What "Parable of the Sower" Taught Us About the Future

Episode Transcript

Virginia Marshall On January 7, 2025, a fire started outside of Los Angeles, at the base of the San Gabriel mountains. The flames spread quickly to Altadena, a residential neighborhood north of Pasadena and L.A. In a matter of hours, the fire had consumed 2,000 acres, with no sign of slowing down. 

News reporter 1 We are live right now on Lake Avenue in Altadena. Yet another business that has been completely hollowed-out because of these flames.

News reporter 2 The Eaton fire on the East Side, they’ve each reduced whole neighborhoods to ash and forced tens of thousands of people to flee.

Adwoa Adusei For the people who live in Altadena — a place where Black homeownership is twice the national average — it was a terrifying time. The power was out, so residents tried to listen to the radio, check their phones, and talk with neighbors. Many were waiting for evacuation orders that never came.

Nikki High I didn't get an evacuation notice. I got a call from a friend who said, ‘Hey, where did you guys evacuate to?’ And I said, you know, ‘We haven't evacuated.’ 

Adwoa Adusei This is Nikki High, a bookstore owner and longtime resident of Altadena.

Nikki High Once I got off of the phone with my friend, I heard the cops outside, and they were saying, ‘Evacuate, get out, get out, get out.’

Sylvie Andrews One of the hardest things for all of us to grasp is — when do you make the decision to leave? 

Virginia Marshall This is Sylvie Andrews, another resident of Altadena who evacuated on January 7th.

Sylvie Andrews My husband and I both had what we call ‘go bags,’ but you know, there are other things too. The important documents boxes that we all think about, right? I had all these things staged by the front door even before the fire hit because the windstorm was so bad. 

Nikki High I got in the car, and as I'm backing out of the driveway, I can see the fire from the other side of my house.

Virginia Marshall Nikki High again.
 

Nikki High I hook a quick right to get to Lake Avenue and, you know, it was bumper to bumper cars. And I was immediately, started thinking like, oh, I don't have a go bag.

Adwoa Adusei Thankfully, Nikki and Sylvie were able to evacuate quickly, grabbing necessary items and driving toward safety through a fire that would claim the lives of 17 people. 
 

Virginia Marshall And they’re not alone. In the end, an estimated 6,000 homes burned in the Eaton fire. And there’s another thing that unites Sylvie and Nikki: when the fire started, they both thought about the same thing—a novel by the late sci-fi writer Octavia Butler. Here’s Sylvie. 

Sylvie Andrews Having read Parable of the Sower, you know, within the last four years before all of this, I understood the importance of trusting yourself and believing that you were seeing that things were going wrong, even if other people were not. And many of us talk now after the fire about that moment and when it came for us, and I think it came a lot earlier for me because I had read these books, and I had kind of practiced for that partially because of what Octavia Butler had taught me. 
 

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Octavia Butler, the Hugo- and Nebula- award winning science fiction writer, published Parable of the Sower, a speculative novel, in 1993. That book was the first in a series set in a neighborhood outside Los Angeles that bears striking resemblance to Altadena, where Butler lived for much of her life. 

Adwoa Adusei And what makes Parable of the Sower a speculative novel is that Butler set it in the future – for her. Parable of the Sower takes place from 2024 to 2027 in a world ravaged by climate change and capitalism. The narrator of Parable of the Sower is a 15-year-old Black girl named Lauren Olamina, and the book is made up of her diary entries. On February 1, 2025, she writes, ‘We had a fire today.’ Here’s Sylvie again. 

Sylvie Andrews Lauren Olamina is living in this walled compound that is safe, but she's very much aware that things could change and that someday she might have to flee the safety of her neighborhood. And because of this, Lauren packs a bag. She has a ‘go-bag,’ as we call it in prepper culture, and it's hidden in a particular place in her house and she has actually practiced on multiple occasions, you know, where to run to grab the important things, the stash of cash, the stash of, you know, supplies.

Adwoa Adusei Here’s a bit from Chapter 7 of Parable of the Sower, read by Hannah Shreiner. 
 

I’ve finally assembled a small survival pack for myself–a grab-and-run pack. … I found an old canteen and a plastic bottle both for water, and I resolved to keep them clean and full. I packed matches, a full change of clothing, including shoes in case I have to get up at night and run, comb, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, tampons, toilet paper …

Sylvie Andrews It's not just the things we take with us that matter. It's also the people. That's the other thing that I learned from these books.
 

…bandages, pins, needles and thread, alcohol, aspirin, a couple of spoons and forks, a can opener, my pocket knife, packets of acorn flour, dried fruit, roasted nuts and edible seeds, dried milk, a little sugar and salt, my survival notes, several plastic storage bags, large and small, a lot of plantable raw seed, my journal, my Earthseed notebook, and lengths of clothesline.
 

Sylvie Andrews You know, I was out on the driveway as the winds were picking up, talking to my neighbors. I had a very close knit neighborhood on my block, and we were all consulting with each other when it became clear that the apps weren't updating quickly enough, when it became clear that there were no sheriff's vehicles and no fire trucks coming down our streets. We had to rely on each other. And that's exactly what happens in Parable of the Sower as well. 

Virginia Marshall In these unfathomable moments, when the world seems to be falling apart, we often turn to stories for guidance.

Adwoa Adusei For the folks in Southern California earlier this year, that story was Parable of the Sower. It set up a striking parallel to our present moment, and allowed us to see everything through Octavia Butler’s eyes.
 

Virginia Marshall Readers are returning to the book today because it shows us how speculation – and Afrofuturism in particular – can help us move through the world with our eyes open. 
 

Adwoa Adusei And, there are so many other books that are coming back to us now. Books that have changed our minds or our society in some way. At a time when it feels like what we choose to read is more contentious than ever, we at Brooklyn Public Library decided it was time to revisit the books that changed us.

Virginia Marshall So we sent out a survey to writers, readers, and library workers. We asked them: what books changed you? The responses we got were incredible. We heard stories about books that entered people’s lives at just the right moment. Books that allowed readers to see themselves there on the page, and books that helped readers process natural disaster, and war.
 

Adwoa Adusei We want to bring all these stories to you, to show you that books have always had power, and that this uproar about books … is nothing new. 
 

Virginia Marshall So over the next several weeks, we’ll bring you memoirs, history books, picture books, graphic novels and fiction that had a profound impact on our nation’s past, and the present moment. 

Adwoa Adusei And the books we chose to feature – they’re not the end of the story. We’re looking at these books with a critical lens, and talking about what we’re all reading – and writing – now. That’s the beauty of revisiting. We get to take into account everything that came after.

Virginia Marshall So, from the team that brought you Borrowed and Banned, our award-winning series about book bans, this is Borrowed and Returned: revisiting the books that changed us, and changed America, too. I’m Virginia Marshall, audio producer at Brooklyn Public Library. 
 

Adwoa Adusei And I’m Adwoa Adusei, librarian at BPL’s Library for Arts and Culture. Today’s episode: How Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower changed the way we imagine the future.
 

[Theme music out] 
 

Virginia Marshall The day after she evacuated, Nikki High went to check on her business, which is also in Altadena. We mentioned that Nikki is a bookstore owner, but we didn’t say that her bookstore is called Octavia’s Bookshelf, which she named in honor of Octavia Butler. 
 

Nikki High So, I went to the bookstore the following day, and at that point, I realized that we still had Wi-Fi and power, which was huge. You know, so obviously I was like, okay, well, I need to get online. I need to call my insurance agent. I need to do the stuff. And then it occurred to me, well, if I need to do this stuff, other people need to do it. So, I just sent a post on Instagram. I said, ‘Hey, everybody, I have Wi-Fi and power. If you want to come in to get online, I'll also try to get some food and water.’ And that was really supposed to be it.

[Music]
 

But see, there's that thing with community again. Somebody came by and said, ‘Oh, I heard you had water.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I only had water if you wanna be here, but let me grab some water.’ Went across the street to grab a couple of cases of water. And then before you know it, like, there's 75 cases of water at the front door. Within I think 16 hours, people had just started bringing stuff to the bookstore. The phone was ringing off the hook. My bookstore manager looked at me and she said, ‘I think we have an operation here.’
 

News reporter 3 NBC’s Carmen Dickerson brings us the story of an Altadena woman whose book store didn’t burn in the Eaton fire, but it has been transformed.
 

News reporter 4 Octavia’s Bookshelf put out a community call for donations, pulling the books down and putting the donated items up for grabs.

Virginia Marshall Nikki and her community worked non-stop to support each other. And she was still working when we talked to her in March. She was dialing in from her car.
 

Nikki High I'm in a state of complete exhaustion. So many people, you know, would ask me like, ‘How are you able to turn your shop into a donation center? You know, you were displaced. How, how, how?’ And honestly, the thought never crossed my mind because I have this community who instantly said, ‘Yep, you're gonna be okay. We'll help you through this. We'll get the donations out to people. We'll take care of each other.’ And I really do feel that that is sort of the magic of Octavia Butler.
 

Adwoa Adusei The community that came together in Altadena after the fires is just one example of the many ways that Octavia Butler’s work has touched readers’ lives. There are so many other ripple effects, like the impact Butler had on other writers, including the renowned science fiction and fantasy writer N.K. Jemisin. 

N.K. Jemisin I did not grow up wanting to be a writer. I often thought that it was a good idea, and I would ask people, you know, ‘I read these books. I think they're great. I'd like to write books myself … so can I be a writer?’ And people would quickly say, ‘No, no, of course not. You know, this is science fiction. Black women don't write science fiction.’ 
 

Adwoa Adusei Today, Jemisin is regarded as the most celebrated science fiction and fantasy writer of her generation. But, she wasn’t exactly encouraged to write when she was growing up. There just weren’t that many examples of other Black science fiction writers … until Octavia Butler came along.
 

Virginia Marshall Nora Jemisin was a teen in Alabama when she first started reading Butler’s books. The first one she read was Dawn, which is from Butler’s Xenogenesis series, also known as Lilith’s Brood. It’s set in the future, in outer space, when only a handful of humans have survived a nuclear war. 
 

N.K. Jemisin Didn't realize it was written by a Black person at first, because it was the earliest edition of Dawn that has two white women on the cover, where one of the characters is actually Black in the book. And there's no author photo, there's no description. Back in those days, they were trying to conceal that she was Black. When I began to read her books and began to realize this is a Black woman, like me, she's been published, like I might want to do one day, and it can be done. Just, it opened up a whole vista of possibilities.
 

Adwoa Adusei It took a career change in her 30s for Jemisin to fully embrace the idea of being a writer. And we’re all so glad she did. She’s written dozens of books and short stories and was the first author to receive the coveted Hugo Award three years in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy.

Virginia Marshall But if it was hard for Jemisin to see a future for herself as a Black science fiction writer, it was even harder for Octavia Butler. 

[Music]
 

Adwoa Adusei Butler was born in 1947 and grew up in Pasadena, California, the only daughter of a single mother in a racially-segregated world. Butler recalled going to cleaning jobs with her mom, and having to enter white homes through the back door. 
 

Virginia Marshall But young Octavia Butler always knew she wanted to write, and she continued to work at her craft through community college and multiple jobs, eventually publishing her first short stories in the 1970s, and her first novels after that. 

Adwoa Adusei Butler slowly gained recognition for her work, as well as a dedicated readership. In 1979, she wrote her now-famous novel Kindred, about a woman who travels back in time to the antebellum South, where she interacts with her enslaved ancestors. By the 1990s, Butler had won two Hugo Awards and was starting research on her new series, the Parable books, with Parable of the Sower coming out in 1993, and Parable of the Talents in 1998.
 

Octavia Butler What I wanted to write was a novel of someone who was coming up with solutions of a sort.

Virginia Marshall This is Octavia Butler in a 2005 interview with Democracy Now! a year before she died. She was only 58 years old when she passed, but at this point in her life, she was in a position to reflect on the experience of writing the Parable books a decade earlier. 

Octavia Butler They are books about what happens if we don’t trouble to correct some of the problems that we’re brewing for ourselves right now. Global warming is one of those problems. And I was aware of it back in the 80s, I was reading books about it. And, a lot of people were seeing it as politics, as something very iffy, as something they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow. That, and the fact that I think I was paying a lot of attention to education because a lot of my friends were teachers. And the politics of education were getting scarier, it seemed to me. We were getting to a point where we were thinking more about the building of prisons than of schools and libraries.
 

Adwoa Adusei In the late 1980s and early 90s, conservatism and the religious right were gaining political power, with the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. And closer to home for Butler, in Los Angeles in 1992, police officers were acquitted for the beating of Rodney King, an unarmed Black man. In the ensuing protest and violence, 63 people died and hundreds of homes and businesses burned.

Virginia Marshall Butler was drawing on what she saw around her when she wrote Parable of the Sower. In the novel, she depicts a world where social services have collapsed for everyone who isn’t massively wealthy. Poverty, violence, and drug use are destroying people’s lives, and it’s not safe for people to leave their homes without guns. When Nora Jemisin first read Parable of the Sower … she was skeptical.

N.K. Jemisin So, I was reading this in the 90s. We're in the .com boom. The Internet has opened up whole new worlds of possibility, and here she is talking about the end of America, basically. You know, the dissolution of America in a fascistic, theocratic nightmare. Well, I didn't think that sounded realistic at the time. 
 

Virginia Marshall Parable of the Sower is coming back to us now because of the eerie, almost prophetic nature of the text. And it’s not just the fires. In her diary entry on November 6, 2024, the narrator of the Parable books, Lauren Olamina, writes about the election of the ultra-conservative President Donner. And the fictional President Donner wants to “suspend ‘overly restrictive’ minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws” … all things that sound pretty familiar today. 

N.K. Jemisin There are people who come to speculative fiction looking for its predictive capacity, or its futurism. I do tend to think that's a mistake. Science fiction, like any fiction, is not really about the future. It is a reflection of what the author in the present is concerned about. The things that were beginning to develop were frightening, were deeply concerning. And she decided to confront that fear by just like, let's go. Let's deep dive into it, and let’s wallow in it for a while.
 

[Music]

There is a cathartic power in confronting your fear, in taking it as deep as it can go and seeing, in the case of the Parable books, that she was exploring, how do you survive that? How do you get past it? How do you gain strength despite these terrible things happening? How do you form those social networks that you're going to need to rebuild? How do you get the philosophy, and how do you get your mind right to get through all of this? 

Adwoa Adusei There are many reasons to read Butler’s speculative fiction: as a window into what she was grappling with at the time; as a thought exercise; or as a blueprint for what’s to come. 
 

Virginia Marshall But no matter why you read her, it’s undeniable that Octavia Butler had an impact on the way artists and writers imagine the future. She is often regarded as one of the pillars of Afrofuturism, or the idea that people of African descent will have a central role in imagining and creating what lies ahead. Octavia Butler was among the first to use fiction to imagine a future shaped and saved by a young Black woman. 

Adwoa Adusei There are so many artists today who consider their work part of this Afrofuturist tradition. Musicians such as Janelle Monae, Solange, and Erykah Badu, and writers like Nnedi Okorafor, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and N.K. Jemisin. There’s also the adaptation of Marvel’s Black Panther comics series into the widely popular portrayal of an Afrofuturist Wakanda.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Butler’s writing is so vivid, and so urgent, that it’s hard not to make connections between her imagined 2025, and our reality. This is especially true for those who live in Altadena and Pasadena, where Butler lived much of her early life. Sometimes, it can feel like Butler is speaking through time.

News reporter 5 When the Eaton fire erupted, the Mountain View Cemetery and Mortuary in Altadena faced a rare struggle, racing to save thousands of loved ones who already passed. 
 

Adwoa Adusei At one point during the fires back in January, Octavia Butler’s final resting place was threatened by flames. Fire crews and cemetery workers banded together to save the cemetery. In the end, Butler’s grave and countless others were spared.
 

Virginia Marshall The truth is that Octavia Butler is still a powerful presence for many Altadenans. There’s a middle school named after her in Altadena, and a laboratory named for her at the Los Angeles Public Library. Huntington Library in San Marino, California has her archives, all of her notes and letters, and of course, there’s a book store named after her. Here’s Nikki High again.

Nikki High It's very sort of physical for me, walking down streets that she walked down, sitting on buses that she sat on, you know, going through her notebooks. She was so well-researched and well-studied. She was a famous bookworm, someone who deeply cared about our environment and the climate and the earth. So much of that feels close to me. 
 

Virginia Marshall It makes sense that a place devastated by fire — and saved by community — would look for meaning anywhere they could, starting with Butler’s books. Jessica Bethel, the founder of Literature Noir, a virtual book club for BIPOC books, lives in the Los Angeles area. She said her social network started posting about Octavia Butler as soon as the fires started.
 

Jessica Bethel And everybody was freaking out like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I gotta read Parable of the Sower.’ I was actually posting on Threads and on my Instagram about like, pretty much a guide to reading Parable of the Sower. And I was like, ‘Before you freak out and panic-buy Parable of the Sower, please read this guide.’ 

Virginia Marshall There were so many people who wanted to read the book to process what was going on in LA that an idea for a community book club came together. Nikki High and Octavia’s Bookshelf stepped in to host, and Black Events L.A. helped coordinate everything.

Jessica Bethel We launched it February 1st, which is also monumental in the book. It sold out within two hours. And we had to add more dates, and those sold out again. 
 

Adwoa Adusei Readers came from all over the L.A. area, not just Altadena. They connected to different parts of the book. Some were drawn to the idea that young people will lead the way into the future. Then, there’s the creation of a new religion, which Lauren calls Earthseed. Those guiding principles reminded many in the book club about the importance of education and community values. 
 

Virginia Marshall One family at the book club — also survivors of the Eaton fire — told a very moving story about the impact that Parable of the Sower had on them. Here’s Jessica again.
 

Jessica Bethel They're Indigenous and their elder gave them this book to read in 2020. They followed the blueprint, and they came together and bought land in North California. And when the fires broke out in Pasadena, they all had somewhere to go. When everybody was going South to like San Diego, OC, you know, other parts of California, they were going North.

Adwoa Adusei By the end of Parable of the Sower, Lauren’s group of refugees eventually makes it north to safety, where they decide to start a new community founded on the principles of Earthseed.

Virginia Marshall Sylvie Andrews, the Altadena resident who lost her home, was also at the book club meeting. This idea of rebuilding not just the same community after devastation, but a better one — was something that moved her. 
 

Sylvie Andrews For me, the opportunity here is to rebuild a neighborhood that is more defensible against wildfire. It's the opportunity to actually take a step back outside of our little nuclear family bubbles and our little suburban islands, and instead look to each other and ask each other, well, as I'm building my house, what can I build that also helps you?

Virginia Marshall If we are like Octavia Butler, and we’re able to look at what’s happening around us and respond with unity and compassion, then maybe the future we write for ourselves can have a bit more hope.
 

Sylvie Andrews We did not fall apart to the extent that things do in Parable of the Sower. We're still keeping it together a little bit more than the society that's there. And I think Octavia Butler knew those same Altadenans that I did. And I think that Altadena got Altadena out of there. And, you know, 17 lives were lost in this fire. People who could not leave their homes for one reason or another. And it just breaks my heart to think that they were waiting for someone who never came. And the thing I'm taking away from all of this is to become the person who will be there even when nobody else is. 
 

[Music]
 

Adwoa Adusei We’re going to release our full interview with N.K. Jemisin next week as a bonus episode. Jemisin had so much more to say about speculative fiction, and what she’s thinking about now with her own writing, and we couldn’t fit it all into this episode.

Virginia Marshall And if you’re thinking about reading Parable of the Sower now, there are lots of ways to engage with the book. Look for a book club near you, or check out a podcast that will read along with you. Jessica Bethel co-hosts one called A League of Extraordinary Readers, and there’s also a fantastic podcast called Octavia’s Parables, hosted by adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon, where they go chapter by chapter through Octavia’s Parable novels, and more. Toshi Reagon also wrote an opera based on Parable of the Sower, and it’s really good. We’ll put more information about all of those things on our web page.

Adwoa Adusei And, Altadena is still recovering and rebuilding. We’ll put links to help out Octavia’s Bookshelf and other community projects in Altadena, so you can spread the love that way, too.

Virginia Marshall Finally, we have a book list with related titles – not just Octavia Butler! – so you can get to reading alongside us. Our next full episode (after N,K. Jemisin’s bonus interview) will come out in two weeks. And, a sneak peak … we’re going to talk about The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
 

Donald Washington There were some messages that were lost that I got from Malcolm X’s autobiography and others. There was a history that I didn’t have.
 

Virginia Marshall Borrowed and Returned is a production of Brooklyn Public Library. It’s written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall, and co-hosted with Adwoa Adusei. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes with all of our great links at BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.   

Adwoa Adusei Brooklyn Public Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] donate. Our Borrowed advisory team is made up of Fritzi Bodenheimer, Nick Higgins, Robin Lester Kenton, and Damaris Olivo. Our marketing and design team for this series includes Laurie Elvove, Ashley Gill, Jennifer Proffitt, Lauren Rochford and Leila Taylor.
 

Virginia Marshall That’s it for this episode. Until next time… keep re-reading.