Octavia Butler

 

I just finished Parable of the Sower.

What a great book.

It was published in 1993.

Why didn't I hear of it until recently?

Probably has something to do with the that same blank page of history that has made the Tulsa Massacre, the Wilmington Coup and Juneteenth new news to me.

Anyway, I have found her and her thinking and writing, late but at least not never.

One good book deserves another, so I have begun the rest of the Parable, that of the Talents.

Sower starts out with a bang: chapter one has a date in the year 2024.

Talents starts with an explosion: the date (not part of the explosion) is 2032; the explosion is the brief statement by Franklin Taylor Bankole, a key character from Sower who summarizes, briefly, recent history.

Octavia published this in 1998 so she was writing it between 1993 and 1998.

An unseen but palpable presence, part malignancy, part amazement descended upon me as I read these words:

"I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as “the Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly, “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030 – a decade and a half of chaos.  This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if a civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger and disease become inevitable for more and more people. 

Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs – wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it had once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself."

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Parable of the Talents, Octavia E. Butler, Copyright 1998, ISBN 978-0-446-67578-9