John and Rosianna discuss Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. This episode was originally released to subscribers in February 2020.
Though Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 about a dystopian world in 2024, the society it depicts bears certain striking resemblances to the world today. Amidst such destruction, what could be a shared goal that unites all humans? To Lauren, Earthseed is the answer. In this episode, John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas ponder change as destiny.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in February 2020. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John: Hello and welcome to the Life's Library podcast. I'm joined by my co-host Rosianna Halse Rojas. Hi, Rosianna.
Rosianna: Hi. How's it going?
John: Everything is going really well. There's a lot of excitement right now in Indianapolis because my kids' February break is coming up and I'm taking them alone to Universal Studios.
Rosianna: Oh, what a good father.
John: Well, I mean, I'm going to take that compliment in this particular case, because it is—this is not something that I would choose to do.
Rosianna: Having said that, I have recently returned from Universal Studios.
John: I know. I feel like I need to get the lowdown from you because—I mean the last time I went, was—you were there, I think.
Rosianna: Yeah, that was the last time I went, too...was 2011.
John: Yeah, I was hospitalized—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —and I said—this is not closely related to Parable of the Sower, but we'll get there. I had to go to the hospital and I was with my brother. It was during a Leaky Con and we both saw Harry Potter World open, basically. It was really cool. Anyway.
Rosianna: It was amazing. They had the park open just for us in the evening.
John: Yeah!
Rosianna: And the final—
John: It was so...yeah.—
Rosianna: —film was out as well, or it was about to be out.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: It was really special.
John: Were we working together yet?
Rosianna: No. No, I had one more year of university left.
John: I have no understanding of how the past works. Anyway. I had to go to the ER—I was fine in the end, but they were like, we're going to keep you overnight and we're concerned about some things and test results and blah, blah, blah. And I took the doctor's hand and I looked him in the eye and I said, I am not dying in Florida. And I'm taking that exact same energy on this trip.
Rosianna: I love it. It's perfect. I really—I enjoyed Universal. I really enjoyed the new Hagrid's Motorbike Journey—or whatever it's called—ride that they have there. Because that was like a proper—it feels like a proper rollercoaster. You can be on the motorbike or in the sidecar, and that was fun.
John: Is it—how kid friendly is it?
Rosianna: I don't know. I don't think Alice is probably old enough for it. Maybe.
John: Not only that—Alice won't ride a rollercoaster of any kind.
Rosianna: Great, well then she won't do it!
John: She looks at a rollercoaster that goes 14 miles an hour, like Thunder Mountain in Disney World and she's like, not interested. And I'm like, Alice, it's not a rollercoaster. It just has the—it has the look and feel of a rollercoaster, but none of the excitement.
Rosianna: She'll probably enjoy Flight of the Hippogriff then, which is very gentle.
John: I think we're going to be doing a lot of hippogriff flying on this trip.
Rosianna: Yeah. And a lot of the joy is just walking around, as well, I found. Like just being in those spaces. I really didn't see much else of the non-Harry Potter parts of Universal. Like I went on the Hulk ride. That was it.
John: Yeah, I got a pretty distinct feeling my kids won't be going on the Hulk ride.
Rosianna: Yeah, and I don't think you'll be going on the Hulk ride either.
John: No, no, no. Not post-labyrinthitis me. Anyway. We're going to transition now seamlessly to Parable of the Sower by imagining what a Parable of the Sower theme park would look like.
Rosianna: What things would be on sale. You can come in.
John: Yeah. There would be a lot of—maybe there would be a ride where you just take that drug that makes you really like staring into the fire.
Rosianna: Oh, god. And then just set everything on fire and that's part of the enjoyment. Yeah.
John: Yeah. I—so this was my pick and I picked it to start this year of reading together because any dystopian novel that succeeds, that is this good—and I think this is a major American novel. I think that this stands alongside the best dystopian novels ever written, and that it should be taught in schools, and that—not only do I think it should be taught in schools, I know which book it should replace. It should replace Lord of the Flies because—
Rosianna: You hate that book.
John: I hate that book. It's true—well, I have softened a little—
Rosianna: Okay.
John: —to that book, but Parable of the Sower—
Rosianna: I like Lord of the Flies, but I also think this should be taught in school.
John: Yeah. Parable of the Sower is—
Rosianna: It can replace Cold Mountain.
John: Oh, I assume Cold Mountain isn't really taught in schools anymore, but maybe it is. If that's the case, strongly agree. Like the best dystopian novels, this book changes over time. When I was a kid—like when I first read 1984, when I was a teenager, it seemed to me like it was a book about the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent, a book about the rabid, terrifying, anti-communism, the fear that we might all be blown up—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —that my childhood was just coming out of. Like I grew up in the end of that historical period. And now I read 1984 and it reads to me like a novel about surveillance culture and about doublespeak and the growing power of the state in private lives. And Parable of the Sower is very much the same way for me, even though it's only been a few years since I first read it. It has changed over time for me. For instance, this reading, I found myself paying much more attention to the president who is distant in the novel, but very demagogy.
Rosianna: Yeah, he has this in-the-background feeling, but that feels much more sinister than it used to.
John: Exactly. Yes. And so—it just holds up brilliantly to rereading, but it is also to me, a major American novel about what happens when our stories stop working.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like part of the problem that we're having now is that we don't have the same sense of communities that we once had. Now, there were lots of downsides to the ways that we were organizing these really strong communities, right? Like they created a lot of outsiders. They were built with structures that removed people from power and disempowered marginalized people. I'm not saying that the religious organizations that bound a lot of people together in the first 150 years of American history were good news. But right now it feels like a lot of us don't have those strong communities and what Parable of the Sower does really well for me is it takes story—it says, yeah, the stories stopped making sense to people.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: The stories that people use to hold themselves together stop making sense. And here is a story of how those religions form and how those communities form in the wake of when things stop making sense. Here is how new stories form to bind us together. I thought that was brilliant and feels not like it was written today, but it could be—like it's written two years in the future.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like it understands today better than I do.
Rosianna: It understands 2024 and we're in 2020.
John: Right. It's funny you should say that because one of—my notes for this are really all over the place, because I just kept having so many different thoughts as I was going. And this is my second or third time reading this. But I only read it last year or the year before. But one of my notes was she's looking for a bigger story to unite us and she understands that she needs that story.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Yeah. And I keep—the book that—it kind of went under the radar and I think I've even mentioned it on the Life's Library podcast before is the Yuval Noah Harari book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: About these stories collapsing and about there not yet being something to replace them. And that book—everyone was like, oh, it's not as good as Sapiens. It's not as good as Homo Deus. But for me, that book has really stuck with me—
Yeah.
Rosianna: —because I just keep looking for both narrative in terms of where we've lost narratives and lost community, but then also where you see narrative used in both positive and negative ways. Like you have this presidential figure in the background of Parable of the Sower, who is telling us a certain kind of story. You have these company towns, which were, again, another thing that stuck out to me much more this time—
John: Yes, me too.
Rosianna: —than they did the first time. The telling and selling a kind of story and taking advantage of this lack of resources and promising their own kind of utopia. And yeah, I think that it's done with also a level of real self-awareness, as well. Because I feel like often, I really distance myself from the author when I'm reading, but I don't know if it's just me putting something on it or because the voice is so strong, like Lauren's narrative voice is so strong, but I really felt like I also felt Octavia Butler herself in the pages of this novel as I was reading it.
John: Yeah, in a Vonnegut-y way, right?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, there's something about when—you know that this is the author's worldview, or this is reflective of the author's worldview. And a lot of times that's seen as a weakness in fiction. I've read that as a criticism of Vonnegut. But I like it. It's one of the things I really like in a certain kind of science fiction, like science fiction with a specific point of view.
Rosianna: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's echoed in Lauren herself because she's always talking about Earthseed and always coming back to Earthseed. And she can't understand why other people maybe don't center their narratives around that.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: She keeps coming back to it because she's determined and she's like this is what's going to help us. It's what's also—it's just the nature of things. I've discovered it. There's like a certainty to it. Yeah.
John: Yeah. And to that idea of a shared goal. This novel was written in a time when there was a lot of global competition, obviously, among nation states—as there is today, but it was felt even more extremely back then. But where there was cooperation was in space.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: There was an astonishing level of cooperation necessary—to build the International Space Station took a lot of international cooperation. Even now, we don't get along particularly well with Russia, but all of our astronauts land back on Earth in Russian spacecrafts in Kazakhstan.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And so I think that Lauren—and I assume also the author understood—or when looking at what could be a human goal? What could be a goal that could unite all humans without creating outsiders and that idea that the destiny of humans is to be in the stars. It isn't the destiny of humans to be in the stars until and unless we start to believe that it is, and then it kind of becomes the destiny of humans. And that's how—the stories that work, whether they're the religious stories that work. And I know lots of people are uncomfortable with that word, but that's what I think Earthseed is, ultimately. The stories that work are the stories that make people feel a sense of purpose. And it doesn't—the great thing about the destiny of human beings being in the stars, as a purpose, is that it doesn't create outsiders. It's not saying that destiny—like it's not saying the point of being alive is to fight for your religion over other religions or the point of being alive is to convert people from their way of thinking to your way of thinking or from their belief system to your belief system. It says the point of being alive is for us to all work together to get off this rock.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I just think that's brilliant. I want that to be the human story. I know this is a little bit over the top, but when I was reading the book this time, I was like, why don't we just pick this as our sacred text? Like, it's plenty good enough. Why don't we just say, like—
Rosianna: There's enough in there.
John: Yeah, why don't we just say like, God inspired this author to write this book at this time. And it speaks to our times, and this is the one. We're doing it.
Rosianna: Earthseed has another convert.
John: Seriously—I was like, you know, maybe it's not the worst idea I've ever heard—to found an Earthseed religion. I'm not going to do it, to be clear. I'm not interested in becoming a cult leader, but I will join the cult.
Rosianna: Okay, perfect. I feel like that sums you up quite well. I will not be the cult leader, but I will join the cult.
John: I'm going to be the first member, but I will be an early convert.
Rosianna: Yeah. I mean, to the point about space travel, there's so many different things I want to talk about all at once, which is such an exciting feeling and my favorite feeling about books. But I mean, that's always kind of been the case with space travel, hasn't it? Because, you know, you have that famous speech by Kennedy and you have the whole mythology of the space race, like these two nations going towards space. And then that becomes this story of international cooperation. But the kind of urgency—I went to—actually, when I was in—this is where it all ties together. When I went to Orlando and I went to the Kennedy Space Center and you see all these elements of the story, and of course you see mostly the American side, but there are also all these international elements to it, too. And yeah, the urgency of the timeline and just how quickly that was achieved and how quickly technology changes and shifts and all of this. There's this kind of—it was a focusing of what the human purpose was, as though that has always been the human purpose and a framing of it as like, well, that's just inherent. That's just our nature. And that mirrors quite neatly, I think, what Lauren tries to do.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And then the other thing that I was thinking a lot about—when that need to look up into this big expansive space. And in Parable of the Sower, like with global warming and everything, with all these fires, Earth is a very hot. It's a very hot place. And when she's talking to—I think it's to Harry, but might be to Travis about Earthseed. And they're talking about entropy and talking about losing heat. Let me find it, actually. "I was just talking to Harry and Travis." As she says, "'That's an aspect of God,' I said to Travis. 'Do you know about the second law?' He nodded. "Entropy. The idea that the natural flow of heat is from something hot to something cold, not the other way. So that the universe itself is cooling down, running down, dissipating its energy. " That move into space is the move from something very hot—this very hot planet into something colder.
John: Mhm.
Rosianan: Space.
John: Right, it's truly our destiny.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Our destiny is to move from that which is hot to that which is cooler.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I never thought of that. That's beautiful. That's wild.
Rosianna: Yeah. I loved rereading this. How did you find out about this book? Did someone recommend it to you?
John: Yeah, so it started...I think...yeah, so I'm not totally positive, but several people had recommended Kindred to Sarah and me—different Octavia Butler novel. And we both read that and loved it. I mean, it's so intense.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: This book also—it's just—putting aside the metaphor and symbolism and figurative language and hot and cold and staring into the fire and every—it's an incredibly intense story.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Within the first ten pages, you're in a situation where like—I, at least, am in a situation where I'm putting things off and to the side, because I'm in a reading emergency. I have to find out what is going on and to how it's going to resolve. Kindred is very much that way, but in some ways it's a horror novel. It's a novel about race and racism and slavery. And it features a woman living in contemporary America who keeps time traveling back to slavery. And it is really—I mean, it's one of the great portrayals, at least that I've read—one of the most moving, damning, wrenching portrayals of slavery in the United States. And then after I read that, I just kind of roared through all of Octavia Butler's work.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And it's all great. It's hard to pick a favorite, but the reason I wanted to pick Parable of the Sower for this book club was because I just feel like it speaks so much to our times.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Not just on the story front, but also on the political front. I mean, it's a novel of literal walls, right?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: A novel of trying to figure out how walls work, when they fail, why they fail. How the movement of people works and so it just felt extremely relevant to me. I should say that there is another Parable book. It is called Parable of the Talents and it is also great. I like Parable of the Sower better. To be fair—
Rosianna: I feel like Parable of the Talents is even more harrowing, I found.
John: Yeah, it was too—it was maybe too intense for me.
Rosianna: It was quite a lot, but it was—
John: I'm a little bit of a coward when it comes to reading.
Rosianna: What I liked about it, though is that it gave you an indication of where the third book would have gone, had it been written, so.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: You know, that kind of what happens next.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But yeah, I mean, the idea of walls are so interesting because I also think—really felt this borderless-ness in a lot of ways, reading it at this time. Even with things like the measles outbreak, which jumped out a lot more now—
John: Yup.
Rosianna: —with that conversation about vaccination, but then also with coronavirus and that sort of just general fear of what an outbreak is and can do. And then also hyper-empathy, I think—
John: Oh, yeah.
Rosianna: —affected me differently this time. That sense of not being able to contain pain, but then also how hyper-empathy can sometimes lead you to look away or close your eyes because it causes you more pain to see it.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: And then the other side of that is how asking for help with it or accepting help with it, like with Bankole, can help manage your pain and how being open about what's causing it, like with the sharing with her—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: The people she learns to trust in her community can also help protect her. But how in that very extreme state when she doesn't know who to trust and is just so afraid of that pain, it causes her to kill a lot of the time—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —rather than heal, rather than leave someone behind because she just can't handle that level of pain.
John: Right. Yeah, to go back to the disease. I think that disease in general is such a great metaphor for the ultimate failures of borders—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —because diseases don't know about borders. Viruses are not aware of when they're in China versus when they're somewhere else.
Rosianna: It's like, it's not in their language. Like it's not even that they don't care. They just don't—it's not part of how they operate.
John: Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's not how it works for them. And yeah, there are just so many ideas that we rely upon as if they are real, like money.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And you see what happens in this novel when those ideas stop feeling legitimate.
Rosianna: And I feel like part of what's fascinating about Lauren's worldview around change is that it's not from an ignorant place with history. She's very aware of history and she's aware—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —of the history of slavery of, again, yeah, of company towns and debts slaves and the potential for abuse. And she's always wary and aware of the potential for abuse. She really pays attention to people around her who share knowledge about that. So even though there is change, it's not always the same as newness. So change doesn't mean that there's never any repetition to it. And she kind of uses those patterns—
John: And there's no sense that change is—rather than change being good or bad, change just is the defining characteristic of the universe.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It's more—like God is change in the way that God is.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Change is.
Rosianna: And that's kind of irrefutable.
John: Thinking about—yeah, right? Like that is the truth. That change—that's why I do have quasi-Scriptural vibes about this book, partly because like, you know, there are parts of it that are quasi-Scriptural.
Rosianna: It's very aware of of the biblical text.
John: Yeah. It's unabashedly that. That's where the title comes from.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: But lifting up this fundamental fact of the universe—that matter is in flux, things are changing, all that you touch, you change, all that you change, changes you, the only lasting truth is change. That is an acknowledgement of our condition rather than a celebration of it.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It's just like, this is. And so from a religious creation narrative standpoint, the myth orients itself not around some outside idea of justice or fairness, but instead by just acknowledging change and acknowledging that we need to work with an awareness that all that we touch, we change, and that all that we change, changes us.
Rosianna: Absolutely. I liked that the novel ends with the naming of the community. Because that felt very biblical. That felt very Adam and Eve.
John: Yeah, I know.
Rosianna: And then also this—I'm always fascinated by death rituals and grief rituals. I think the planting of the acorns is such a beautiful way of doing it, but it's also—I just thought about this while I was talking about it—it's also starting with the fruit and growing the tree from the fruit, rather than putting the tree first and then the fruit coming from there. They've already had that—they've had so much horrible experience and they've seen so much of—really, the worst of people. They have that knowledge, but they put it in the ground, anyway. They put it in literally scorched earth.
John: Right.
Rosianna: That farm that was burnt down. And start again—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —like they don't—that's not the end of the chapter for them. There's a lot about it that I found hopeful. I think the first time I read it, I found it less hopeful because it made me afraid. Because it felt too real and too close.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And it is real and is very close to her experience, but there's still hope in it and that in itself feels hopeful.
John: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that—I hope that no human community has this level of suffering in front of it, of what happens in Parable of the Sower. But I also know that lots of human communities have been through—not exactly that, obviously, but versions of that suffering.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Have been through, you know, civil wars where everything collapses and where—I mean, we were just filming a Crash Course European History about decolonization and about the war for independence in Kenya. And there was this really gut-wrenching quote about a young man walking back home after school and slowly realizing that he was standing in his village, but there were no buildings there—
Rosianna: Oh, god.
John: —because it had been burned to the ground.
Rosianna: Oh, it's horrifying.
John: And so many times throughout history, communities of humans have been destroyed or have had to rebuild from almost nothing. And so it is—I mean, I think that's part of why it's such an upsetting read is because it isn't unprecedented.
Rosianna: Right. It's very rooted in history.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And in that way it is like—other than just under the dystopia umbrella, it's very much like Handmaid's Tale in the sense of everything that Atwood drew from was something that had actually happened in the past.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Like it has that feeling to it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: But also something else I was thinking about was how Lauren focuses so much on this sense of survival, initially, and that initially means very practical terms and having her escape pack ready and practicing the route of how to get out and all of this—
John: Mhm. Mhm.
Rosianna: —and trying to persuade other people to join her. But really that survival becomes much more about her outlook on it. And also—yeah, the natural leader that she becomes and this way that she binds together with community and less about knowing what to eat with what, because they all have that knowledge. And she has that great moment where it's her and Harry and Zahra and Zahra thinks they're about to ditch her. And she says, well, no, of course we're not going to ditch you. Like you have your knowledge from being on the street, like you have something to contribute. And that, really, is for me, at least, the core to her survival is that community.
John: Oh, that's so beautifully put and I think it's good to leave on a hopeful note,
Rosianna: Try and be hopeful, as 2024 is coming up quickly.
John: Yeah, I mean—yeah, I feel like it's 50/50 about whether or not in 2024 I'm going to be living in a civilization I recognize.
Rosianna: I'll live on a hill.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Great.
John: Yeah, maybe I'll just live on a farm. That's not so bad
Rosianna: You know how to grow things now.
John: Yeah. I mean, I am the kind of gardener who would definitely be among the first to die.
Rosianna: I know how to grow a lot of herbs. Can we survive on herbs?
John: Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I'd have to have a lot of mealy tomatoes.
Rosianna: Perfect.
John: But I'm getting better.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Thank you all for reading with us. We really love reading with you and we hope that you're enjoying the Discord, if you're on the Discord. If you're not on the Discord, we hope that you'll check it out. I know it can be a little intimidating, but it gets easier the more you use it, like anything. And also if there weren't a small barrier to entry, it would be like every other social media platform and horrible.
Rosianna: So you saying the Discord is behind a wall?
John: Uh-oh.
Rosianna: Oh, no.
John: Oh, boy. Maybe like a knee-high wall.
Rosianna: But yeah. You can just do a little hop over it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: It will be fine. And yeah, next month is Hank's pick, so exciting things ahead.
John: Yeah, I'm excited to read a book with Hank next time. It's going to be fun.
Rosianna: It's going to be very fun. All right, well, thank you for podcasting with me, John.
John: Yeah. Thank you. And thanks to everybody for subscribing and thanks to Sheridan Gibson who edits this podcast and produces it. So thank you, Sheridan. And we'll talk with you next time.
Rosianna: Goodbye.