lightreads

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

4/5 and DNF on the second one. These start out as the journals of a black teenager living in a rapidly-disintegrating Southern California society in 2024, and progress through her migration north on foot and the founding of a community of misfits and other people like her who have "hyperempathy," which means she shares the pain of others.

Amazing, brutal. Much has been made of how these books are prescient. Too much, IMO – people are keying off things like the use of the "make America great again" campaign slogan when the candidate who uses it is a religious zealot. Donald Trump is a lot of things, but that he ain't. And there's something . . . dishonest? Histrionic? Something. There's something about pointing at books about the displacement of hundreds of millions of poor and middle-class Americans into slavery or murder and the disintegration of multiple layers of government and being like "this foretold our current moment!" that makes me mutter about needing to gain some perspective. These books do put their finger on the stresses of our time, though – climate, income inequality, unregulated technology – and that isn't nothing.

But anyway, yes these are amazing, and no I have not finished the second one as it is, believe it or not, too brutal for me. Such a thing does exist. Particularly when I have a small child and could not read about the narrator's baby being torn away from her. Oh, and if me bowing out of a book for being too brutal is surprising, here's one that'll get you: Butler intended there to be four more books in this series, but didn't write them because she thought they were too depressing. Whoa. I do wish I could know what would have happened in those books without necessarily reading them. There is a push in these books to reach the stars as humanity's only hope, but the protagonists of the first two are so laughably far from even being able to think about that, I'd like to know how it all would have fallen out.

Anyway anyway. Hyperempathy is such a great concept, and a wicked, complicated mechanism here. An average or even good writer would have turned that into themes of kindness and the strength of relating to each other. Butler is better than good, so in her hands that is the least of it. Hyperempathy doesn't make you a better person. In some ways, it makes you worse in order to protect yourself.

Content notes: Everything you could possibly imagine. Murder, mob violence, torture, child death, rape, family separation, death death death.