Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
Over the next five months, I’m reading and reviewing ten pioneering works of science fiction written by women. This is my third pick. Stay tuned for more.
Parable of the Sower is the haunting tale of twelve year old Lauren Oya Olamina growing up in the United States in 2024. Her world has been devastated by climate change, crime, and political failure. Lauren begins the novel as a twelve year old child in a gated community outside of LA, surrounded by friends and family. By the end of the book, she is an adult of eighteen, her family is dead, and she has fled north with a band of followers of her new religion, Earthseed.
The book begins with a prologue consisting of a short quotation from Lauren’s religious tract. Earthseed: The Books of the Living. The prologue’s title is the year the novel begins, 2024. This first quotation is signed with Lauren’s full name and introduces the primary motivating factor in her life, her esoteric religion. The narrative thereafter is written in the first person in the form of a diary, with headers indicating the day and date. The first entry is Saturday July 20, 2024, Lauren’s twelfth birthday. The dated entries in conjunction with Lauren’s birthday help us to easily track her age and the timeline of the novel.
Octavia Butler must communicate a vast amount of backstory in a short amount of time to give Lauren’s journey context without impeding on the narrative of the novel. The prologue launches this effort and by its first three chapters, a mere twenty-seven pages later, the bulk of the backstory has been delivered. Butler succeeds in this difficult feat by communicating a new piece of backstory in (nearly) every paragraph of this section. Counting nuggets of information is a subjective affair, but approximately 80 pieces of contextual information are communicated over the course of 120 paragraphs.
A summary of good backstory delivery following Butler’s approach in Parable of the Sower:
- Make a list of facts about the world that the reader must know to put the primary narration.
- Pare this list down to approximately 50–80 facts.*
- Weave these facts into a cohesive narrative that unfolds over 80–120 paragraphs.
* Note that the type of narration will be influenced by the facts that need to be conveyed, so steps 2 and 3 may be an iterative process.
After Chapter 3, the information content of each paragraph decreases, with the focus thereafter being the emotional and the narrative content of the prose. Butler’s craft with respect to backstory embeds the reader in the world and religion of Parable of the Sower, allowing Butler to spend the majority of the novel conveying why this all-too-realistic nightmare of a potential future must be avoided.