The Overlooked Lesson of The Parable of the Sower

On the power of the big dream in Octavia Butler's prescient novel

Quick thing: I have a new book, The Pacific Circuit, coming out March 18, 2025. It’s the culmination of eight years of work thinking and living in Oakland. We revealed the beautiful cover this week, and I did a reel explaining some of the cover design. If you want to do me the biggest solid: go preorder the book. Preorders are super important for book launches! On with the show…

What is the point of talking about botanical beauty or mystery in times like these? How can anyone let their eyes linger on the way the light is hitting a bowl of persimmons? Who could be thinking about flowers at a moment like this?¹

Fair questions. Let me try to answer them. Fair warning: It’s going to be a bit of a roundabout journey, and it begins, as so many journeys in these times do, with Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

Published in 1993, the novel opens 21 years in the future—that is to say, 2024—in a degraded Los Angeles suburb. Lauren Olamina is a teenage girl from a family just up from the bottom rung of a society that is collapsing on itself. On November 6, 2024, a presidential candidate wins with the slogan, Make America Great Again. “He hopes to … suspend ‘overly restrictive’ minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws for those employers willing to take on homeless employees and provide them with training and adequate room and board,” Olamina writes in her journal. In practice, this means bringing back slavery. That president, Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner, is pretty much what you expect.

The narrator Olamina, on the other hand, is not. She has very little and soon loses even that. Her response to her circumstances is to imagine this new religion called Earthseed. Bits of Earthseed lore are included throughout The Parable. For times like these, the basic tenets have always felt like a balm to me (and many others). For example:

Once that concept got into my mind, I have thought about it pretty much every day for 10 years.

Or consider this bit of wisdom:

Undoubtedly, you will see this book and Earthseed more in the coming months, as we did when Trump was first elected. There’s something so eerie and uncanny about this work. We should be stunned by Butler’s prescience, and scour the text for what it might offer about the cultural and political dynamics of our time.

But that’s not all that’s going on. Earthseed is not mere folk wisdom or sci-fi guide to the future. There is a key dictum of Earthseed that almost everyone ignores, and which names the purpose of humanity:

The desinty of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.

Olamina means this literally. In her religion, humans have a special purpose, and it is to spread our biosphere (“Earthlife”) to other planets.

There are fascinating passages in the book where she tries to tell people about her vision for Earthseed. They do not really believe her. Space travel? Lady, slavery is back! Refugees are streaming up I-5! Drugs and gangs and guns are everywhere! Society has collapsed! Space travel?!?

Sometimes the characters, like many people in our real world, choose to see Earthseed as mere prescription for an addled world. But Olamina is clear: “Fixing the world is not what Earthseed is about.” It is bigger than that. She said what she said: “And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.”

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When I first read this book, I struggled with Olamina’s insistence. In fact, it makes recruiting people to Earthseed more difficult. There is something inexplicable about it. Why did she feel this way? Because she did. It came from the part of her that did not need any kind of instrumental justification.

Over time, I came to understand it differently. Butler is saying: people need a transcendent goal, a way of tapping into the awe and wonder of the universe. The impossibility of travel to the stars in the Parable is neither here nor there. The power of Earthseed is that it demonstrates that anyone in any circumstances can hold an audacious and global dream for humanity in their heart. The existence of a nearly impossible vision inside Lauren Olamina is, itself, a form for power; it says, you cannot kill off the spirit through brute force and immiseration.

Does the specific dream matter? I’m not sure it does. And I would suggest a journey inwards into life, rather than outwards into space.

To me, our destiny is to be the part of the biosphere that comes to understand what it is to be alive. Life, in its many forms, remains fundamentally mysterious. Life does things that the rest of the universe does not. As physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker puts it, “Life is the only physics that can generate complex objects." Life has agency, and yet is made of the same things as the rest of the universe. How? It has something to do with information and energy, something down near the fundamentals of the universe, but how the parts are connected remains unclear.

On Sunday, I went to see Kija Lucas’s incredible show at the Palo Alto Art Center. Kija grew up in Palo Alto in an intentionally racially integrated community, with all the attendant complexities you might imagine there. Her work takes the form of incredible photographs of botanical materials (almost) glowing from within. They are, I would say, memory traces as much as objects, and they pulsate with energy. Each one calls you to see the plant in question differently, to replace your low-resolution image of it with one of Kija’s gorgeous rendered portraits. And in that quality of attention, there is a portal to thinking about the raw complexity of life, structure stacked in structure stacked in structure.

Out of the vast universe of things we might know about life, we don’t know much, as books like Philip Ball’s How Life Works show. The idea that life is fundamentally like some kind of machine—whether steam engine or computer—has run its course. Life is always more complex than anyone bargains on. Life is always doing more than we imagined. Every time we learn a big new thing, it becomes the “secret to life,” but man, turns out, life has a lot of secrets!

Ball says, “life is what creates such meaning as exists in the cosmos” because life is trying to do things; it has goals and purposes. Understanding what the different forms of life around us are trying to do and playing our role in maintaining our biosphere is a task as cosmic as seeding the stars.

Our specific American politics is an important part of that because of the power and capital we have amassed, but it does not and should not negate our interest and investment in the more-than-human world. And like Olamina, I’m not saying this because I think it is good for you to touch grass and get the compost ready and plant bulbs in the face of reactionary politics. This isn’t (only) about fixing the world. This is about taking your role seriously as Earthseed, as part of humanity.

We’re so desperate right now for a future direction. One candidate argued for a return to American greatness; the other said we can’t go back. But who has defined a vision in recent decades for what we’re moving towards in this great big future? Hopefully, we extend our circles of care, fix core structural problems, remediate the land, and bring our role in the biosphere into balance.

And also, I hope we take on our human destiny of being the life that knows all other life — animal, vegetal, bacterial, fungal — reaching back to when life became. Our knowledge has reached back and up and in, but the project is incomplete and will be long into the future.

Or, as the tenets of Earthseed would have it:

Reader Haley Gonzalez tells me this brought to mind the Hanif Abdurraqib poem “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This”

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