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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
The Parable of the Sower is a science fiction novel, which also falls under the umbrella category of speculative fiction. Speculative fiction features environments that depart from reality and often explores imaginary futures. By examining how humanity might react and adapt to these changes, writers are able to point out what they consider challenges in real-life human society.
Octavia Butler, a prolific science fiction writer, accomplishes this via the world of The Parable of the Sower. The novel is set in an apocalyptic future rife with climate crises and political failures, as well as a new drug, pyro, that turns people into arsonists. The setting of California in the U.S.—which connects the story to the reader's reality—is riddled by corpses, fires, and barren landscapes. The reader can witness how Lauren and her community have adapted to this environment: they've created walled communities, makeshift religious gatherings, and small-scale farming. As such, the book highlights structures of the real, current world that Butler notices weaknesses within. In other words, the science fiction genre enables Butler to pressurize the flaws she recognizes within her world.
Butler also utilizes the science fiction genre as a mode of hopeful speculation. Put differently, Lauren's apocalyptic environment is not a place that lacks alternative pathways to a functional society. In some ways, this imaginary world is a place to more freely and seriously consider how improved living conditions might take form. Earthseed, for example, is spawned from Lauren's recognition of the increasing difficulties of life on Earth. Lauren puts her hope in space exploration and sets out to influence others with her message and optimism for a better future in the stars. Earthseed is a tool, then, to restructure how people relate to one another and the natural world while they cope with the continued demise of their home planet.
Lauren's hyperempathy can be read as another example of hopeful speculation. Because Lauren is obliged to feel in her body the pleasure and pain of others, she is also forced to more carefully consider the effects her actions have on others. Butler encourages the reader to imagine how such a condition might be beneficial to overall human relations—how would the world change if all people were compelled to empathize with all people? Ultimately, Butler interrogates the conditions and habits of humanity in The Parable of the Sower by merging realism and fantasy via the genre of science fiction.
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