Forum From the Archives: Forum Book Club: Octavia E. Butler's 'Parable of the Sower'

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KQED

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2021

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“I write about people who do extraordinary things,” observed the pioneering science fiction writer Octavia Butler, “it just turned out that it was called science fiction.” This month, Forum’s book club discusses Butler’s 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower." In it, 15-year-old Lauren Olamina navigates a California in the early 2020s that has been beset by climate change, grotesque income inequality, and violence. Sound familiar? Butler has been lauded as prescient and prophetic, but she called herself merely observant and able to imagine what the world could be like if no one bothered to change. We’ll talk about the book, Octavia Butler’s legacy and what speculative fiction can teach us about our own current reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:24.6	When Octavia Butler published her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower,
1:28.6	the United States was at the beginning of an economic boom.
1:31.5	The effects of climate change still were unclear to most Americans.
1:35.3	The Cold War had just ended with the U.S. the winner.
1:38.0	Still, Butler foresaw a world of pain, ecological devastation, and debt slavery.
1:42.3	30 years on, her world can seem prophetic. We'll discuss the work for our Forum Book Club
1:46.0	and how Butler could see so far and so clearly.
1:49.0	They were what I call cautionary tales.
1:53.0	If we keep misbehaving ourselves, ignoring what we've been ignoring,
	...

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