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<\/div>N.K. Jemisin<\/p>\n
Laura Hanifin<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n
There\u2019s power in threes. The rule of three, we call it in the writing world: repeat a word or phrase or plot element three times in order to give it meaning. Two repetitions isn\u2019t enough to establish pattern recognition; four repetitions and the mind gets bored. Three is the sweet spot.<\/p>\n
It took me three tries to get what Octavia Butler was trying to do with Parable of the Sower <\/em>and Parable of the Talents<\/em>. I think. I\u2019m still not sure. But I\u2019ve now read these books three times, at three very different points in my life, and each reading has shown me just how powerfully prescient Butler was. The first read took place sometime in my mid-20s, as I struggled through grad school; the second was in my mid-30s, in the early years of my professional writing career; the third was just a few months ago as of this writing, so not long after I turned forty-six.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The mid-20s read would\u2019ve been a few years after Parable of the Sower <\/em>debuted in 1993. I\u2019d known about the books since they came out, of course, but my earliest attempts to read Sower <\/em>were bounce-offs. I was used to Butler\u2019s more overtly science-fictional premises: post\u2013nuclear apocalypse aliens (the Xenogenesis\/Lilith\u2019s Brood <\/em>books), time travel (Kindred<\/em>), or telepathy and immortality (the Patternist\/Seed to Harvest <\/em>books). In contrast to these, the Parables <\/em>featured little in the way of scientific or technological advancements or out-of-this-world what-ifs. The books seemed to \u201cmerely\u201d be set in the future.<\/p>\n Now, note: I was very much a baby black-power militant in those days. I joined sit-ins to demand that my school divest from apartheid South Africa, went to the Million Man March to help register voters, immersed myself in African American history, all of that. Yet my engagement with the ideas underlying my activism was surface level only; I hadn\u2019t had time to actualize or syncretize much. I also hadn\u2019t yet figured out how limited my own ambitions and expectations really were, largely because I couldn\u2019t visualize a world that was actually better than the one I lived in. I\u2019d spent my life absorbing statistics and societal narratives that predicted a dire future for me\u2014if I even survived young adulthood. This was echoed by the fiction I read. Most of my favorite speculative works, like Star Wars <\/em>and Star Trek <\/em>and the \u201cgolden age\u201d novels of science fiction, depicted a future that was shiny and exciting . . . for white guys. The rest of us were present only in token form, if we were present at all. Usually, we simply did not exist. There was no future for us, beyond whatever limited use the heroes might find for a few. (We were never the heroes.) And depictions like this were so ubiquitous in the speculative field that for many years I accepted them without question. Just more dire predictions. The radicalism of \u201cmerely\u201d envisioning a future\u2014while American, while black, while female\u2014had not yet become a part of my consciousness.<\/p>\n In grad school, however, I became one of three black women in an intensely competitive sixty-person master\u2019s program. As part of my program, I learned about racial identity development theories\u2014that is, the process through which a member of a racist society moves from superficial engagement with race to a place of deeper, personalized understanding. As part of one class, we were asked to read Butler\u2019s Kindred<\/em>, which I\u2019d already read, so I decided instead to finally tackle Parable of the Sower<\/em>.<\/p>\n Still wasn\u2019t ready; I know that now. However, I\u2019d grown enough by then that Lauren Olamina no longer felt anachronistically know-it-all to me, as she had when I\u2019d first sampled the novel. (She always read to me like an older woman\u2019s idea of what a smart teenager should be, rather than a realistic rendering of what smart teenagers are actually like. Naturally, I like her better the older I get.) As an examination of racial identity development, the story doesn\u2019t work at all; Lauren is basically born knowing that racism is systemic and that, as someone born at multiple intersections of marginalization (black, disabled, female, poor), she is doomed if she doesn\u2019t work every angle possible. Kindred<\/em>\u2019s Dana is a much better example of someone whose understanding of herself transforms radically over the course of a story; Lauren starts deep and stays deep. However, Parable of the Sower <\/em>works beautifully as an examination of how smart resistance functions\u2014and I, growing jaded with respectability politics, black patriarchy, and other shallow solutions to the problem of racism, needed that badly. I needed to know how to bide my time. I needed to understand the difference between good intentions and good outcomes. Understandably, I found a lot to empathize with in Lauren\u2019s struggle between being a \u201cgood girl\u201d and being a grown woman with needs beyond what parental guidance can provide.<\/p>\n Still, I didn\u2019t like <\/em>the books, not back then, nor did I find them particularly prescient. For context, this was the 1990s. The dot-com boom had begun to democratize society in new ways, by giving a blog and a platform to anyone who could yell loudly or market themselves cleverly enough. The Gulf War was over, crack was wack, and the economy was booming so much that taking on thousands of dollars in student loan debt didn\u2019t sound like a terrible idea to me, at the time. Lauren\u2019s world still felt unrealistic to me, even impossible. Roving, uncontested gangs of pedophiles and drug-addicted pyromaniacs? Slavery 2.0? A powerful coalition of white-supremacist, homophobic Christian zealots taking over the country? Nah, I thought, and hoped Butler would get back to aliens soon.<\/p>\n Yeah. Okay. Look, I was young.<\/p>\n The mid-30s read, in the late 2000s or so, hit me in the middle of a career-specific encounter with institutional racism. I\u2019d decided to become a writer by then, by profession rather than just hobby, and had added my voice to others demanding change within this genre of possibility. Octavia Butler, to our collective horror, died in 2006. Yet here were we, her spiritual children numbering in the thousands, come to claim the future. By this time I\u2019d begun to understand just how rare, and how strange, the mere idea of thinking about the future was, for those of us from marginalized backgrounds. Worse, I\u2019d seen how complicit science fiction and fantasy were in making our futures so hard to imagine. It was time for this to change. We weren\u2019t asking for much from our fellow writers: just more than European myths in our fantasy, and more than token representation in the future, present, and past.<\/p>\n But that fight is when I saw far too many of my once-favorite writers and editors reacting to our demand for a future and our existence in the present as if both were a threat. So we fought them. Of course we did; Butler\u2019s memory demanded no less. But I won\u2019t pretend I wasn\u2019t heartbroken by how hard it was to make presumably intelligent, well-meaning people understand just how much harm they were doing.<\/p>\n That\u2019s when I paid more attention to a thread in the Parable<\/em>s which had frustrated me to no end during that first read-through: the story of Marc, Lauren\u2019s younger brother, thought dead at first and later rescued from horrific sexual slavery. Marc understands pain, in spades\u2014and yet he eventually betrays Lauren, because he cannot acknowledge her pain without also acknowledging the harm that his fellow militant evangelicals have inflicted on others. He isn\u2019t an evil man; throughout the two books, he helps many, though always (and only) within the framework of the Christianity he embraces. Eventually, though, his need for the status quo, for conformity, trumps his basic goodness. \u201cI cannot help you until you suffer the way I want you to suffer, express your pain in a way that pleases my ears\u2014and stop doing both when I\u2019ve heard enough,\u201d is what he seems to say.<\/p>\n This resonated powerfully with me amid the ongoing context of the American social justice movement. For every attempt made by marginalized people to express anguish and seek change for historical (and ongoing) harm, there\u2019s always pushback from those who demand that we suffer only in the expected ways, express that suffering with an acceptable tone, and end both our suffering and our complaints on demand. Marc\u2019s ultimatum was the exact refrain of those SFF figures I once admired, as they proceeded to question why we demanded a better future, how that demand should be framed, and whether we deserved it. After that, I couldn\u2019t help wondering how much of Marc was informed by Butler\u2019s fellow authors. Maybe none. Or maybe Butler\u2019s message is that Marcs aren\u2019t exactly rare in our society\u2014so anyone who wants to understand and guide positive change, like Lauren, must also be prepared to work around them.<\/p>\n Then we come to the mid-40s read. Right now.<\/p>\n All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change Changes you.<\/em><\/p>\n What we have touched has changed: the SFF genre has improved slightly, despite its plague of Marcs. Instead of just Butler and a handful of others, now there are dozens of published black writers\u2014and disabled writers, queer writers, indigenous writers, and more. But what we have changed has changed us in turn; I and other marginalized writers must be constantly braced for internet harassment, death threats, and campaigns to Make Science Fiction Racist Again. And as science fiction reflects its present, the same ugliness afflicts our society on the macro scale. In the wake of America\u2019s first black president, we now endure an incompetent crook and bigot. We are more wired than ever, able to enact change through crowdsourcing and callout culture, for good or for ill . . . but most of us are less hopeful, more tired, struggling to keep the future in mind as a handful of powerful figures seem determined to drag us back to Jim Crow. Climate change looms. Human beings are resilient and resourceful; there\u2019s little doubt that as a species we\u2019ll survive. And those of us who want a better world will doubtless prevail, just as Lauren Olamina eventually did . . . but it may take everything we have.<\/p>\n So this time around, what I find myself resonating with most is Earthseed itself. Butler does not appear to have intended the Parable <\/em>novels to be a guidebook\u2014and yet they are. That\u2019s true for all of the most powerful science fiction novels: they offer not only accurate visions of the future, but also suggestions for coping with the resulting changes. We can only imagine what that vision might have included if Butler had been able to complete it; she apparently had planned a third novel, Parable of the Trickster<\/em>. But maybe it\u2019s just as well that she and Lauren were unable to \u201cdiscover\u201d that third book of Earthseed. Now, like the communities of Earthseed, it\u2019s our job to create change in fiction and in life. Like Lauren, these days I am comforted not by the platitudes I was raised with, but by the idea that change is a tool I can shape to my advantage, if I am clever and lucky. Claiming the future will be an ugly, brutal struggle, but I\u2019m prepared to go the distance in that fight. The future is worth it.<\/p>\n And in ten more years? I\u2019ll check in again, and see what else I can learn from these brilliant books.<\/p>\n \u2014N. K. Jemisin December 2018<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Extract taken from N.K. Jemisin\u2019s foreword to Parable of the Sower <\/em>by Octavia E. Butler, published by Headline, the latest pick for the\u00a0New Scientist Book Club<\/a>. Sign up to read along with us\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Take your science fiction writing into a new dimension during this weekend devoted to building new worlds and new works of art<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/section>\n Topics:<\/p>\n![\"New](\"https:\/\/images.newscientist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/29145349\/sei219090922.jpg\")
<\/div>![\"New](\"https:\/\/images.newscientist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/03151851\/SEI_211401408.jpg\")
\n <\/picture>\nThe art and science of writing science fiction<\/h3>\n