Parable of the Talents
by Octavia E. Butler
Summary
The sequel to Parable of the Sower, and it should be read second.
Lauren Olamina has built Acorn, a small self sufficient community in northern California, around Earthseed, the religion she wrote as a teenager, whose central claim is that God is change and whose Destiny is to take root among the stars.
The United States around it has kept degrading. Andrew Steele Jarret is elected president on a Christian America platform and a promise to make America great again, and his supporters, who are not officially the government, begin burning churches of other faiths and taking over settlements.
Acorn is seized. The adults are collared with electronic shock devices and worked as slaves on their own land by men who consider this a re education programme, the women are raped as policy, and the children, including Lauren's infant daughter, are removed and given to Christian America families.
The novel is assembled from Lauren's journals, her husband's writing, and the bitter commentary of that daughter, now grown, who was raised as Asha Vere and who blames her mother's religion for everything. It is the daughter's voice that makes the book: Earthseed succeeds, and the cost is itemised by the person who paid it.
Butler refuses to make the ending triumphant. Earthseed does eventually launch, humanity does reach for another star, and Lauren dies at eighty one having been right about everything and having lost her daughter permanently to being right.
Around four hundred pages, brutal through the middle third and completely unsentimental about the founder of a faith, including her ambition and her coldness.
Read Parable of the Sower first. Best for readers who want a hard look at what conviction costs the people standing nearest to it, and a dystopia built from mechanisms that already existed when it was written.
Historical Context & Significance
Parable of the Talents won the 1999 Nebula Award for Best Novel, presented in 2000.
Octavia E. Butler wrote it in the 1990s and set it in the 2030s, and the slogan she gave President Jarret, make America great again, was in political circulation from Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign. Its reappearance in 2015 sent readers back to the book in enormous numbers, and it has stayed there.
Butler was the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, in 1995, and had already won Hugos and Nebulas for shorter work including Bloodchild. She intended a third Parable novel and could not write it, saying the material had become too bleak, and turned to Fledgling instead. She died in 2006 at fifty eight.