LibGuides: Parable of the Sower: Introduction

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Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren's father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, war, and chronic shortages of water, gasoline, and more. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others. When fire destroys their compound, Lauren's family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is facing apocalypse. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
The second book in the series is also available.

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Novels for Students: Parable of the Sower

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Future Females, The Next Generation : New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism
See Part 1, Chapter 1 “Gender and genre in the feminist critical dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler”
Religion in Science Fiction : The Evolution of an Idea and the Extinction of a Genre
See Part Three, Chapter 10, Acceptence, Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower.

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Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable of Postmodern Sentimentality (Parable of the Sower) Wanzo argues that Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are postmodern, sentimental fables that interrogate the relationship between feelings and politics. She contends that the books are postmodern texts because they depict people who understand themselves as existing in both an ideological and material postmodern state of affairs--a postrevolutionary period of consciousness surrounding political movements dealing with racial and sexual discrimination, colonialism, class oppression, religious fundamentalism, and ecological dangers, as well as the end of many modern innovations in technology that are dismantled in apocalyptic circumstances.
Critical Dystopia Reconsidered: Octavia Butler's Parable Series and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake As Post-Apocalyptic Dystopias This paper calls for a more nuanced assessment of current dystopian literature and questions the feasibility of lumping together all dystopian works after the 1980s under the umbrella term "critical dystopia." According to current definition, critical dystopia is open-ended, harbors an eutopian enclave, and entertains some kind of hope. However, this definition fails to identify crucial aspects of dystopias around the millennium. Octavia E. Butler's Parable series (Parable of the Sower, 1993; Parable of the Talents, 1998) and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) are investigated to pinpoint the limitation of the term "critical dystopia." Both the diminished utopianism of Butler's Parable series and the apocalypse and despair in Atwood's Oryx and Crake testify that dystopias around the millennium have undergone some significant transformation. They should more properly be labeled "post-apocalyptic dystopias."
Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler's Parables
Folk And Urban Communities In African-American Women's Fiction: Octavia Butler's Parable Of The Sower This article discusses Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower' as typifying African American women novelists' response to urban concerns. The role of dystopias in portraying crises, the use of science in a futuristic setting, and the contradictory resolution of this novel are explored.
The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower Phillips discusses the illustration of utopia and catastrophe in Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower," a futuristic novel that explores latent and manifest tendencies, with regards to both utopia and dystopia, in the postmodern condition. The novel reflects two classic pathways to modern utopia, which are, the application of bureaucratic rationality to socioeconomic problems through the agency of the state and the constitution of communities of them and us through the politics of race.