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A review by matconnor
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
3.0
I wanted to like this much more than I did. You have to respect Octavia Butler's imagination and prescience. This novel was first published in 1993 and describes the United States in 2024: Society is falling apart due to climate change, inequality, and water shortages. This is a dystopian vision that feels scarily realistic.
In my opinion, there were two major issues with this book.
1. The main character (Lauren) suffers from an imaginary disease called "hyperempathy", a condition where a person physically feels the pleasure and pain of others, but Butler makes the curious decision to portray her as completely flat and unemotional. Lauren is constantly reminding us about her debilitating empathic condition but recites terrible events like murder and rape as if she were an unfeeling robot.
It would be like if an unfunny person was constantly telling you that people found them hilarious or a boring person talking about all the people who find them charming.
2. This is an epistolary novel, told through Lauren's Journal entries, and the format saps most of the tension out of this novel. There are great epistolary novels (Frankenstein, Carrie, Augustus by John Williams), but Lauren's flat journal entries made this a tedious read.
I'm not going to give up on Octavia Butler though. I still have copies of Kindred and Dawn I plan to get to. But based on the expectations I had going in, this was my most disappointing read of 2023.
In my opinion, there were two major issues with this book.
1. The main character (Lauren) suffers from an imaginary disease called "hyperempathy", a condition where a person physically feels the pleasure and pain of others, but Butler makes the curious decision to portray her as completely flat and unemotional. Lauren is constantly reminding us about her debilitating empathic condition but recites terrible events like murder and rape as if she were an unfeeling robot.
It would be like if an unfunny person was constantly telling you that people found them hilarious or a boring person talking about all the people who find them charming.
2. This is an epistolary novel, told through Lauren's Journal entries, and the format saps most of the tension out of this novel. There are great epistolary novels (Frankenstein, Carrie, Augustus by John Williams), but Lauren's flat journal entries made this a tedious read.
I'm not going to give up on Octavia Butler though. I still have copies of Kindred and Dawn I plan to get to. But based on the expectations I had going in, this was my most disappointing read of 2023.