My shelves bulge darkly with dystopian fiction: Orwell’s 1984, of course; Huxley’s Brave New World; Zamiatin’s We; Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed; Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time; the whole gamut of Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s tale, The Testaments, the raucous MaddAdam trilogy. A recent addition, Kallocain, by Karin Boye, emerged from current explorations of Sweden (where I live) and Swedish, and has been a hard-won revelation.
I read and re-read these novels for their precise world-building and skillful story-telling. I am also perversely compelled by their bleak warnings. Styles and themes converge and diverge, but all of these novels resonate partly because they succeed in telling us something about the past and the present as much as the future, as Margaret Atwood has made explicit. They are also, of course, often eerily prescient in their predictions.
A timely re-read
I recently re-read Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, published in 1993 and 1998, respectively. Butler is perhaps less well-known and celebrated than her contemporary, Atwood, but I would say that her depictions of a world shaped by environmental devastation and social breakdown deserve equal attention. The books are in fact set in 2024-2035, so a re-read seemed timely.
The premise of the novels
The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, starts the novels relatively sheltered from the climatic and societal chaos around her. She is far from rich, but is fortunate enough to live in a walled community – a tough, limited, precarious life, but a world away from the dangers and indignities of life on the streets as inhabited by much of the American population in the novels.
Lauren’s meagre water supply comes from official suppliers, and so is clean and safe, unlike the murky, disease-ridden slop sold by the ‘water peddlers’. She enjoys a sense of community, albeit often strained by the stresses of life and the clashes of personalities. In a country where public education has been destroyed, she is one of the few who can read and write, having been taught by her father – pastor, professor and community leader.
Lauren has two particular individual burdens. She suffers from ‘hyperempathy’, as a result of her mother’s drug abuse. This means she feels the physical pain of anyone she sees suffering. She is also hiding a secret: she is a kind of profit who has uncovered a new belief system – ‘Earthseed’. It is predicated on the idea that ‘God is Change’ – change that shapes and can be shaped. There is also ‘The Destiny’: the goal of a new life, not an after-life, but a journey in this life to new planets. This religious element is perhaps somewhat quirky, but it is a device which propels the plot and sets the protagonist up against the various faces of the Christian Nationalist movement which dominates political life in the novels.
Lauren’s relatively peaceful life is inevitably upended, and we follow her journey through the two novels, in a world of relentless heat and drought, a world blighted by the violence of inequality.
Education, education, education
The theme of education is woven through the action and ideas of the novels. It struck me as I read that Butler depicts the assault on education as a catastrophe equal to that of the deadly lack of water. In fact, the latter almost seems like a metaphor for the former – a drought of the mind, perhaps. It made me think of Dickens’ Christmas Carol:
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
In the Butler novels, there is an ominous foreshadowing of current attacks on education in the US, extending to the threats to defund public education all together, and of the willful ignorance of the consequences of this. She writes:
There were still a few public school systems in the country, limping along, doing what they could, but these had more in common with city jails than with even the most mediocre private, religious, or company schools. […] And no one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions, People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them.
A preview of MAGA – and a glimpse of an antidote
Having originally read the books sometime before 2016, I was, this time struck by the catchphrase of the novels’ despotic but charismatic US President, Jarret: “Help us to make America great again.” I would have glossed over that phrase on my first read, but it pulled me up on my second, naturally.
There are other references in the novels which evoke current realities, or fears for what may come: a compliant Supreme Court, a privatized, bribable police force, food and water stores guarded by armed guards, company-controlled towns, indentured workers, a return to slavery.
But the novels also tell a tale of people organizing and resisting, people imagining new ways of thinking and being: a little seed of hope in the dystopian mire.
