Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Sower

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2024-12-07 0 0 623.31KB 373 页 5.9玖币

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Parable of the

Sower

by Octavia Butler

The odyssey of one woman who is twice as

feeling in a world that has become doubly

dehumanized. The time is 2025; the place is

California, where small walled comunities must

protect themselves from desperate hordes of

scangers and roaming bands of drug addicts.

When one such community is overrun, Lauren

Olamina, an 18-year-old black woman, sets off

on foot, moving north along the dangerous

coastal highways. Lauren is a "sharer," one who

suffers from hyperempathy -- the ability to feel

others' pain as well as her own.

"Butler's spare, vivid prose style invites

comparison with the likes of Kate

Wilhelm and Ursula Le Guin." --Kirkus

"Moving, frightening, funny and eerily

beautiful." --The Washington Post

General Fiction Science Fiction

2024

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and

persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence,

what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment.

Without adaptability, what remains may be

channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without

positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

by Lauren Oya Olamina

Parable of the Sower

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, JULY 20, 2024

I had my recurring dream last night. I guess I should

have expected it. It comes to me when I struggle--

when I twist on my own personal hook and try to

pretend that nothing unusual is happening. It comes

to me when I try to be my father's daughter.

Today is our birthday-- my fifteenth and my father's

fifty-fifth. Tomorrow, I'll try to please him-- him and

the community and God. So last night, I dreamed a

reminder that it's all a lie. I think I need to write about

the dream because this particular lie bothers me so

much.

I'm learning to fly, to levitate myself. No one is

teaching me. I'm just learning on my own, little by

little, dream lesson by dream lesson. Not a very

subtle image, but a persistent one. I've had many

lessons, and I'm better at flying than I used to be. I

trust my ability more now, but I'm still afraid. I can't

quite control my directions yet.

I lean forward toward the doorway. It's a doorway

like the one between my room and the hall. It seems

to be a long way from me, but I lean toward it.

Holding my body stiff and tense, I let go of whatever

I'm grasping, whatever has kept me from rising or

falling so far. And I lean into the air, straining

upward, not moving upward, but not quite falling

down either. Then I do begin to move, as though to

slide on the air drifting a few feet above the floor,

caught between terror and joy.

I drift toward the doorway. Cool, pale light glows

from it. Then I slide a little to the right; and a little

more. I can see that I'm going to miss the door and

hit the wall beside it, but I can't stop or turn. I drift

away from the door, away from the cool glow into

another light.

The wall before me is burning. Fire has sprung from

nowhere, has eaten in through the wall, has begun

to reach toward me, reach for me. The fire spreads. I

drift into it. It blazes up around me. I thrash and

scramble and try to swim back out of it, grabbing

handfuls of air and fire, kicking, burning! Darkness.

Perhaps I awake a little. I do sometimes when the

fire swallows me. That's bad. When I wake up all the

way, I can't get back to sleep. I try, but I've never

been able to.

This time I don't wake up all the way. I fade into the

second part of the dream-- the part that's ordinary

and real, the part that did happen years ago when I

was little, though at the time it didn't seem to matter.

Darkness.

Darkness brightening.

Stars.

Stars casting their cool, pale, glinting light.

"We couldn't see so many stars when I was little,"

my stepmother says to me. She speaks in Spanish,

her own first language. She stands still and small,

looking up at the broad sweep of the Milky Way. She

and I have gone out after dark to take the washing

down from the clothesline. The day has been hot, as

usual, and we both like the cool darkness of early

night. There's no moon, but we can see very well.

The sky is full of stars.

The neighborhood wall is a massive, looming

presence nearby. I see it as a crouching animal,

perhaps about to spring, more threatening than

protective. But my stepmother is there, and she isn't

afraid. I stay close to her. I'm seven years old.

I look up at the stars and the deep, black sky. "Why

couldn't you see the stars?" I ask her. "Everyone can

see them." I speak in Spanish, too, as she's taught

me. It's an intimacy somehow.

"City lights," she says. "Lights, progress, growth, all

those things we're too hot and too poor to bother

with anymore." She pauses. "When I was your age,

my mother told me that the stars-- the few stars we

could see-- were windows into heaven. Windows for

God to look through to keep an eye on us. I believed

her for almost a year." My stepmother hands me an

armload of my youngest brother's diapers. I take

them, walk back toward the house where she has

left her big wicker laundry basket, and pile the

diapers atop the rest of the clothes. The basket is

full. I look to see that my stepmother is not watching

me, then let myself fall backward onto the soft

mound of stiff, clean clothes. For a moment, the fall

is like floating.

I lie there, looking up at the stars. I pick out some of

the constellations and name the stars that make

them up. I've learned them from an astronomy book

that belonged to my father's mother.

I see the sudden light streak of a meteor flashing

westward across the sky. I stare after it, hoping to

see another. Then my stepmother calls me and I go

back to her.

"There are city lights now," I say to her. "They don't

hide the stars."

She shakes her head. "There aren't anywhere near

as many as there were. Kids today have no idea

what a blaze of light cities used to be-- and not that

long ago."

"I'd rather have the stars," I say.

"The stars are free." She shrugs. "I'd rather have

the city lights back myself, the sooner the better. But

we can afford the stars."

A gift of God

May sear unready fingers.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SUNDAY, JULY 21, 2024

At least three years ago, my father's God stopped

being my God. His church stopped being my church.

And yet, today, because I'm a coward, I let myself be

initiated into that church. I let my father baptize me in

all three names of that God who isn't mine any more.

My God has another name.

We got up early this morning because we had to go

across town to church. Most Sundays, Dad holds

church services in our front rooms. He's a Baptist

minister, and even though not all of the people who

live within our neighborhood walls are Baptists,

those who feel the need to go to church are glad to

come to us. That way they don't have to risk going

outside where things are so dangerous and crazy.

It's bad enough that some people-- my father for

one-- have to go out to work at least once a week.

None of us goes out to school any more. Adults get

nervous about kids going outside.

But today was special. For today, my father made

arrangements with another minister-- a friend of his

who still had a real church building with a real

baptistery.

Dad once had a church just a few blocks outside our

wall. He began it before there were so many walls.

But after it had been slept in by the homeless,

robbed, and vandalized several times, someone

poured gasoline in and around it and burned it down.

Seven of the homeless people sleeping inside on

that last night burned with it.

But somehow, Dad's friend Reverend Robinson has

managed to keep his church from being destroyed.

We rode our bikes to it this morning-- me, two of my

brothers, four other neighborhood kids who were

ready to be baptized, plus my father and some other

neighborhood adults riding shotgun. All the adults

were armed. That's the rule. Go out in a bunch, and

go armed.

The alternative was to be baptized in the bathtub at

home. That would have been cheaper and safer and

fine with me. I said so, but no one paid any attention

to me. To the adults, going outside to a real church

was like stepping back into the good old days when

there were churches all over the place and too many

lights and gasoline was for fueling cars and trucks

instead of for torching things. They never miss a

chance to relive the good old days or to tell kids how

great it's going to be when the country gets back on

its feet and good times come back.

Yeah.

To us kids-- most of us-- the trip was just an

adventure, an excuse to go outside the wall. We

would be baptized out of duty or as a kind of

insurance, but most of us aren't that much

concerned with religion. I am, but then I have a

different religion.

"Why take chances," Silvia Dunn said to me a few

days ago. "Maybe there's something to all this

religion stuff." Her parents thought there was, so she

was with us.

My brother Keith who was also with us didn't share

any of my beliefs. He just didn't care. Dad wanted

him to be baptized, so what the hell. There wasn't

much that Keith did care about. He liked to hang out

with his friends and pretend to be grown up, dodge

work and dodge school and dodge church. He's only

twelve, the oldest of my three brothers. I don't like

him much, but he's my stepmother's favorite. Three

smart sons and one dumb one, and it's the dumb

one she loves best.

Keith looked around more than anyone as we rode.

His ambition, if you could call it that, is to get out of

the neighborhood and go to Los Angeles. He's never

too clear about what he'll do there. He just wants to

go to the big city and make big money. According to

my father, the big city is a carcass covered with too

many maggots. I think he's right, though not all the

maggots are in L.A. They're here, too.

But maggots tend not to be early-morning types. We

rode past people stretched out, sleeping on the

sidewalks, and a few just waking up, but they paid

no attention to us. I saw at least three people who

weren't going to wake up again, ever. One of them

was headless. I caught myself looking around for the

head. After that, I tried not to look around at all.

A woman, young, naked, and filthy stumbled along

past us. I got a look at her slack expression and

realized that she was dazed or drunk or something.

Maybe she had been raped so much that she was

crazy. I'd heard stories of that happening. Or maybe

she was just high on drugs. The boys in our group

almost fell off their bikes, staring at her. What

wonderful religious thoughts they would be having

for a while.

The naked woman never looked at us. I glanced

back after we'd passed her and saw that she had

settled down in the weeds against someone else's

neighborhood wall.

A lot of our ride was along one neighborhood wall

after another; some a block long, some two blocks,

some five. . . . Up toward the hills there were walled

estates-- one big house and a lot of shacky little

dependencies where the servants lived. We didn't

pass anything like that today. In fact we passed a

couple of neighborhoods so poor that their walls

were made up of unmortared rocks, chunks of

concrete, and trash. Then there were the pitiful,

unwalled residential areas. A lot of the houses were

trashed-- burned, vandalized, infested with drunks or

druggies or squatted-in by homeless families with

their filthy, gaunt, half-naked children. Their kids

were wide awake and watching us this morning. I

feel sorry for the little ones, but the ones my age and

older make me nervous. We ride down the middle of

the cracked street, and the kids come out and stand

along the curb to stare at us. They just stand and

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摘要：

ParableoftheSowerbyOctaviaButlerTheodysseyofonewomanwhoistwiceasfeelinginaworldthathasbecomedoublydehumanized.Thetimeis2025;theplaceisCalifornia,wheresmallwalledcomunitiesmustprotectthemselvesfromdesperatehordesofscangersandroamingbandsofdrugaddicts.Whenonesuchcommunityisoverrun,LaurenOlamina,an18-y...

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Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Sower

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