Lyn's Reviews > Parable of the Talents

God is change.

Thus is presented Octavia Butler’s brilliant and brutally powerful 1998 Earthseed novel Parable of the Talents.

Taking its title from the Biblical parable from St. Matthew, Butler describes a near future dystopian American society that has been decimated by apocalypse, The Pox, and is unraveling along socio-economic and theological lines.

Religion as power

Some religious critics will see this novel as an attack on religious fundamentalism, most specifically Christian extremism, as horribly exemplified by Christian America (CA) Crusaders. Certainly, Butler’s attack is focused on a Christian organization, but she is revealing a primary problem with lowest common denominators in fear and trembling before an angry God, and His hypocritical followers.

Andrew Steele Jarrett, reminiscent of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 It Can't Happen Here and also Robert A. Heinlein’s Nehemiah Scudder, is a populist, jingoistic preacher turned politician who is elected president and helps to transform the already fatally injured nation. Under Steele’s rule, the novel’s protagonist Lauren Olamina, suffers dreadfully, as does the country.

There is an old saying that religion has caused more wars than anything else in history. I’ve never really believed that, it seems like land, money or power is always the real underlying cause. In college, a professor taught us how the American Civil War was caused by cotton and the economics of cotton production rather than slavery and states rights. War is caused by many factors, and frequently with a dogmatic face such as religion, nationalism or racism to provide an idealistic front.

Steele’s black clad crusaders made me think of the black clad and masked fundamentalist extremists we see on television these days as they behead orange clad victims. Butler is showing us how nationalistic and religious fronts can hide gross and deplorable moves for power by playing on inner fears and prejudices.

Religion as a spiritual movement

Butler describes a movement created by and championed by the protagonist Lauren Olamina: Earthseed. Comprising her writings in “The Books of the Living” and in her model community Acorn, "Earthseed" comes from the idea that the seeds of all life on Earth can be transplanted, and through adaptation will grow, in many different types of situations or places. "The Books of the Living" is chosen in direct contrast to many other religions' use of the phrase "The Books of the Dead". Earthseed, as defined by Olamina is a religion of the present and the future, of the living, not of the dead or the past. (partially from Wikipedia)

While Earthseed, as beginning in the American Pacific coast, is categorically opposed to the Christian America movement of President Steele, Butler’s philosophy is a posthumanist statement intending and anticipating a radical change and a paradigm shift in the course of human evolution.

Butler describes organized religion as hypocritical, corrupt and focused on worldly and individual power rather than eternal salvation or harmony. Earthseed, by contrast is shown as a practical, if harsh, means to an end – eschewing the religious structures and conventions of the past.

Post-Apocalypse / Dystopian / posthumanism

Similar in theme and scope to Arthur C. Clarke’s magnificent novel Childhood's End, Butler chooses to set her narrative close in time; much of the action takes place in the 2030s. Like much of Philip K. Dick’s work (many now set in the recent past) this decision creates a theatrical tension with the reader who is able to identify closely with the events in the novel. This type of setting is in stark contrast to science fiction settings far, far in the future where speculative fantasy can have a freehand in developing the plot. Butler, like Dick and Clarke (I’m shameless) interprets her vision of the future through a glass darkly.

A powerful, sometimes painful, journey through endurance, determination and ultimately atonement.