Parable of the Sower Offers More Than Prophecy

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In the past couple of weeks, the internet has exploded with claims that author Octavia Butler was a prophet.

Butler’s 1993 science fiction novel, Parable of the Sower, crafts a vision of Los Angeles in 2024 — a city ravaged by climate change, economic inequality, political corruption, and racism. As the initial shock of this month’s wildfires subsides, Parable of the Sower has gained significant attention for supposedly predicting the devastation. Unfortunately, less attention has landed on the themes of Butler’s work. Parable of the Sower not only provides an eerily accurate vision of the world in 2025 but also a blueprint for existing within it.

Throughout Parable of the Sower, deliberate arson and wildfires set ablaze vast expanses of California’s terrain. Butler’s protagonist, teenage Lauren Olamina, lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles before setting off in search of an alternative way of life after a fire destroys her community. Fire serves as the inciting incident and plays a significant role throughout the narrative, but the story addresses a wide variety of issues pertinent to contemporary society. The novel portrays intense economic inequality and the corporatization of entire towns. Wealthy land and business owners exploit labor from lower-class citizens, often manipulating them into conditions of indentured servitude. Privately owned towns that maintain their own security and social services descend into states of total corruption and dysfunction. In Butler’s sequel, Parable of the Talents, a new American president is elected and adopts the motto “Make America Great Again”.

I finished Parable of the Sower a week before the LA fires began. Timely. The parallels with Los Angeles are incredible and certainly a testament to Butler’s remarkable foresight. However, as I scrolled social media, stumbling across endless discourse surrounding Butler’s supposedly prophetic qualities, I was struck by an absence of discussion surrounding her teachings. Parable of the Sower is a book about adaptation and survival. Lauren, all of 15 years old when Parable begins, deeply understands the issues of her time and, shortly before fire destroys her community, begins crafting a set of plans and principles — a modern spirituality — to make sense of her reality and reorient herself towards progress. Butler uses Lauren’s character to provide antidotes to the harsh conditions of reality. It is important to acknowledge that Butler was more than a prophet —a label that dilutes her knowledge, education, and imagination — but also a strategist, problem-solver, and organizer.

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I sat down with Dr. Briana Whiteside, a former college professor turned public intellectual, who recently went viral on TikTok for examining Butler’s work in the wake of the LA fires. An expert in African American literature, Whiteside possesses an absolute wealth of knowledge on Butler’s work.

While discussing the recent surge of interest in Parable of the Sower, Whiteside maintained that Butler was not a prophet, but a well-researched, well-educated woman with an incredible imagination and keen ability to study and predict trends. “Saying that [Butler] was prophetic is easy,” Whiteside asserted. “That’s the surface work. It doesn’t require any rigor.”

Parable of the Sower is a remedial call to action. The hard work lies in the action Butler prescribes, the most urgent of which is her call to build community. After Parable’s fires, Lauren is left with no family, no partner, and no neighborhood. Nevertheless, she creates her own community. As she travels north through the desolate California landscape, she invites strangers to join her, steadily building a traveling community and grounding them with the principles of her own spirituality, which she calls “Earthseed.” The necessity of community and community organization is central to Butler’s work.

Whiteside points out that Butler does not allow us to make excuses for not organizing ourselves. “Just because I may not have what I want, it does not absolve me from the responsibility of building the community that I believe in,” she says.

In the absence of community, organization is essential. Adaptation is essential.

The core tenet of Lauren’s Earthseed is the idea that “God is Change.” She insists that “the only constant is change.” Butler warns of the dangers of failing to adapt and placing hope in such external forces as God or politicians. In Parable, Lauren’s destroyed community once centered itself around Christianity. Their God did not save them from destruction.

Social media’s response to Butler’s work may be indicative of a tendency to ruminate on the woes of our existence instead of looking for solutions. Butler reminds us that complacency is unacceptable when fate is in our own hands.

Whiteside herself is following Butler’s advice. After her first Butler TikTok went viral, she posted another, and another, and her audience steadily grew. “I didn’t know people were interested in her work,” Whiteside humbly told me. “I didn’t know people were reading her work, and I didn’t know people were studying and discussing her work. This community came to me.” Though she attracted her audience somewhat unexpectedly, Whiteside has since made significant efforts to transform it into a cohesive community. Notably, she has started a YouTube channel where she will offer free public courses on Butler’s work.

“I want to invite people into her world,” Whiteside explained. “I want to give people access to a scholar who would not [typically] have access because of the politics of academia.” She is working to make Butler’s philosophies accessible and creating a community where these philosophies can flourish, evolve, and be actualized. It is important to her that this community allows the public to explore Butler’s entire canon, which she noted spans a time period from 1680 to 2366 and provides healing strategies for many different eras of human history.

Whiteside is a living part of Butler’s legacy — a legacy of teaching, organizing, and creating a future grounded in community and sustainability. Yet, she recalls disliking Parable of the Sower the first three times she read it, which she attributes to an unwillingness to accept the unsavory realities of the book’s circumstances. Her fourth read was different. Examining Butler’s work in a time of climate crisis, incredible economic inequality, and raging political corruption intensified her appreciation of Butler’s message.

Whiteside’s own call to action echoes Butler’s teachings: “You have to learn and adapt. This is not a time to resist the moment. You’re in it now.”

A.J. Weiler writes about culture and entertainment. You can find her on Medium and Muck Ruck.