Parable of the Sower: How Octavia Butler Creates Worlds

How are new worlds created? The goal of every Science Fiction writer, I believe, is to create new worlds while making them tangible at the same time.

Octavia Butler’s novel, Parable of the Sower, is a master class in world creation, crafting a narrative where imagination and religion are tools used to bring to life a previously unseen reality.

Her world is created by the forces of imagination and religion in the hopes of birthing a utopia. Together, both forces come together to place a spotlight on their ability to remove an individual from an old way of being in order to give life to something new and previously nonexistent.

Imagination and religion are two halves of the same process which fosters change. Through the writings of Jeffrey Kripal, connections between religion and imagination work to highlight the future Octavia Butler’s characters aspire to establish.

Parable of the Sower maintains themes of growth and change. The characters, lead by Lauren Olamina, wrestle with how to create an ideal future, especially when the past and present aren’t exactly desirable. Through Lauren’s created religion called “Earthseed,” the text’s themes of growth and change are evident.

The central tenet of the Earthseed religion is simple, things must change:

“All that you touch You Change./All that you Change Changes you./The only lasting truth Is Change./God Is Change” (Butler 3).

In order to get the reader invested in the world, change is deified, becoming synonymous with God itself. Change becomes a force. The religion of Earthseed is founded in a principle of change. Separately, the connection Lauren and her father share in their different religions symbolizes that change as well.

Reverend Olamina represents the old, static world of Baptist Christianity while Lauren represents the untapped and dynamic futurity of her new religion’s possibilities. Earthseed encourages all of its adherents to realize their individual capability to participate in and embody change.

Change represents a multitude of phenomena in relation to the religion. As described, change is the subject of Earthseed, the goal of Earthseed, and a necessity to Earthseed.

The potential of Earthseed to become a force of change is birthed through what Lauren imagines it to be.

Without the imagination, her religious movement and mission are reduced to being a product of the dying present that she currently is a part of. The possibility of leaving Earth through Earthseed is an imaginative exercise by Lauren. It was an experience that even Lauren doesn’t speak about with any degree certainty.

“I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we’ll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place” (Butler 78).

The focus of this moment is the uncertainty that it contains. Through the uncertainty, however, Lauren imagines the capabilities that her religion can attain.

She says, “I think” as opposed to something much more certain like “I know.” The passage displays what Lauren imagines for her religion and the change that may come from spreading its influence. Lauren “thinks” that they’ll have to seed themselves further from the already dying earth, but she doesn’t know that they will be able to. It is only a possibility that her religion can help bring a utopia to reality.

Earthseed does not represent the pure certainty of utopia for either Lauren and Butler outright. The religion only represents a change; the beginning of something new through the imagined. Lauren’s blossoming religion is a philosophical and spiritual change that the present incarnation of society desperately needs, but has no other access to begin acquiring it.

Earthseed’s creation by the mind of Lauren mirrors Parable of the Sower itself by the mind of Butler. Lauren intends to evacuate the sameness she is chained to, by mind and then hopefully by body, envisioning humanity’s future on a different planet altogether.

Writer Jeffrey Kripal discusses the use of the imagination to aid in affecting material reality. Butler and Lauren reflect the ability of the imagined to interact with the world around them. Kripal questions just how imaginary is the imaginary.

“Is it possible that imagination sometimes takes on other powers and mediates other dimensions of the real to us?”

Kripal discusses what the imagination is able to create beyond its home in the mind.

Reality, according to Kripal, is a composite of imaginations. The imagination is able to interface with the world by what Kripal call “materialization” . Earthseed and Parable of the Sower represent this materialization. The possibility of the Earthseed religion is something that aspires to affect the reality of Lauren’s world for the better.

Aspirations to leave earth color Lauren’s intent for furthering her religion. She doesn’t want to create utopia on her current planet, but to use it as a means to seek solace elsewhere by starting from scratch and accepting change. Even with the aspiration to create a new world with better ideals, the version of utopia that is maintained is still nonexistent. It can only be imagined.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower merges the influences of religion and imagination. How the imagination interfaces with reality to affect change is the basis of the text. Utopia is hardly seen in Parable of the Sower, outside of imaginings. The reality that Lauren and her community face in the span of the novel is that there is no utopia on earth and there just might not be a utopia anywhere else. The thing that the characters in Parable of the Sower strive for is change or an alternative. An alternative to the current state of existence from the current iteration of society is all that they can ask for with any modicum of certainty.