This is the sequel to Parable of the Sower which I recently read. The novel was published in 1998 and describes a speculative-dystopian future narrated between the years 2030 and 2090. It only took until 2023 for much of the foreshadowing of this tale to become our current reality.
I’m not really sure how to review this book, critically. My feelings are best summed up by this Goodreads commenter:
This was one of the best books I’ve ever read… I never want to read it again.
I had a fairly simplistic take on this book, which was to see it as railing against the very American brand of fundamentalist Christian nationalism. This stacked up nicely with a very prescient warning about the rise of populist leaders who always seem to tag-team symbiotically with these fundamentalists (think Putin, Trump and Erdogan). Another Goodreads commenter went full HAM on this line of thinking. The following is just a snippet of their review, but is the most pertinent here:
The Parable of the Talents is in fact, as the title suggests, a work of theology, specifically political theology, the study of the link between community and individual belief. And although it overtly criticises evangelical Christianity, particularly the militant American brand, its target is really the monotheistic religions of the world — notably Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — not because they are monotheistic but because they are dogmatic, and consequently sectarian, and therefore useful for political manipulation, especially in modern democracies. The tale that Butler spins (in 1998) is eerily prescient of not just Donald Trump and his collusion with the American evangelical Right, but of Vladimir Putin’s manipulation of Russian Orthodoxy and any number of Muslim politicians’ tactics from Turkey to Indonesia. Monotheism, at least in its dogmatic forms, is clearly susceptible to political co-optation from Moses to Constantine to Khomeini.
It really is worth reading in full.
I’m going to conclude this review (if I ever even started it) with some quotes from the book that chilled me to the bone. This book, if I am honest, made me feel a little sick, Butler is just so uncannily prescient.
“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”
Hold that thought in mind as we approach 2024 elections in USA and UK.
“Beware: Ignorance protects itself.
Ignorance promotes suspicion.
[…]
Ignorance protects itself,
And protected, Ignorance grows.”
A paen to the current tidal wave of anti-intellectualism
“I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.”
This is so bleakly accurate, it hurt to read.
“I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.”
A story about what was supposed to be a future we could avoid, if we only listened and acted, is instead a tragic legacy that we have already left behind us.
I know the idea of Earthseed was that the children of Earth would find their home in the stars; however, I wonder if Butler were alive today, to see how this endeavour is now the preserve of billionaires whether she would rethink her position.
