Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, and Jenny Offill, Weather: Imagining the Future
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A dear friend, to whom I was married for about a decade and a half, used to love to talk about a science fiction story he’d read as a boy, a marvelously built world full of moving sidewalks and hovercraft. And then, at some point, the hero (this was the sort of story, of course, that had a hero rather than a protagonist or main character) whips out his slide rule and performs a lightning calculation. “And that,” said my friend, looking around at us all through his monocle, checking that we shared his pleasure in the story, “is what happens when you try to predict the future.”
It is not, however, what happens when Octavia Butler predicted the future. Because her predictions/imaginings come from character, from knowing how people behave in both extreme and ordinary circumstances:
“So do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.
“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”
“Okay,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”
“There isn’t one,” I told him.
“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.
“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers--at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
Several days later, by mail, I received a copy of the young man’s story in his college newspaper. He mentioned my talk, listed some of my books and the future problems they dealt with. Then he quoted his own question: “What’s the answer?” The article ended with the first three words of my reply, wrongly left standing alone: “There isn’t one.”
It’s sadly easy to reverse meaning, in fact, to tell a lie, by offering an accurate but incomplete quote. In this case, it was frustrating because the one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope. In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.
(This is an excerpt of an article in the May 2020 issue of Essence: one I gave out as a handout in class when we read the book. It’s now starting to circulate again, and the entire essay, with its wisdom about change and the cycles of history, can be found in various places online.)
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
I’ve written about Parable of the Sower before, in an essay on “Mystery vs. Confusion” for CRAFT. Over the years as I’ve read and reread the novel, it has sunk into me more deeply, as our most beloved books do, and I have often checked reality against it, both in terms of some of Butler’s specific societal imaginings and also her insights into what it means to be part of a community. Society has broken down in this book, and Lauren Oya Olamina, the brilliant young progatonist/heroine, has a dangerous journey to take, as well as a vision of how life could be different. As she travels, Lauren begins to draw people into her company, but it’s a wary group, especially at first. She has a disabling level of empathy (caused by a drug her mother took during pregnancy) that could endanger them all. And she’s the daughter of a preacher, having lived all her life by moral rules that might be a hindrance on the road.
Some crucial, interlocking threads of the book: the tension between what we need to do to make it through hard times, how much we can or have to trust others, how we protect ourselves and those in our care, and how we can move forward with our visions for transformation, without writing off the stranger who immediately needs help. You can’t help everyone. Lauren and her creator are painfully aware of this. But you can’t just announce this to yourself and those around you and then turn away.
At one point, getting to know new companions, Lauren surprises and shocks them by letting them know she’s never stolen anything. But now she means to survive and will steal when there’s no other choice.
“I hope it won’t ever mean getting caught or leaving someone else to starve,” I said. And to my own surprise, I smiled. “I’ve thought about it. That’s the way I feel, but I’ve never stolen anything.”
“You’re kidding!” Zahra said.
I shrugged. “It’s true. I grew up trying to set a good example for my brothers and trying to live up to my father’s expectations. That seemed like what I should be doing.”
“Oldest kid,” Harry said. “I know.” He was the oldest in his family.
“Oldest, hell,” Zahra said, laughing. “You’re both babies out here.”
And that wasn’t offensive, somehow. Perhaps because it was true. “I’m inexperienced,” I admitted. “But I can learn. You’re going to be one of my teachers.”
“One?” she said. “Who have you got but me?”
“Everyone.”
She looked scornful. “No one.”
“Everyone who’s surviving out here knows things that I need to know,” I said. “I’ll watch them, I’ll listen to them, I’ll learn from them. If I don’t, I’ll be killed. And like I said, I intend to survive.”
“They’ll sell you a bowl of shit,” she said.
I nodded. “I know. But I’ll buy as few of those as possible.” She looked at me for a long time, then sighed.
“I wish I’d known you better before all this happened,” she said. “You’re a weird preacher’s kid. If you still want to play man, I’ll cut your hair for you.”
In this conversation, Lauren wins over Zahra with her admission of vulnerability (she’s strange, in this world, for never having stolen anything), with her authenticity and straightforwardness about her past, with her determination to learn, and with her mixture of youthful wisdom and her willingness to admit what she doesn’t know. She’s too savvy to be entirely cynical, which wouldn’t be realistic, and wouldn’t help her survive.
The dialogue is terrifically compressed, believable, funny sometimes, moving sometimes. It’s right at the edge of conflict – Zahra hasn’t fully decided to come along with this unexpected kid. By the end, Zahra hasn’t explicitly committed to joining the group, but she’s expressed a certain admiration for Lauren and has fallen in with her plans.
And Lauren hasn’t revealed everything about herself. She’s honest, but within limits. As a reader, I’m responding to the tension in waiting for where and how she feels safe enough to open up another layer, as well as the tension in waiting to see Zahra move away from her current tenuous position at the edge of the group. She might come closer. She might break away again. There’s a lot that can, and will, go wrong with the community as Lauren learns what she needs to do and offer to be a leader.
There are dystopian novels and movies that people reread and rewatch right now for a variety of reasons, from confirming the strangeness of life to reminding themselves how dangerous this moment is even with the sun shining outside and far too many bars and pools open for business. I return to this book in part because of the way it embodies resilience, what we need to do and be and how we need to look after each other to survive.
Jenny Offill, Weather
In Weather, Jenny Offill inhabits a frantic present (which, like everything before late February 2020, feels like another world, though its concerns are still alive), one haunted by imaginings of the future. We are already living in a world that requires the suspension of disbelief, and this novel, in its anxiety about life during emergency, feels almost more like essay than fiction. Like one of those essays we read online, scanning frantically for help, which confirm the depths of our predicament. Except that, since it’s by Jenny Offill, it’s more beautifully written.
She revisits a form she developed for Dept. of Speculation—fragments, many of which end on a kind of punchline. In the earlier novel, she uses these shards to depict the fragmentation of motherhood and frustrated artistic ambitions. Here she wields them in a way that feels wilder, desperate to embody the dread of a worldwide emergency, the catastrophe of climate chaos, and the different forms of madness that people embrace, hide in, or give way to as they confront a growing sense of possible doom.
The central character in Weather, Lizzie comes out of a family that struggles with addiction, caretaking, and parenting. She takes a job answering letters for Sylvia, her former mentor, who has a podcast called Hell and High Water. Part of her job sometimes includes accompanying Sylvia to dinners and events, and Offill uses these to deliver information about climate disasters via Lizzie’s witnessing of Sylvia’s cool, increasingly withdrawn presence:
Sylvia tells the audience that the only reason we think humans are the height of evolution is that we have chosen to privilege certain things above other things. For example, if we privilege the sense of smell, dogs would be deemed more evolved. After all, they have about three hundred million olfactory receptors in their noses compared with our six million. If we privileged longevity, it would be bristlecone pines, which can live for several thousand years. And you could make a case that banana slugs are sexually superior to us. They are hermaphrodites who mate up to three times a day.
Offill’s lists, including this one, sometimes serve as a way to contain and create edges around that overpowering sense of emergency. Sylvia uses facts as hypotheticals. What if we thought differently, what if we valued different things? And then that punchline at the end, the kind of punchline that leaves us wondering, was that really a joke and, if so, what kind? The delirium in this book is one of despair, with the very occasional “obligatory note of hope,” in Offill’s term (this plays a role in the ending that I won’t give away). The book, and this paragraph, is also a celebration of the wonder cabinet of the world, as well as being a challenge to human ideas of superiority.
Rebecca Godfrey, in talking with Offill for The Paris Review blog, says to her,
In terms of not being prescriptive or self-righteous, the use of language in this book is avowedly original, the opposite of a screed or lecture. Instead of authoritative statements, there are such startling sentences and moments of beauty. I know in the past you’ve spoken about the importance of poetry, and the book has these moments where, formally, it feels like there’s a necessary intervention of lyricism. Can you talk about these shifts in language, i.e., “Hard to believe that isn’t joy the way it flies away when I fling it out the window.”
And Offill answers,
I think Lizzie’s mind just moves that way sometimes, especially when what she is experiencing is just a flicker of feeling, like this moment of interspecies curiosity. She says at one point early on that she has to be careful because she is prone to making sudden alliances with strangers. “My heart is prodigal,” as she puts it. She is startled to discover that these alliances and moments of recognition are starting to include nonhuman creatures as well.
Lauren would recognize both the care required in making those alliances and also their absolute necessity. The madness in Butler’s world is not that far from the one Offill depicts, and very aligned to the one all around us.
There’s a necessary form of art linked to social justice, racial justice, and climate justice that has to do with very direct witnessing and calls to action, like The Viral Monologues and Surviving Miami projects on nowhearus.org.
And then there is the act of witnessing in fiction, less direct but necessary in a different way, bringing together reality and invention to allow readers to more clearly see and know the world. The reader then has to figure out what to do what we’ve learned or understand in a new way. This kind of witnessing may not lead as directly into action. But it has its own role to play: it can keep nourishing and inspiring and warning readers for years, even centuries. A book like Parable of the Sower can be read generation after generation, along with actual history. In that Essence piece, Butler also wrote,
Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.
We’re working towards getting out of our current cycle of stupidity and ashes. It feels like a long road sometimes. For a journey like that, we need to have allies, to learn to be an ally, and to sometimes have an evening around the fire, even if that’s on Zoom.