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Parable of the

Sower

by Octavia Butler

The odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025; the place is California, where small walled comunities must protect themselves from desperate hordes of scangers and roaming bands of drug addicts.

When one such community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18-year-old black woman, sets off on foot, moving north along the dangerous coastal highways. Lauren is a “sharer,” one who suffers from hyperempathy — the ability to feel others’ pain as well as her own.

“Butler’s spare, vivid prose style invites comparison with the likes of Kate

Wilhelm and Ursula Le Guin. ” —Kirkus “Moving, frightening, funny and eerily beautiful. ” —The Washington Post

General Fiction Science Fiction

2024

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment.

Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

by Lauren Oya Olamina

.

Parable of the Sower

1

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, JULY 20, 2024

I had my recurring dream last night. I guess I should have expected it. It comes to me when I struggle-when I twist on my own personal hook and try to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. It comes to me when I try to be my father’s daughter.

Today is our birthday— my fifteenth and my father’s fifty-fifth. Tomorrow, I’ll try to please him— him and the community and God. So last night, I dreamed a reminder that it’s all a lie. I think I need to write about the dream because this particular lie bothers me so much.

I’m learning to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me.

I lean forward toward the doorway. It’s a doorway like the one between my room and the hall. It seems to be a long way from me, but I lean toward it.

Holding my body stiff and tense, I let go of whatever I’m grasping, whatever has kept me from rising or falling so far. And I lean into the air, straining upward, not moving upward, but not quite falling down either. Then I do begin to move, as though to slide on the air drifting a few feet above the floor, caught between terror and joy.

I drift toward the doorway. Cool, pale light glows from it. Then I slide a little to the right; and a little more. I can see that I’m going to miss the door and hit the wall beside it, but I can’t stop or turn. I drift away from the door, away from the cool glow into another light.

The wall before me is burning. Fire has sprung from nowhere, has eaten in through the wall, has begun to reach toward me, reach for me. The fire spreads. I drift into it. It blazes up around me. I thrash and scramble and try to swim back out of it, grabbing handfuls of air and fire, kicking, burning! Darkness.