, called Acorn, that all rests on the Earthseed principles that Lauren has been preaching. Earthseed is a religion based on fundamental truths about God. The first line in most of the passages is "God is Change," and Lauren means this quite literally. The world is built on impermanence and change and why wouldn't the force behind such a constant state of "becoming" be considered God?

As the daughter of a Baptist minister, pulling desperate people in and offering them safe harbor and education is Lauren's empathetic vocation. It's also a solid recruitment method in a post apocalyptic world. At their weekly Gatherings, the Acorn community openly discuss the principles of Eathseed's moral belief system whose ultimate destiny is to take root among the stars. And for a time, Earthseed seems to be actualizing right in front of Lauren...until the outside world comes in, as it inevitably will.

In the background of both stories is a crumbling late-stage capitalist America. Keep in mind, this book was published in 1998. The American Empire has toppled under inadequate leadership and unsustainable consumerism. In "Parable of the Talents," America has only just begun to recover from economic and social collapse that occurred in the first book when a new President is elected that has a fanatical Christian following. President Jarrett's Crusaders erect re-education camps where they hold "heathens" and low offending criminals. It is in these camps that people are enslaved and brutalized for holding different beliefs than the ruling regime. Far away in Washington, D.C., President Jarrett claims he doesn't endorse these fanatical factions, but it's clear by Lauren's experiences in one of the camps that Jarrett is completely complicit. It is his message of narrow minded intolerance that awakens a dark monster in some of his followers.

The world Butler created over the span of the first two books is one that mirrors our own, and yet she wrote this twenty years ago. In the first book the exploration of income inequality and the war between the middle and lower class citizens as they all sunk into depravity due to massive job loss and dwindling resources is culturally relevant. The eruption of conflict into shocking and desperate violence serves as a warning. The environment in Butler's vision of the Southwest, U.S. in the 2020s and 2030s is frighteningly on point; a parched land that has run out of water and time. Fires follow Lauren all the way up the coast on her journey through the hellish landscape of a crumbling America.

Lauren's story is fascinating to me. I've long thought of writing about someone who becomes a cult leader. Lauren's dedication to the development and fruition of Earthseed is one that makes sense to me; she is clinging to a conviction she knows to be true in a world that is rapidly changing all around her. She loses everything, safety is impossible; the only thing of any consistency in her life is her belief in an ideal she has shaped since childhood. Which is why, in the second book, the entries from Lauren's daughter Asha, who she is separated from due to Jarrett's Crusaders, was difficult to read. Asha possesses an anger and deliberate disbelief in her mother's life long pursuit. Her unwillingness to understand and forgive her mother left me feeling unsettled at the end.

Butler's Earthseed series got a lot of the future correct, and I don't know how I feel about living in the initial stages of a dystopian world. I think I will need to take a break from Dystopian Lit...at least until COVID-19 quarantine has ended.