The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Summary

Zero to Well-Read: "The Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler

Podcast: Zero to Well-Read
Hosts: Jeff O’Neill & Rebecca Schinsky
Date: November 18, 2025

Episode Overview

In this episode, Jeff and Rebecca dive into Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower, examining its plot, prescient social commentary, and growing importance in the literary canon. They discuss Butler’s life, her influence on science fiction and contemporary writers, and the reading experience of encountering a dystopian world that feels alarmingly close to reality. Sprinkled with irreverence and genuine admiration, the conversation functions as both a spirited book club and a crash course in why this novel matters.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Octavia Butler’s Cultural Ascent ([01:42]–[06:17])

• Under-the-Radar to Essential: The hosts note that Parable of the Sower is likely the least well-known work they've covered so far, but Butler's reputation and reader base have exploded over the last decade.
• Butler’s Canonization: “If you're looking at the trajectories of more people will know about them in the future than know about them now, Butler's probably our number one over overall draft pick for what we've done so far.” — Jeff ([02:15])
• Word-of-Mouth Growth: Rebecca explains Butler’s slow mainstreaming: “This is really, I think, an if you know, you know, kind of book recommendation…as the years that Butler was writing about in this book have come to pass…a lot of it is prescient, a lot of it feels very relevant.” ([03:23])

2. Plot and Premise: Near-Future Apocalypse with Real Roots ([06:17]–[09:28])

• Setting and Protagonist: The novel, set from 2024–2027, follows 15-year-old Lauren Olamina, a Black girl surviving in a Los Angeles suburb where climate change, economic collapse, and violence are rampant.
• Societal Breakdown: “Climate change has made food and water really scarce and very expensive…paying work is rare…company towns and sex work…modern slavery even are on the rise.” — Rebecca ([06:26])
• Earthseed Religion: Lauren invents “Earthseed,” a philosophy centered on the inevitability of change and shaping the future, especially humanity’s destiny among the stars.
• Hyperempathy: Lauren feels others’ pain—a result of prenatal drug exposure—a condition affecting her survival and empathy.

3. Butler’s Life and Writer’s Journey ([09:28]–[12:53])

• Background: Butler, raised by her mother in Pasadena, overcame poverty and dyslexia, turning to libraries and reading for solace and education.
• Breaking the Mold: “This was not a time when Black women were writing science fiction. And Butler had talked about...very consciously wanted to write her and Black people and Black women specifically into the corpus of science fiction.” — Jeff ([10:44])

4. Resonance, Relevance, and the Slow Burn of Apocalypse ([16:54]–[18:42])

• Realistic Dread: The novel’s apocalypse unfolds gradually, mirroring real societal decline: “This is a slow roll, and it’s a slow roll that unfolds over decades…climate change happens gradually, societal collapse happens generally pretty gradually…there might be inflection points...” — Rebecca ([17:17])

5. Influence, Resurgence, and Canonization ([18:42]–[29:49])

• Afterlife of the Novel: Butler won a MacArthur “Genius” grant in 1995, and Parable was a New York Times Notable Book in 1994.
• Posthumous Fame: "One of her books charted on the New York Times bestseller list in like 2021 for the first time…super unusual and we can talk about the reasons why…" — Jeff ([04:52], [28:55])
• Cultural Impact: NASA named the Mars Perseverance landing site after Butler in 2021.

6. Reading Experience: Narrative, Structure, and Style ([31:01]–[36:53])

• Diary Form & Scripture: The narrative is told via Lauren's retrospective journal entries with prophetic “Earthseed” verses as headers.
• Reflective Distance: “Do not let your guard down in journal and letter books…it feels like you’re getting more direct access to a character’s interiority, but actually there’s a further distance…” — Jeff ([36:54])

7. World-Building Details and The Nature of Collapse ([42:20]–[44:48])

• Mundane Apocalypse: The hosts praise Butler’s slow, naturalistic introduction to her dystopia, revealed not through exposition, but through rituals (like baptisms), logistics, and everyday threats.

8. Community, Diversity, and the Ethics of Survival ([47:04]–[49:23])

• Surviving Together: The book prioritizes communal strength and diversity as a survival strategy:
  • “Embrace diversity. Unite or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed by those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity or be destroyed.” ([49:23])
• Open Ethic vs. Paranoia: Lauren’s group forms a microcosm of trust, openness, and shared values amidst widespread fear.

9. Relevance and Prescience in 2025 ([51:03]–[53:11])

• Now vs. Then: “It’s powerful because some of the things are happening right now. And it’s powerful because it asks us to think about what might be happening 30 years from now…” — Rebecca ([51:03])
• Hope and Small Communities: The novel's hope is pragmatic—rooted not in grand revolution, but modest communities and the ethic of care.

10. Literacy, Suppression, and Access to History ([56:51]–[60:33])

• Valuing Reading: Being literate is rare and vital in Lauren’s world—a tool for survival and understanding historical patterns (like company towns), with contemporary resonance given modern book bans and educational decline.

11. Speculation, Empathy, and the Limits of Genre ([60:34]–[64:58])

• Hyperempathy as Messianic and Humanistic:
  • “Committing violence dehumanizes not just the victim, but the perpetrator. And...Lauren...experiences that.” — Rebecca ([62:41])
• Drug as Scourge: The “pyro” drug devastates communities, serving as a metaphor for unchecked desire and destruction.

12. Religion, Story, and the Power of Narrative ([64:58]–[72:20])

• Earthseed and Storytelling: Lauren makes her belief system both poetic and memorable because “People forget ideas. They’re more likely to remember God, especially when they’re scared or desperate.” ([70:02])
• Why Story Matters: Narrative form and “sacred” language create lasting cultural impact.

13. Genre Influence, Accessibility, and the YA Angle ([73:35]–[93:00])

• Headwaters of Sci-Fi Tropes: “If you’ve read a whole bunch of sci-fi already and you read this, you may have déjà vu all over again, but then you’re going back to the headwaters.” — Jeff ([73:35])
• Fiction for Young People: Rebecca posits that if published today, the book might be classified as YA, due to its young protagonist and clarity of conviction.

14. Art, Writing, and Meta-Reflection ([78:00]–[81:42])

• Art as Survival and Destiny: Lauren’s writing, and Earthseed’s cosmology, suggest art is both a coping mechanism and a tool for long-term flourishing—“preparatory work” for a future that transcends mere survival.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Butler’s Rise:
  “To see and be a part of seeing an author’s reputation in place in our literary imagination rise even after her death…we’re seeing that happen in real time.” — Jeff ([04:52])

• On Word-of-Mouth Fame:
  “When people in 2020…started looking at the political landscape and…the ways, especially, that homeless people are treated…Butler predicts that homeless people will be seen as disposable, [that] the government will actively be trying to kill homeless people.” — Rebecca ([17:17])

• On Community:
  “That ethic of care is the thing that distinguishes their group from everything that's happening in the outside world. It's all competition everywhere else…these people have committed to being each other's neighbors.” — Rebecca ([55:38])

• On Hope Despite Darkness:
  “Even the person who writes this is a hope. This is a book about hope. This is not a book about false hope. It's about real hope.” — Jeff ([54:48])

• On the Importance of Change:
  “Change is inevitable. If we learn to work with it, we can shape it to our advantage.” (Paraphrased, [94:15])

• On Fiction and Philosophy:
  “People forget ideas. They're more likely to remember God, especially when they're scared or desperate. Then they're supposed to…read a poem or remember a truth or a comfort or reminder to action…people do that all the time…they reach back to the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran…” — Lauren/Butler ([70:02])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Butler’s growing reputation: [01:42]–[03:23]
• Book Plot & Setting: [06:17]–[09:28]
• Butler’s personal journey and context: [09:28]–[12:53]
• Dread and realism of the apocalypse: [16:54]–[18:42]
• Mainstream resurgence (NYT bestseller etc.): [28:55]–[29:49]
• Reading experience, narrative style: [36:54]–[38:16]
• Literacy, history, and book bans: [56:51]–[59:17]
• Quotes & close reading: [64:58]–[72:20]
• Relevance in 2025, prescience: [51:03]
• Art and writing meta-analysis: [78:00]–[81:42]

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Zero to Well-Read Score (1–10)

• Historical Importance: 7 (could rise as Butler’s legacy continues to grow)
• Readability: 9 (“Once you figure out what's happening with the Earth Seed verses and the journal entries, which is not that hard to…get into the flow of.” — Jeff [97:28])
• Current Relevance: 10 (“Can we spinal tap this one?”)
• Book Nerd Credit: 7–8 (“I had imposter syndrome when I started reading it and realizing I hadn't read it before.” — Rebecca [98:13])
• O Damn Factor: Not scored directly, but implied high due to the prescience and resonance.

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Cocktail Party Crib Sheet (Takeaways)

1. Groundbreaking and scarily prescient: Butler’s vision of social collapse, climate change, and fraught politics mirrors aspects of the present.
2. Butler paved the way: Her influence is direct on writers like N.K. Jemisin and countless others—she was the first Black woman and first sci-fi writer to win the MacArthur Genius Grant.
3. Change is the only constant: The theology of “God is change” is both radical and grounding; survival and progress require adaptation and communal care.
4. The power and danger of stories: Earthseed’s “scripture” demonstrates that lasting ideas are carried by narrative, not abstract doctrines.
5. The ethics and dangers of exclusion: Community, diversity, and radical empathy are positioned as antidotes to a polarized, violent world.

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Further Reading Suggestions

• The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (draws explicitly from Parable)
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Works of N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor

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Final Note

The episode balances affectionate irreverence with genuine scholarship, making clear Parable of the Sower is not just a dystopian blueprint for disaster, but a manual for surviving—and finding hope—in a shifting, fractured world.

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“We are a harvest of survivors.”
— Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower ([65:54])

Transcript

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Toast the holidays in a new way and raise a glass of Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. Enjoy it over ice or in your coffee. Rumchata. Your holiday cocktails just got sweeter. Tap or click the banner for more. Drink responsibly. Caribbean Rum with real dairy cream Natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands, Pojoaquee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved. If we knew more about our sleep, what would we do differently? Would we go to bed at a consistent time or take steps to reduce interruptions to our sleep? With the all new Sleep Score, Apple Watch measures your bedtime consistency, interruptions and sleep duration. Then every morning it combines these factors into an easy to understand score from 1 to 100 so you'll know how to take the quality of your sleep from good to excellent. Introducing the new Sleep Score ON Apple Watch iPhone 11 or later required.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Welcome to Zero to well read a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Today we're exploring an alternate vision of the 2020s in Octavia Butler's groundbreaking novel the Parable of the Sower. Before we jump in though, if you're enjoying the show so far, we'd sure appreciate a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. It really helps us as we're continuing to grow in this first season. And of course telling your friends that you're liking it is also helpful. You can also send questions, thoughts, whatever. Tell us about your own experiences with the books that we've covered. We're going to do a mailbag here at the end of the season in a few weeks. Zero to well [e-mail] for all of those.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And you can, you know, if you've liked a particular episode, you've got feedback for the show. A story of reading one of these books like way back in high school, assuming high school was way back for you. That's not true for all listeners I know at this point. You can also we've got gotten a few requests for books to cover eventually and let me just say I appreciate those. They will definitely get put into the file. But there are so many books, Rebecca, that we could do this for a hundred million years. But we do want to know. So no problem.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The master list that we have going is like 400 and some odd books.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right yeah, and I don't know that Parable of the Sower is something that a lot of people would have written in about because I think this might be the least well known book we've done so far. I don't think there's really anything close and I think that's part of the story of Octavia Butler, especially over the last five, ten years. Again, this is not an own work, a super important work, but I think for a general reader, maybe former English majors, who seem at this point to be our most adherent in vociferous. Hello and welcome. Yes, thank you very much. We have pins to put on your jacket later. Like us, for example, we both think came to this book quite a bit later we'll talk about that a little bit more. But a hugely influential person in books and sci fi specifically and continues to be super influential. And I think Octavia Butler's esteem, frankly is only growing at this point. It's hard to say, like Shakespeare or Great Gatsby esteem is growing at this point. But I think if you're looking at the trajectories of more people will know about them in the future than know about them now, Butler's probably our number one over overall draft pick for what we've done so far.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I totally agree. It's really, I think an if you know, you know, kind of book recommendation. I think Octavia Butler tends to be a word of mouth recommendation from book people to other book people that when this book first came out in the 90s, it was like within the sci fi community. And over the last, really the last decade as literary fiction has broken out more into genre and we've seen more crossover and what a typical reader is willing to explore. But also as the years that Octavia Butler was writing about in this book have come to pass, like a lot of the action, everything in this book happens between 2024 and 2027. And a lot of it is prescient, A lot of it feels very relevant. And as we sort of started approaching that point in history that Butler was writing about and a lot of the things started happening in the world that she imagined or predicted would happen, people who already knew the old heads came out and said that everybody needs to be reading Octavia Butler and the Internet picked it up and I think, I believe she is becoming more of a mainstream readers kind of recommendation. I think the next generation of readers coming behind us are more familiar. These books are starting to be assigned in schools. But of the titles that we're talking about this Season probably the least well known. I mean, I don't know Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. Like I think Pynchon's name is probably more known. But we did, we wouldn't have done Vineland in this season if one battle after another hadn't been coming out. We either would have saved Pension for later or picked a different pension title.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, Pension is a perennial sort of second tier Nobel betting favorite, which is, you know, not where science fiction writers generally go though. Octavia Butler won many of the awards, I think all the major Hugo and Nebula awards at some point in her life. But you know, it's interesting to see one of these authors have a trajectory like this in our lifetimes. Because you hear stories and there are many stories of books that were forgotten under known. I mean their eyes were watching. God, we covered. That's like case in point and you. And then over time they become part of a canon or one of the canons and we're seeing that happen in real time. But this happens like this happened with Melville, this happened with Edgar Allan Poe. This happened with a lot of different people. But it's so interesting to see and be a part of seeing an author's reputation in place in our literary imagination rise even after her death, even after no new books coming out. There's no, there hasn't been. There have been adaptations of some of her work, but there hasn't been one that changes the directory of its own. This has really been reader to reader, recommender to recommend, or writer to writer in science fiction fantasy, scholar to scholar making this happen to the point. We'll talk about this a later. Where one of her books charted on the New York Times bestseller list in like 2021 for the first, for the first time. So that is super unusual and we can talk about the reasons why and we'll get into it. But I think without further ado. Rebecca, maybe you should tell folks what this book is actually about.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. So this was written in 1993. It begins in 2024 starring a young girl, Lauren Olamina. She's 15 years old. She's a black girl living outside of LA. When the book opens, times are bad. Times are getting worse. Lauren's family lives in this walled neighborhood with I think 10 or 11 other families. They are constantly under the threat of break ins, theft, fires, violence. Climate change has made food and water really scar and very expensive. Paying work is rare, hard to come by. Company towns and sex work and modern slavery even are on the rise. And there's this new drug that Causes pyromania, and it has made its way to the west coast where she lives. So now the addicts, they call the drug pyro. So pyro addicts are setting fires that tear through the landscape. In addition to the fires that happen because of climate change. Also, the basic institutions of American life have eroded. Some have already broken completely. Fire and police services are for profit. You have to pay for them. So people are doing that math in the story of something bad happens, and is it worth the fees we have to pay for the police? Will they actually even help us if they come? But there are still rumors of places where things are relatively better, and that relatively is doing a lot of work. So up north, Oregon, Washington, Canada, people are thinking about going there, trying to have access to water. Maybe there are better jobs. Gasoline vehicles are all but obsolete, so the highways are covered with people that are hiking north in search of opportunity and more resources. Lauren is rejecting her family's Baptist beliefs. Her father is a preacher, and she is in search of her own way of understanding the world. So she invents this religion for herself that she calls Earth seed. It's centered on the recognition that change is the greatest force in the world. She sees God as change and that humans have to learn to shape God in the language of the book, to accept and to work with change in ways that we would best set them up for the future. So after catastrophe strikes her neighborhood in 2026, Lauren sets out for the north with two friends from the neighborhood. Along the way, she teaches them about Earthseed. She's sort of forming her group of congregants, and they pick up a ragtag collection of other travelers along the way that they hope to form a new community with. So the book's title comes from a story in the Gospel of Luke that is called the parable of the Sower. It's about seed that is scattered on the ground. Some gets picked up by birds. Some fell upon a rock and withered without moisture. Some lands among thorns and is choked. The seed that falls on good ground springs up and bears fruit. And so here, Lauren and her community are trying to be both the seed and the good ground for growing a new community and a new way forward in this difficult time of life. And there's also stuff about wanting humanity to go to space. And Lauren has a condition brought on by her mother's drug use, seari pregnancy that makes her able to feel other people's pain. She calls it hyper empathy. So there's some really solid, like most of this is really just solid speculative fiction about the world that we live in, that we could live in. And then there is a twist of more sci fi or slightly fantastic elements as well.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We're going to get into all the details here in a minute, but let's go back and talk about Octavia Butler and where this book fits into her work in the can the 20th century into 21st century can as we know it. Butler was born in 1947. Her. Her mother raised her. Her father was a shoeshine guy and he died. And so she was raised by her mother who worked all sorts of menial jobs and was treated pretty terribly by her employers. And this is an important part of Butler's story. Butler herself was a lonely kid, suffered from dyslexia, though I don't think they had the word for it at the time, but loved to read and spent many an hour by herself in the Pasadena County Library reading. And Pasadena is an important location for her because the Huntington Library is there and she's a lot. She's had a long standing relationship with the Huntington Library, which is a wonderful place to go. Her papers are there. I was there last year and saw some of the collection. It's pretty terrific. And I have some more to say about some of her papers. But this is a case where she was reading fairy tales and books about horses. She loved horses. She was a horse girl, Octavia Butler, and liked to read. And in high school she started reading short stories, went to community college and got noticed. She won a prize for $15. And from there she got noticed. And I think another part of Butler's story that's so interesting to know and important to recognize is the infrastructure of writing that supported her. The Clarion workshops, the community college. Harlan Ellison took her on as a someone that he cared about and championed, bought her first story and got her started on a career like she clearly had to do it and do the work. But this was not a time when black women were writing science fiction. And Butler had talked it talks about that's in a lot of interviews where she didn't see herself and very consciously wanted to write her and black people and black women specifically into the corpus, into the main of science fiction and fantasy. And that's a legacy that's important in its own right around the kind of issues that science fiction is always interested. The future utopias and dystopias, what's going to happen to humanity, what it means to be human are given different angles from her perspective, both as a black woman but also as Someone who always felt herself to be a loner, but always then found something interesting, something if not liberating, at least field of possibility to write, to take up story. And this book came later in her career. 1993. In 1979 she published Kindred, which is her best selling novel. Which is a time traveling book where a character flashes back and forth between the present day and the slave times in the south, sort of ping ponging back and forth. And that was published by Doubleday, which is, which is a major author. Her later books were published by smaller presses and I was trying to look for something around the contemporaneous success of Kindred. I didn't find a whole lot. I imagine Rebecca. It maybe didn't sell a whole bunch else. Doubleday would have kept her on, I'm just not sure. Or the other stuff was like too sci fi fantasy. Doubleday historically hasn't been but you know, I don't know if we yet have a great big Butler biography, but her own story is so, so fascinating.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's really interesting. And she has a lot of things in common with Lauren in the book. Lauren is in some ways modeled on her. Butler's own family was religious and she comes to chafe against that and find that being a Baptist is not the way that she's going to understand the world. Lauren finds a lot of refuge and also resource in books and is not quite the loner that we understand Octavia Butler to have been as a kid. But one of the ways that Lauren is preparing for what she thinks is going to be the next part of her life, like when she, when she's still in this walled neighborhood at the beginning of the book is she is reading everything she can find that has anything to do with any kind of survival. She's reading about seeds, she's reading about like just survival techniques. How do you build shelters? She has basically no practical skills in any of this. And she likes relatable. I know, I mean like it. My take on apocalyptic scenarios is well documented over on the Book Riot podcast. Like I'm not hiking up Highway 1 at the end of the world. It's just not gonna happen.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Rebecca. It did give me some hope though. I'm not a prepper. I mean we have some water and stuff for an emergency. But this gave me hope that maybe if I just have a shelf of books about how to survive, I could do it like that. Suggest, like grab a bag full of the right books, get some seeds, get yourself a repeating rifle and maybe I could do this. Rebecca I've got more hope. I. I'm like you. I always thought I was gonna be like a day two guy, dangerous, you know, 48 hours, I'm out. I've got some hope. I can walk. I'm already in Oregon. We got lots of water.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And you're like, yes, I've read a book about this.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Let's go.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No, I don't have to have read a book. I just have to have it ready to go anyway.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You just have to have the shelf of books ready to go. Yeah, I mean, this, I mean, in a lot of ways, this is kind of a book nerd fantasy. This character that she's 15, she has this zealotry about her that teenagers have this conviction that she sees the world in a way that the adults just don't understand, that she's cracked a code here. Like running through it is a thing thread, as you read of, like, is she, is she a little nuts that she believes that she's creating her own religion? But then she comes, she recognizes that she's self aware of. People might think I'm crazy, but here is how I like, here's where this philosophy comes from. But that idea that you could be a young person who's found a new way to see the world, that you could survive really against all odds and do it with no practical experience other than like having had shooting lessons from her father and a bunch of books and just general, like wisdom, like she has somehow she is able to translate book smarts into street smarts in a way that is maybe the greatest fantasy element. Well, the whole thing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, yeah, I mean, we're going to talk a little bit about Lauren and actually N.K. jemisin you mentioned. I don't think I mentioned it here, but in this 30th anniversary edition and McMillan has been reissuing a bunch of Butler stuff over time, there's an afterword from NK Jemisin and a forward from LeVar Burton. And NK Jemisin even talks about on her first reading, finding Lauren's proficiency a little unbelievable. But, and, and so I read. I did read the afterword in the forward before reading the book again because I was. I did want to see a little bit and read through Jemison and LeVar Burton's eyes. I think actually it's not as bad as you might think because her father has been teaching her how to shoot for decades. Like there has been survival stuff built in. She is, she is all. She's not like you and me going out into this world because the world that she's in has already been defending a walled fortress. And this is really more about taking her skills and sensibility outside of the fortress. Now, again, she learned some stuff and I don't disagree. But I think one of the fascinating pieces of this book is the frog boiling nature of the apocalypse that we experience here and that she is a. She is a child of this and she recognizes that's different than her own parents who remembers the before times. She's a survivor from the moment she's born and has had to have been.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's one of the things that feels truest to me about this book is that I think when we imagine the apocalypse or even like a lot of movies, TV shows, like even though this shares some DNA with the Walking Dead, where like it's just a series of perilous events that they experience and have to survive or a lot of those, like sort of post apocalyptic the Last the Road.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I mentioned some of these a little bit later. Red.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Alex.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, right. That a lot of times it's presented as there's some big event that happens. The virus gets out and everyone becomes zombies or the meteor heads for Earth and here's what's going to happen. But this is a slow roll, and it's a slow roll that unfolds over decades that has been unfolding in Lauren's world for decades by the time the book opens. Where climate change happens gradually, societal collapse happens generally pretty gradually. There might be inflection points, but yeah, this has been a developing process and that feels really true and relatable and probably one of the things that made this book land as like, holy shit, this is prescient. When people in 2020, like it really started having its resurgence in 2020 and people were looking at the political landscape and looking at the ways especially that homeless people are treated. Butler predicts like the, that homeless people will be seen as not just seen as disposable, but the government will actively be trying to kill homeless people. And just a month ago, two months ago, we had government officials on TV saying just kill them all. Like that is. Butler was not wrong about a lot of these things that can develop, but that they tend to unfold over time rather than just overnight. There's a big event and the world is completely different is one of the things I think that makes this scariest.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And the book itself is an inflection point for Butler's own career, even as Kindred has been the best selling single book of hers. The Parable of the Sower. When it came out of 1993, got all kinds of attention. It was a New York Times Notable book in their 1994 list. And then she wins the MacArthur in 1995 and sets her just on a different kind of trajectory. It's interesting that we get this book and not the whole series. She had imagined these parable books to be a trilogy around the. The Earthseed Trilogy is what it would have been called. She wrote a second book, the Parable of the Talents, which came out a few years later that is told from the perspective of Lauren's daughter after Lauren has died and she is disaffected to some degree. And then the third book that she was working on at the time of her death was going to be called the Parable of the Trickster. And the Huntingdon Library has early manuscripts and things over there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, that's cool.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Butler herself became pretty depressed and frustrated with. With this third book and turned to something else fledgling, which was a little. It's a little more fun. It's a vampire novel. And then she died in. In 2006, unfortunately. Had a. Had a stroke and then a fall or a fall and then a stroke. It's not really clear. But she died young. She had a lot of. She had a lot more in her.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

58.

[Jeff O'Neill]

58. So there's a. There's. There was a lot more there. And I think that's also part of the macabre fascination of this trilogy and this book specifically is even the author was wrestling with it. Even the author had not come to terms with this as. And we're left in suspension and imagining what it could have been at that point.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

To unlock our best deals. Big gifts, big perks. That's why you rack.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I don't know anything else to say about the background before we get into.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think there has been a lot in the last five years about like what would Octavia Butler have written about if she were alive today to see how many of her predictions have come true. I do really want to highlight you mentioned that she won the MacArthur in 1995, popularly known as the Genius grant. She was the first science fiction writer to get the Genius grant and she was the first black woman to get wide recognition in writing science fiction at all. So just a hugely groundbreaking figure like N.K. jemisin later wins a MacArthur genius grant. Other sci fi writers have won, but this is one of those cases where you can draw pretty straight lines from a groundbreaker to the people that she opened doors for. Like we don't get NK Jemisin if first there isn't Octavia Butler. And I think NK Jemisin would say that and comes kind of close to it in her afterword to the book. And since that win of the MacArthur, there's just a ton of awards like you go to the Wikipedia page for Octavia Butler. She's won the Hugo a bunch of times. She's won the Locus Award a bunch of times. Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Awards. And then after her death in 2006, she continues to be recognized for things there's just a ton. But the coolest one, I think, is that in 2021, NASA named the Mars landing site of the Perseverance rover the Octavia E. Butler Landing in her honor. And to my knowledge, this is the first author we've had on this show who's had a Mars rover or a landing site, you know, after them.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I was thinking very cool. Octavia E. Butler. I wonder if she was tempted at the time to just use her initials. Right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, we Butler.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But being a woman was so important to her work that she wasn't interested in that. Right. And for those of you who maybe don't know, that is a strategy that some writers have used to try to dodge a little. The bias that can go into especially and still using less so. But still. It's still out there for sure. But there's something about that. She uses an initial, but she just puts Octavia front and center, which I've always. I've always admired. And I think at this point she. This is always a fun game to play. Authors that are recognizable only by their first name. So you either have to be so famous that you know you can be the one. Kevin. And I'm just picking a number, picking a name at random. And. Or yeah, Tony's a good one. And. Or your name is distinctive enough that you can't. There's not a lot of namespace pollution for the Octavias. But you can reference Octavia to book people and they'll know who you're talking about. Generally speaking, they're not gonna. Which Octavia you're talking about. And that is maybe the highest sort of. That's the last tier of fame to get to for writers. It's also so interesting. We're talking about the trajectory in preparation for this pod. I was looking around for a copy to pick up and I like to buy them used if I can. I kind of like to get an old copy of some of these books just to see I could not find a used copy. And this is this Gives me a chance to talk about Thriftbooks, who's sponsoring the show this season. One of the features you can do there is if there's an addition you like, you can set a little reminder that let me know when one of these comes in and they'll tell you about how often they get something. So I looked in several used bookstores at Physical with my own two human meat hands. I looked and I couldn't find a used copy at multiple used bookstores over the last couple months. And even if I go on Thriftbooks right now, there are not. I mean there are used copies to have, but you're not going to get a deal. The one I want to shout out Here is the February 1995 paperback mass market paperback. So this was after the initial hard to cover. This is from Aspect Press, an acceptable copy, which is the kind of the lowest that Thriftbooks makes available is $19 for a mass market paperback. You can't get these, Rebecca. So if you ever find yourself at a library bookstore or a library book sale or a little free library situation, you know, leave something for the little bit free library. But if you see a parable of the Sower, pick that shiz up because you've got a market for it. And that like there weren't that many used copies and people continue to buy these. So creates a very strange market for books, one of which I don't. I can't really think of an equivalent. I really can't. That these.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, that's.

[Jeff O'Neill]

There's not even the. Miss Even the mass market ones are available. But the. The one that's you can buy. There's a really nice hardcover of the two parable, the Earthseed ones, that's like 38 bucks. It's a collector's edition. But the 30th edition, that's. I read an ebook of this eventually that's what I have. But you can get that for 16 bucks. But go to thriftbooks.com thanks for them to sponsoring the show. You can find all kinds of interesting other editions there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I wonder how the publisher is balancing the new demand for her and how they're handling it. Because the resurgence in 2020 was totally unexpected as the Black Lives Matter movement gained traction after George Floyd's murder. The Octavia Butler books just appeared on a bunch of Black Lives Matter reading lists and other folks who were trying to educate themselves about black authors and reading more diversely. There were just a lot of angles that people were coming to. Octavia Butler Butler from and it makes a lot of sense. Like, her work is at the intersection of racial justice, economic inequality. This book deals a lot with how those things can be tied to political polarization and to climate concerns, all of which feed back to, you know, major political ideas and, you know, discussions, battles, things that have really been in the water in the US especially since 2016. But yeah, landed on the first landed for the first time on the New York Times bestseller list in 2020, 14 years after her death and what's seven, 27 years after the book was published. Really incredible.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I do have a little inside information on this element because I this is published the the current edition of Parable, so published by Grand Central Publishing, which is imprint of A Shet. And I talked to them in the course of doing book riot stuff, and I remember talking to them about their we're going to be releasing new additions of the Butlers over time, and this one came out in April 2019. So it was available to be picked up in 2020 and 2021. Like, someone over there did a hell of a job of getting, I think they acquired all of the rights. It's a wonderful. But part of, part of something having a resurgence is having it available in a different kind of way. And, you know, maybe probably she would have been picked up, this book would have picked up in 2020, 21. But having an edition that a publisher was behind, that was available, that was in print. Rebecca like, that's not always the case either. Some of the literary legacy stuff is much more boots, you know, books on the shelves, publishing industry stuff.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It does matter more than like, a casual reader is probably aware of that when the list goes out or when somebody says, octavia Butler is my favorite on a big TV show or now a big like, TikTok channel, it matters that readers can immediately go and get those books where they want them. And then that momentum begins. And once it's off, you're like, you're really going to the races, but very unpredictable. This is one of those things that I keep remembering as we record the show. How many books are near like most books are forgotten, and how many of the books that we think of as classic or integral to our canon today were very nearly forgotten or had been forgotten for a while. And then somebody reads them at the right time, somebody stumbles on it, and that person has access to the kind of platform that just lets them say, maybe we should bring this one back out. That these things that feel inevitable, like reading this book in 2025 feels like, of course it was inevitable that Octavia Butler would become the kind of well known, like scion of science fiction that we think of her as today. But it was anything but. There's like so much randomness and so much unpredictability in it. And that just, I think, makes it even more magical when these things happen.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And that gives us a chance to talk about the story itself and the reading experience and our own relationship to the book. Rebecca, you have. All you have in the notes here says you have a funny story about that. I have no idea what you're. Is this your first time?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So I thought I had read this and as I sat down and started, I got about 25 pages in and I was like, this is new to me. This is all new to me. I don't recognize this voice or this story. And I, for the life of me don't know what book I have been thinking of when I have been thinking that I have read the Parable of the Sower. It's totally possible that I read like an excerpt from it online when it was having the big resurgence in 2020. But I this, it turns out this is my first time and I did not realize it was going to be my first time with Parable of the Sower. So yeah, it was a great one. But here we are.

[Jeff O'Neill]

My first time, I think was in 2018 or so. It was post BR. Like I heard about it through doing Book Rush write stuff, a list or, you know, there's a lot of, A lot of science fiction fans that this is canonical to them. I went through a pretty serious science fiction phase when I was like 14 or 15, which ironically is about. Is when this book was published. But I wasn't reading. I had no idea about new science fiction. I was doing Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert and all. All the people that Octavia Butler was reading. But also seeing that there wasn't people like her in that list. So I didn't get to it until quite a bit later. But even, even then I can. I got it right. And I think that's one thing that both of us are having a reaction to. And I'd be curious. Yours is. I can see why in 1993 was a big deal. But this book is so influential that it feels like a version of things that we've read that were influenced by it since then. Right. Or like, yes, it was ahead of its time, but if you go back and read it now, it sets so much of the groundwork that if there's parts of it that can feel familiar. I guess what I'm trying to say, even though at the time it was not at all familiar, this was.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Since it turned out I hadn't read this before, it was. It felt like an exercise in understanding the roots of a. Like a trend or a trajectory in science fiction where I've read some of the things that came after. I've read, you know, NK Jemisin, I've read other folks that I think had to have been influenced by Octavia Butler. Angela Flournoy draws on this book quite a bit in her new novel the Wilderness that came out earlier this year. And like that book, is mostly literary and just slightly speculative. But the places where it's speculative, they name check Octavia Butler and are drawn straight from Parable of the Sower, that it's interesting to do that, like to be familiar with the more recent versions of a story, the more recent things that were influenced, and then to go back to the origin and get it. That, to me, was the most interesting part of the exercise. Some of it too, is that we live in a time where many of these predictions have come true. They're not scary and groundbreaking because we don't have to imagine them. We are in them now and wondering what's going to come next. And it's tempered, or at least for me, it was tempered by. There are all of these really grounded predictions about, you know, like, water will become scarce and expensive, food will become scarce and expensive, all the ways that that can lead into increased violence and danger for people. But for me, the, like, the more fantastical elements really sort of tempered the power of the grounded, relatable, earthbound stuff like that, that Lauren has sort of this magical power with the hyper empathy that little bits about like wanting humans to escape into space or that maybe that's where we're going to make the future. Like we have that conversation today. But it also still feels a little bit fantastical and felt to me a little bit unnecessary. And it's interesting that in the books that come after Octavia Butler and the writers that come after her, I think a more. That more grounded speculation about what happens here on Earth, it doesn't need magical elements at all or, you know, surreal elements.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. If you take Lauren's hyper empathy out of the book, it is still speculative into science fiction, but in a different. More in league with like 1984, like it's political alternate future or the Handmaid's Tale. Or the Handmaid's Tale or something like that. Where, you know, because Butler is a science fiction writer, she thinks in these terms, right? She's. She's looking for these elements. She's thinking about this. This. I. I wonder if it occurred to her that the power you could even keep it would be alternate future, I guess is what we're thinking about this. So kind of it's not. It's dystopian but not post apocalyptic. And that's a distinction I care about and no one else does. I'm going to keep saying that, but it would have a different kind of prophetic resonance without the supernatural thing that. Or they don't even. It's not even in this, in this book. It's not supernatural. It is. She got this ability because her mother was a drug addict and she was addicted to this particular drug while she was pregnant with Lauren. And it gave her this hyperempathy. Now it doesn't. It's presented as a medical condition. She meets a doctor and says, oh, I've studied this. So it's not like Clark Kent or something like that. But it does strain the bounds of what we know. But we can talk about why that. You know, what that does add and maybe what it detracts from the story a little bit later. I want to focus for a minute on the reading experience, especially the first 50 to 100 pages for someone who's getting into it, because I think there's some things that can orient a reading experience but. And also enrich it. It's organizes Lauren's journal entries. And next to it, at the head of each journal entry, we get a piece of these. These poetic verses that she has written that will. She imagines that are going to be the source text for this new religion.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The Earthseed. And so there's a couple things as a. As a. As a reader to be aware of and I think also careful of at the same time, especially when it comes to journal books, novels that are journals or novels or letters. Do not let your guard down in journal and letter books. Right? This is. It feels like you're getting more direct access to that character's interiority. But actually there's a further distance because as someone who's written a journal, and I know a lot of people have kept diaries and journals, there is always already a sense of audience and the performance in those things. I'm sure there are people out there who are just like automatic writing. This is just my interiority and I don't imagine anyone's gonna ever read it except me. But I think that's less the case, and certainly less the case when it's a work of fiction using this as a tactic. And the other thing you can know that it's not just here I go. Is that she has come back to put these verses in because she hasn't written them yet at the time of a lot of these events. And then the later. And later you get in the book, you can see here's the August 18th entry that's composed out of August 28th notes. So she's taking notes and then reforming them. And somewhere along the way, I think it's interesting to think about her being self conscious of this text being a holy document to the. To the. To people that come in the future.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, that's a great point. Like, we don't know how old Lauren is or how long after the events take place in the story. She's constructing this. But a good analog, I think. And like, by the way, it really helps to know a little Bible going into this. Like, you'll be just fine if you don't, but it helps to know a little. And this feels to me like if you imagined that somebody, you know, took notes as they were going on a journey and then they came back later and constructed those notes into what looks like a journal of here's what a document of. Here's what's happening on August 16th. And then they matched it with a Bible verse that, you know, was related to the themes of what happened that day. Like, that's how it unfolds that the verse at the top of each entry is somehow thematically connected to the story that she's telling us about what happened that day or what's been going on in the last week or so of their journey. But yeah, she must have constructed these after the fact because she has not completely created Earthseed and written all of it as it's happening because they're busy just walking up the highway trying to survive. That's, I think, really helpful. And for being journal entries, it's really plot heavy. Like, at least my personal experience of journaling is pretty interior. Or if you read like a writer's personal notes or journals, often about thoughts and feelings, this is a pretty straightforward document of what happened, who did what. We get some of the, like what she was thinking or some of the strategy that Lauren is trying to exercise, what she's worried about in the group dynamics. But it's pretty exterior and the, like the peril is pretty relentless. Like it is one episode after another of. Of here's a dystopian thing that happens. Here's another dystopian thing. Our community was broken into, a fire was set. We're trudging along the road and these people attacked us. And here's how we met the other people that joined our group. Like, Butler has played this very successful game of what if with herself and then followed all of the ifs down to logical ends. But it feels, I guess, less literary and more plot heavy than a lot of the books that we've talked about.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, as a document of survival, you know, you see journals or diaries from people in survival situation, it tends to be a lot more practical matters, right? Like, because you and I, when we were keeping our journals, we're 14. We were not worried about, like, we need to learn how to use guns because people are coming over the wall tonight or we got to go.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

She doesn't have the luxury of navel.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Gazing, so, like, she's under duress. I. There's a lot that happens from the jump, though. We start out with a dream sequence, which is never my particular favorite thing. Dreams is something I would get rid of in all literature if I could. I never find them interesting or illuminated, but for the first hundred pages or so, a lot happens. But it's in the service of world and character building, right? Like the. It takes a while for Lauren to get out on the road that we've been talking about quite a while. A lot has to happen for her to find herself in a position where she is ready, able, has to launch even as she's been thinking about it for a while, which I found pretty interesting. She's ready to strike out on her own and go somewhere, but she doesn't until she's the only one left. I mean, for lack of a better term, like her. Her domestic world ends in many ways and she's left with essentially no choice. Or the choice is to give in or become a prostitute or a drug user or really give in to the squalor in hell. And she tries not to that and she tries to go on the road, but to give you some sense of the world. And this is always tricky with any kind of alternate history or future is how do you give people a sense of. Of the world without just saying how it is? And it can take some time to do that because you need to learn important logistical, practical things without the character saying it directly to themselves in the form of journal, which you and I would never do. You and I and I. And would never be like, you know what? In this world, I need to go put gas in the car. Right. Because it's so taken as red. So that can take some time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's true. And I did appreciate the way that Butler does the world building, that it isn't like that. The first sentence of the book isn't like, and here's the thing that happened that totally made the world change, but that the book opens with a group going for a baptism. Like, coming back around to the biblical stuff. They are all walking together to go to this water source where they can conduct a baptism. And the logistics around it tell us a lot about what has changed in the world. The concerns that they have for their safety. Are they bringing guns? Who's going to come? Who's allowed to. What's happening back at home that they need to worry about and that it continues to unfold that way that she just casually mentions, like, that a fire has been set. And will it be worth it to call the firemen? Because can we pay the fees or should we call the police about this break in? Because that's gonna be really expensive. And that's a level of artistry and I think careful craft that does elevate a reading experience like this. Other writers, lesser writers, would just say, like, and now we have to pay for police. You know, like, in a world where. And there are writers, that's. It must be tempting because that would be the easier thing to do. But that she. She constructs these, like, series of vignettes, this series of experiences that we get to watch Lauren have, where we. We are able to build the world bit by bit.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

It.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And part of. I think one of the fascinating things that she does is where she puts us in the timeline of the fall. Right. Of the before times and the after times. We're in the. Is this going to hold? Because there's still. There are still elections, there are still police, but you have to pay them. And they're, you know, pretty mercenary. They're still, like, money is still good for stuff. Like, you're using dollars to pay for nuts and stuff on the road. But, like, 2,000 bucks gets. You do essentially what, as I'm understanding, like, nuts and rice for two weeks. Like, that's how much everything is.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it's like a thousand dollars for groceries for a week. Like, there are still airplanes that fly.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That go places, but they're terribly expensive. And, like, one of the folks who ends up in Lauren's little band of travelers is going north and says something about, like, I thought about just flying up there because it would have been cheaper but then I wouldn't have had any money left to get my like to get myself set up like it would have. Well, it wouldn't have been cheaper. It would have taken less time to just fly north. So you, you also know that those pieces of infrastructure do still exist and that. That to me also feels.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes, true. Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

For how this erosion happens. How, how public civilized society becomes gradually less civilized.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And in. Unless you have a way of getting outside of it for a moment. And part of one of those. One of those ways is to be the reader of this text. As a reader I was like this thing is fallen man. Get the hell out of it. There's no reason. And the people who are have slowly with every day experienced new deterioration but then has adapted deterioration and adapt and deridation adapt. Whereas Lauren because of her personality, because of her reading, because of the hyper empathy. I think there's a lot of reasons she is different in this regard. She's like how can I deal with this? We've got to prepare because this is not going to hold. And I need some other strategy. I need some other tactic for not just putting up walls and staying in place, but then also not like her brother throwing himself at the will of the. The thing beyond the wall. Like I'm going to go out there and see what happens and participate in it and is destroyed by it. And I think that piece of it. There is a. There's a really sort of logical chain of imagination which is I don't think is a phrase I've ever thought of before of how she gets from one place to another and imagining a future. It's prepare. There is no safety. Right. There's no wall high enough here because she's imagining even the rich people are having this problem. Maybe even more so because they have more stuff to steal. And then it opens up in a space of a kind of a critical consciousness like we got to get away from here. There's got to be some other way of doing this. This. And the reducto ad absurdum of this is the stars like we're. This is the. This is the fate of humanity is to take ourselves and seed the stars with our own presence. But part of that is. Is that's undiscovered country. Right. It doesn't have all of this baggage to go along with it so that it gives you room to reinvent. And I think that's a commentary on art and the imagination and maybe science fiction principally among them. This. These step changes of possibility open up new terrain, which you can imagine. Things that are hard to imagine if you don't get farther away from the quotidian every day. Let's talk about. Let's talk about some of her or go ahead, follow up on that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think one of the companions of that, though, like, while she's got them dreaming about the stars or while she's dreaming about getting people to the stars, is also a very grounded yes. Idea that informs a lot of activism today. That we take care of us. That it you have to form community, that you have to form connection, that the seed needs good ground to fall upon and that you can be both seed and good ground if you form this new kind of community. And that the world she's living in is very polarized. And people are very paranoid because there are good reasons to be very paranoid about who might be coming for you. Does this person or this bad group of people know that you have resources that they might come for? Is your house going to be broken into? Are you safe when you're out on the road? All of these things can drive people into little silos. And one of the driving tensions and forces of her philosophy is that diversity is good for us and that that is overtly written into the sort of sacred text of Earthseed, that change is like God is change, and that learning how to work with change is how we will approach the future. But that also diversity is of kind of power. And where she and most of the characters that meet have previously been in their own little homogenous communities. They find themselves out on the road and that the way that they're able to survive is instead of hunkering down and, like, closing and trying to protect all of their resources, they express a form of generosity, of openness, of curiosity about the possibility that maybe some of these people are good and can be trusted. And what new powers, what new way of being in the world, what new access to survival might they unlock if they can be open to those things in a world that tells you that you should be closed and that you should be really. That you should be closed and worried and, like, stingy. And I probably, like, there's there. I'm not going to look there are probably terrible tiktoks about, like, the Octavia Butler abundance mindset. But it is like, it is a. An open, open mindset, a growth mindset rather than a scarcity mindset. And I think Butler is writing directly into what she understands to be, like, the tension around, especially race, but how that's connected to resources and scarcity.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. One of the, one of the verse chapter headers, sacred text scripture pieces reads, embrace diversity. Unite or be divided, Robbed, ruled, killed by those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity or be destroyed. And that is put in action on the road. So Lauren eventually leaves with a couple of people she knows from her fortress town and you know, whatever, whatever. However we're going to describe this group of 11 homes that's surrounded by a wall to strike north to try to get to Oregon somewhere else where water is, is more possible. And where water is more possible, the rule of law tends to hold a little bit better because the scarcity has made people into savages and turns turned people against each other. And their morality is. It's actually more complicated than one might think where they will give someone a shot to join them, but if they are betrayed, they will be killed or exiled. There is no, well, you know what, we'll give you another chance. Even though you stole from us or did something else, like we're going to give you a little bit of a probationary period. But there's a recognition too that part of this is like you have to participate in the same morality and the same ethic with us or you're going to exploit us. And we can't have that here. We cannot tolerate that. And one of the things that's happened in this the fallenness is people are not held accountable. People are not held accountable for their transgressions because the police force, the judiciary system, and the political powers that be aren't interested in enforcing it. So people get away with more and more. And in the fabric of that shared understanding has strained and I gotta tell you, that feels a little close to the bone. Rebecca Schinsky.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It does, it does.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

It's.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is still a really powerful book. Like, even though she's predicting the time we are living in right now, it's powerful because some of the things are happening right now. And it's powerful because it asks us to think about what might be happening 30 years from now. Like, we're not yet in the place where groceries for two people for a week are a thousand dollars. But it's not impossible to imagine how that happens.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We did live through a time where you couldn't get toilet paper. I mean, we've had some of these micro experiences of the world turned upside down in a radical way and how different things can happen.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

Streaming only on peak. I'm going to need the name of everyone that could have a connection.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you going to do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All her fault.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A new series streaming now only on Peacock.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's also, it's also a story of creating possibility that's not interested in political revolution. Right? That's not what it's trying to overthrow or run for something. This is a smaller, longer term thinking about creating a new ethic around which you can build some sort of society. And there's. They talk a little bit about the end as they sort of form this new community. So she meets, they meet these people across the way and they've come from all over. And one of them is an older Fella, he's what, 57, we're told, and has. He's a doctor. And he has a piece of land up in central California that is protected enough and kind of out of the way. But also since in Central California can grow anything that it might be able to sustain some people. And he falls in love with Lauren and they have an age gap situation that, you know, it's the end times, Rebecca. Consenting adults do your thing. But he then agrees to let that become a place where this new religion, society, political ideology can take root. But even when you get there, everything's not ready to go. Like it's, it's this, this book does not traffic in the promised Land, there's just us here. And I found that refreshing is not quite the right word, but I found that grounding and in a way more hopeful because Butler, on the whole, I don't know if we've said this, she. She's even said in interviews, is a hopeful person. Even the person who writes this is a hope. This is a book about hope. This is not a book about false hope. It's about real hope. Now, it may be longer term, it may be quite small, but it's real hope. Don't you think?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I do. And like, it's at risk of sounding like, trite about it. It kind of is. You know, like the real hope is the friends they made.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's true.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like that, like the stakes are really high and. And the stakes of being in their group are still extreme because the worlds that they live in is extreme. So as you were saying, like, Lauren kind of issues these ultimatums to new people as they are interested in joining the group. Like our values. You don't have to believe in all the Earth Seed stuff, but these are our ethics. This is the way that this group lives. And you have to live as we live if you're going to be part of it. And that even when they get to what they hope will be their promised land, where they can have a fresh start, it's not at all what they expected. They don't have the resources that they thought they were going to have. But it's not a like, I guess it's over. They still have each other.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

And the fact that they have found each other and that this community has formed and that they are committed to taking care of each other. That ethic of care is the thing that distinguishes their group from everything that's happening in the outside world. It's all competition everywhere else. Competition for survival, competition for resources, Scarcity, danger, violence. You can't trust your neighbor. And these people have committed to being each other's neighbors.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that this open. It's an open, essentially open acreage. 300. There's no structures at all. Even the one that was supposed to be there is burned down. It's just open land. And they're coming from a land of walls. Right? And you know, there's. There's a good fences make good neighbor situation. Robert Frost. You've all read it wrong. Everyone knows everyone else reads it wrong. Maybe we'll do poems. We'll do short stories and poems someday on zero to well read. But the walls themselves are protection and separation Right. And that's, that is the deal you make with a wall. And they're trying to strike some other kind of deal with each other and with community. One of the things that struck me this time, and I think probably when I read it, if I would have read this when I was 15 or 16, I don't think I would have. This would have hit me as hard. But reading and writing is not a given for people.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's, it's actually a rare skill and it's valuable and it's like literally valuable in terms of employable, but it's valuable in terms of survival and learning about other parts of the world and everything else that goes on having some sort of exterior knowledge. And I don't remember Rebecca, in the book, do they tell us what happened? Like, is this government? Is it just people aren't going to school? Like what happened to reading and writing that it became so scarce? Now clearly there are, there are people who, who do not read and write. And there's all kinds of problem with the modern educational system. System. But I'm. My sense of this is it is super rare for people that even own their own homes or have jobs that we would consider non menial to read and write. But I didn't. It just seemed part of the decline, it seemed part of the erosion. But I didn't see a specific entity.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It is just presented as part of this world that especially a lot of younger girls and women in this world don't know how to read and, and write. And we don't know what's happened to education. Like people are still getting on planes and going places. There are still big corporations that exist. There are still rich people, still a college.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Weirdly, I didn't know the college would still be around at this point.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, my assumption reading into that was that there are schools and that people have stopped going to schools because it's too dangerous to get out there. Or maybe school isn't free. Maybe, maybe there's no such thing as an underwritten public school anymore. But also some of the girls that we meet have been like Lauren meets them because they were sold into marriage as teenagers to older men. And of course those older men have incentives not to educate these young women and to provide them with exposure to ideas that might make them even more desirous of being liberated from their current situations. The ideas are dangerous and a less educated populace is easier to control. A less educated personal slave is easier to control. And I think we see aspects of both of those like the micro and the macro of that happen in this book.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And that in our current landscape of book banning and censorship, that feels more present than it would have to me at 15 if I had read this in 1993. I don't think. I think naively I would like that The. The impetus to keep books from people and the slippery slope of this isn't good for kids to. This shouldn't be anywhere. This should be outlawed. You can't get this to people not being able to read and write and think for themselves. Themselves. I'm a little more. I'm a little more sympathetic to that, to that chain of events.

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

The access to history too. Right. Like, one of the things that we learn about that's happening in the world is that company towns are popping back up where they advertise themselves as come work here and you can live for free. Like maybe even room and board, maybe even your meals are free. But what we find out is that they don't pay enough to actually subsidize the cost. And so people end up up in debt to these companies and that means they can never stop working for them. Yeah, they're. They're stuck. And this is not the first time that this has happened in American history. And Lauren knows this, and a couple of the other folks she meets along the road know this, but she's writing it in her. In her journal into the Earthseed documents, partially as a way of educating people who have come across those that this was happening in the world of. And it has happened before, and we know this. But people who don't know that, who don't know that that's happened in history, are more gullible for an offer because they don't know this is a trap, and they don't know that we've seen it be a trap in the past. And I assume that history classes, if nothing else, have changed drastically by the time that this book is taking place, but that many fewer people have access to education because the less you know, the easier you are to take advantage of.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I want to talk a little bit about the hyper empathy and then pyro, which is this. The drug that has. Is a scourge. And I think there's a version of this book where the creation of this specific drug might be the thing that has led them to this place because it is so all consuming, it is so dehumanizing, it is so unma. It unmakes the people who take it right to the point where they shave off all their hair. And they paint themselves like blues and greens. And they have this very strange attraction to fire. Like to the point. Well, they will go close to it and just stare at it to the point like they burn their faces off and stuff it. It is dehuman. They turn into some other kind of being. And in a simple way, it may just be a metaphor for id, of just raw desire for power sensation. Radical self interest, I think is a way of thinking about it versus is the thing frankly it's created or one of the another drugs created, which is this opposite, which is hyperempathy, where you are so in tune with the physical feelings of others that if you punch them, you feel the blow yourself. If you stab them or they are stabbed within proximity, you. I'm not really sure the duration or the radius of this empathy circle. But Lauren, it becomes a bit of a plot mechanic where some of the encounters are governed by her ability to participate them or not, or do other things or not. But those are the two poles that are being navigated here. And I don't think it's presented where hyper empathy is a good. But there's a little bit of messianic stuff going on, right? Like this is the ultimate turn the other cheek, right? Like it's hyper empathy given embodiment of. I literally feel what you feel. Not, not just that I am going to suffer and die for you metaphorically, but I suffer along with you. And so I'm interested in you not suffering because I suffer. And that kind of radical identification is a fascinating idea. But I don't. I don't know that it's. I wonder a casual reader if they're going to make all of those kinds of extensions and connections.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, I think there's the Christ stuff certainly that you're getting to of like I suffer with you, I feel your pain. And there's also a really humanistic reading of it that committing violence dehumanizes not just the victim, but the perpetrator. And that one of the ways that Lauren is positioned to maybe see life and see humanity and possibilities for the future in ways that other people aren't, is that she does experience that. That if she inflicts harm on someone else, if she shoots somebody else, she feels the pain of the bullet. It literally. And there's a real cost to that that's not just psychic or emotional. And. And sometimes the psychic and emotional costs of that sort of violence in other survival stories get written off because like it's just necessary, right? We just had to commit this violence in order to protect ourselves. But when she has to commit. Commit violence to protect herself, she still has to feel the cost of it. So she's doing a different calculus about is it really going to be worth it to stab this person? Will it be worth it if I have to shoot them? What is. How does that change me? How does that change my humanity? I think that's subtler. Like, I think that's probably in Butler's philosophy of this world, but that it's not. It's not overt enough and it's not on the page to be part of. I think a casual reading of the book. It's certainly not something I would have thought about when I. If I had read this as a teenager.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And it's a little deterministic too. Right. Because it's a. It's a quirk of biology, but not of morality. Right. That, you know, someone could. And so. And people have developed these kinds of ideologies without this kind of genetic imperative, you know, or genetic constraint to guide them into that kind of direction.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Butler talks in some interviews about having read a lot about Buddhism and a lot of this. Like, I. I've been to some meditation retreats, Jeff. Like, some of this is. Is pretty familiar to me from Buddhist and a lot of Eastern teachings, but also not wanting it to just feel like Buddhism light or Buddhism in the future. And I think she threads that needle very well, but that it is from a biological cause, not because Lauren has been, like, meditating on these ideas or engaged with philosophy that's guiding her. The philosophy comes out of the physical experience.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Let's do some quotes. I'm going to start with something I have a little bit lower. I have it in this. Are we sure? This is about art and writing? But I'm going to come up here because I think it's a good bridge to some of the ideas that Butler has and what her project is and the deployment of them. This is Lauren writing in her own journal. But I think it's not hard to make a skip and a jump over to Butler. Here. Here we. Here we go. Here's the quote. Quote I'm trying to speak, to write the truth. I'm trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy or even original. Clarity and truth will be plunged if I can. If I can only achieve them. If it happens that there are other people outside somewhere preaching my truth, I'll join them. Otherwise, I'll adapt where I must take, what opportunities I can find or make. Hang on. Gather students and teach I think that's not the worst way of understanding Butler's approach, style and ethic here to take that as a whole. What other quotes should we talk about? What did you have?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

See, I mean, there are some that just really capture it. She says we are a harvest of survivors. And of course, harvest is an interesting word because she's thinking of themselves as seed, but also talks about the ordinary, unspeakable things that we did now to live. And that ordinary unspeakable is so concise and says so much about what life. Life feels like. Like, we really do get to feel the drudgery and the fear and the. Just like how you get ground down by like walking every day in the heat and being constantly scared and hungry and waiting until you have enough money to buy the good water. And like, you know, there's dogs everywhere and are you going to be. Are you in danger? Just like it's. It's a real life is a real grind. And that. That these un. These things that would have been previously unspeakable continue to feel unspeakable, but have also become ordinary.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Earlier in the book, where before the really bad stuff has happened to her family and their family realizes that things are intensifying. It's not just a status quo that you're surviving, but things are getting worse. One of the characters says, we can't live this way. Corey shouted. I jumped. I've never heard her sound like that before. Or we do live this way, dad said. And then Lauren's unsaid third rejoinder would be something like, we don't have to live this way. Right. We don't have to go back or stay. We could go forward. Because Corey's thinking about joining the company town, which is a real regression, like, sort of. Everyone understands it's a great. Like it's a. It's a compromise of. To trade security for liberty and really agency of any kind. But this third way is out elsewhere go. So that one's really powerful there. Let's see. I used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos, the world that would destroy the neighborhood. Instead, these things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit. We've talked about that a little bit. I thought this was interesting too. Lauren has told her father something of the nature of her beliefs, and she is trying to shake people out of their complacency or their sort of bunker mentality of weathering it to say this is not weatherable, and she's trying to freak them out. It's Better to teach people than to scare them. Lauren, if you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear and you lose some of your authority over them. It's harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching thought. That was fascinating.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's fascinating. And that feels pressing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. Present and true to like our political landscape, especially messages that are about what you should be afraid of and the like, if this happens and this happens, then this is going to happen. Like sort of the doomerism of it all. When those things that you have predicted don't come true, you do lose power and trust. And that, that she does. Lauren starts to figure it out. She takes her dad's advice that like to set an example, to teach about ideas rather than to just like kind of it's preaching versus teaching. And sort of interesting that she fashions, fancies herself to be both. But she's much more effective in the teaching mode, in the modeling of things than when she's just trying to preach. And I did appreciate that, that like she's. I mean, we both grew up in Kansas. We're not unfamiliar with, you know, people trying to set out churches and like evangelical sorts of modes of engagement. And I, and I think Butler was familiar with that too, of like, what can be a turnoff about somebody who just so powerfully believes in what they believe in and desperately wants you to believe in it too. And then how people who are effective in those roles and effective at sharing their beliefs or persuading other people like that often hinges on a demonstration of something and of an action or an ability to convey the idea rather than just like pounding them over the head with it. And then Lauren comes around like she develops a little finesse with how she shares these ideas.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The last one I have here that I'll mentioned, it's a little bit longer one, but I think this connects the, the religiosity, the sort of creation of a sacred belief system around a moral philosophical ethic. And then using narrative, narrative and story as a vehicle for it. This is when she's talking to one of the people they meet along the road. And one of her navigations, it's. It's always interesting to see her do it is at what point do I try out their, I don't know, their sympathy, their interest, their openness to this Earthseed idea. I took a chance. I told Travis about the destiny. He asked and asked me what the point of Earthseed is. Why personify change by calling a God. So since it's change is just an idea, why not call it just that? Just say change is important because after a while, it won't be important. I told him people forget ideas. They're more likely to remember God, especially when they're scared or desperate. Then they're supposed to do what he demanded. Read a poem or remember a truth or a comfort or reminder to action. I said people do that all the time. They reach back to the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran, or some other religious book that helps them deal with the frightening changes that happened to them. So, you know, make it easy, make it simple, make it sacred for people to turn to something than to rather, you know, just remember two plus two equals four. I thought it was a fascinating conversation. And something I think Butler is trying to work out is, like, what will people turn to? Because clearly Butler is a book that people have turned to, and why do they turn? Why not? You know, this is a question that some people ask of fiction writ like large. Why not just say it plain? Well, the answer is because if you say, well, life is hard and we don't know everything, and sometimes you don't know what to do. That's easy to say. But people remember Hamlet, right? You know, like you can get consumed by the pursuit of something to the point where you forget all else. Like, that's an easy platitude you could put on the pillow. But Moby Dick is doing different work in the exploration and the articulation of that kind of idea. The story matters. I guess what I'm trying to say, the form of the story matters, the form of the message matters. And to reduce it to a platitude or just even a syllogism doesn't stick. It just doesn't work as well as art or religion or some other kind of articulation.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Why? Is it. Is it for you? Is it Maybe not for you. Rebecca, where do you want to start?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think it's for you if this idea that there is no going back to. To normal resonates, and it's radical and grounding, and there is also something kind of comforting that, like, we will not go back to the way it used to be, but there is work to be done and hope to be had in seeking to create a way forward and a new life. I'm not sure Butler would ever use the term new normal. I don't know that this book believes that there will be the establishment of anything that feels normal again. But we're not going back to Whatever came before. I think if you're curious about one of the seminal books that influenced a lot of contemporary sci fi, if you've read a lot of contemporary sci fi, but never Octavia Butler, I imagine you will find a lot of seeds here. Like, I have not read super widely in contemporary sci fi, folks who have but haven't read Butler, I think you'll find a lot to pull on and I think if you are a reader who's drawn to. There's a lot of action, there's a lot of plot and story, and it moves quickly. Like, you know, it's books, a little over 300 pages. It's not going to take you that long to get through. Things are always happening. There's always something to engage with that's really compelling.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. If you've read a whole bunch of sci fi already and you read this, you may have deja vu all over again, but then you're going back to the headwaters. Right. Like, that's another. So that's like an if, not if. Get ready for that. If you're a sentence reader, the, the quote I just mentioned, like, she writes clearly and crisply, but on a language level, she's not, you know, she's not working on a level of Ishiguro or a Zadie Smith or some of the people we read for the sentences. But it has other virtues, a tough one for dog people. You say, yeah, the dog will die. All of the dogs.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, they're dogs. Yeah. Lots of, of bad ends for lots of dogs in this book. And, and just a lot of, like a lot of animal cruelty. A lot of violence for everyone.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. It's just, it's trigger. This, this book is just triggered. Just a giant trigger. I didn't remember it being. I was younger and less sensitive, I guess I just didn't remember it being so. And casually. So the people are so used to sexual assault and torture that they're numb to a lot of it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because, like, it's not graphically described, but how casually they refer to, like having seen a rape happen or having watched as someone was attacked, that is violent in itself, that, like it, that it's painful and difficult to read in itself in a way that like, she doesn't need it to be graphic or gory for it to really come. Come across. So like, I, I think, you know, make your own judgments about what you can tolerate as a reader, but like, the world they live in is very violent and they mention it quite often.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

Get started [e-mail] let's do the immortal questions are asked. Which of these are primary Here. Here are the questions under consideration. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil? I don't know if I would have said going into this it's really about these questions, but boy howdy, is it really about these questions.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's really about almost all of them. Or maybe even. Even it is all about all of them that Lauren is striking out, trying to figure out. Like the life she's living doesn't feel like the ultimate good life. And. And what might be better? So much of what do I owe my neighbor.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think that's the primary one, especially in contrast to the other things that we've read and done with Zero to Red so far. It is so concerned both pragmatically and existentially with what is justice? How should we be together? What does human community and civilization look like? How does it go wrong? What should we avoid and what should we strive towards? I think that's at the core of it. And then the other questions are related, but sort of almost flow from that. Right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

In a certain kind of way. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? You said this you weren't so sure. I am more sure. Why don't you give the skeptics case before I come off the top rope?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You're turning me around on this. Like, through the course of this conversation, as sometimes happens, you know, when you're discussing a book with somebody. When I was making my notes, it felt a little slippery to me. Like, Lauren is compelled by this need to write in order to process her experience. She tells us that, like, I just have to write about this. But the book doesn't spend time on the value or the importance of, like, creativity itself. The thing that they're creating is this new community. But there's not the, like survival is insufficient vibe that you get from something like Station 11 that is overtly concerned with. We're not just trying to make it down the road and get to our next meal. We are also trying to generate art and beauty and that that's a mode of developing additional hope. And Lauren is frustrated, she tells us, by people like herself who are full of books and ignorant of reality. So I think Butler has maybe, like, is walking a line of some healthy skepticism about exactly how useful art is or maybe that art comes secondarily after these necessary components of survival. But there are works of speculative fiction that make art and creativity central to survival. So it just. Yeah, it just felt slippery to me.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. There's one line that it's almost a non sequitur. The third part of it I'll read here, but I've been thinking about a lot. She writes, God has changed. I hate God. I have to write. Like, I don't know what to do with that. Except that her process of thinking and feeling is a textual one. She is. She uses the writing to make herself and to make her philosophy. And the form of the poems and verses. As she says at one point, like, this is just what I mean by this. I've been working on my articulation and it's this strange sort of poetical thing, right? The. The form of the idea is as important as the idea itself. Some of that so it's communicable. Some of it makes it feel sacred. Right. Writing in a different way makes the message seem elevated or outside of our normal modes of communication. Here I think I. I'm in tune with your survival is in sufficient route. I think where you look for that is Earthseed is about something else. The ultimate gold is out there to go forth, to find, discover these places that we haven't been before. Like all of this is preparatory work and prepare. We have to get ready so that some point far in the future. Our efforts will be part of a process that's to let people leave this mortal coil and go to the stars and go to Alpha Centuria, these other kinds of places. And I think here it's in science fiction a lot of times frankly, space exploration or other kinds of technological revolution are a metaphor for a creativity which itself about art and literature itself. How do we make new things? How do we imagine new things?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

Technology allows us to imagine new things, but imagination allows us to think about what other technological things. What are we going to do with this stuff? Right. It's not just that we can make something, but then once, once you do, once you've made a space shuttle, what are you going to do with it? I know some people that are into space and they're frustrated with just sort of sending people up into space and spinning around for a bit and coming back down. You know, one of the critiques, and it's included in this book of things like art and things like poetry and things like, like the NASA is all those energies could have been, could be pointed towards feeding people. And of course they're right. But that goes into the survival piece. I think Butler here and Lauren here, in her philosophy, her religion is not just holding space for higher aims, but making the higher aims primary. That is the point of the arrow in which all this wood and bow and arrow and string is being built. But the goal is to shoot that arrow into the future. And I think that's inherently about art and creativity.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I think that we just had an exchange that's kind of a meta moment for what this project of zero to well read is all about that in for this particular book, like I have not read nearly as much science fiction as you have or as many of the folks listening might have. And so we each bring our experience and what we, what we have read and what we know of the world and of the genre into the new reading. And you're going to have a different experience with a book like this. If you're an experienced sci fi reader who's drawing on a lot of stuff like space exploration is often a metaphor for art and literature. I believe you, you know.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, I'm not, I'm not. That's not like written down on a tablet somewhere. But I think that's an easy.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's a way of saying like, yeah, I think, I mean it makes a ton of sense. But I want to like say to our listeners that I hope that what you're hearing in these conversations is that there is room for all modes of engagement with these books that you can come to these now canonical books with a lot of experience and get something new and interesting out of them. And you can also come to them as a new reader of this genre or a relatively new reader or inexperienced reader of this kind of book. And you will have a different experience than somebody who's read a lot of them. But you will have and can have a really enriching experience. And for me, that feels like unlocking something that like my next next science fiction reads will be enriched by having read Octavia Butler, but also by having had this kind of conversation in this case with a person who is coming from a more experienced place with the genre. And I hope that like that we can be both guide and like fellow traveler with everybody who's listening with us.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Could you get the mo. Could you get most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation in brackets here? If one existed for the this. Because there isn't one. But what do you think, Rebecca? Could you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think you could. Yes. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All right. Since there isn't one, should this be a movable A movie, musical, limited series or Muppets?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is way too violent for Muppets. Like I could not.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No. This is the worst. We continue to find new depths of no for our Muppet adaptation question.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think this is an Apple limited series. I want want six beautifully produced, terribly expensive episodes. Let's do it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The thing that I think would be hard or what could be lost is the metatextual piece of. This is a journal with the poems and stuff. Are those voiceovers? I'm not really sure how that would work anyway. That's. But I think this is the right. A movie. I don't think is going to give you the sense of time that a six episode series would because there's multiple stages. You need to live in the neighborhood under siege in the walls for what, two episodes? Three, like one. Probably the end of the second episode. Lauren leaves. If we were to script this ourselves.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And then some Time on the Road and the last episode of the season. They arrive at the land in California and we see them starting to try to build life there.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

The temptation then would be to like do six more seasons of them building there. But I like the. I want to dwell in the question.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And I should say parable of the talents is not just the next day like it jumps into the future. It's more like a foundation which Apple has. Has done a lot with at that point, trivia adaptations, rumored misattributed quotes, etc I've got a couple here. She like Lauren will do her homework and she wanted the survival elements to feel real. So she did a ton of research about Seeds and Gifts. Guns. That could be an alternate title for this the Ballad of Seeds and Guns by October Butler. We talked about this parable of the Sewer.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Much more poetic.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The we talked about this was going to be a trilogy but she got stuck. Oh, this is where I get to talk about the have you seen these pages? I linked it here.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I didn't come across these in my.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Research so I saw these and the link I found is on Austin Kleon's blog. But she would write these motivational pages to herself in her book, her. Her notebook. And they're. They're a little bit of the secret or manifesting. So this one I'm just going to read. I'll put a link in the show notes here or in the episode notes on your podcaster. And she just writes I shall be a best selling writer after Imago. Each of my books will be on the bestseller list of the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Publishers Weekly rights poets and writers. My novels will go to the onto the above list whether publishers push them hard or not. Those are underlined. Whether I'm paid a high advance or not or not. Whether I even win another award or not. This is my life. I write best selling novels. My novels go onto the bestseller list or on or shortly after publication. My novels each travel up to the top of the best. Like it's just, I'm just. I'm not going to read the whole things but like I don't know why I find these so amazing. Rebecca, this is your first experience with them. What am I seeing? Do they speak to you as much as they speak to me? Maybe the post facto piece of this. I find this amazing.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Oh.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean and the. So be it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So be it at the very end. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And that's a well known quote. I, I mean I love this. I think this is a real like everybody has a version of this. Whether you're writing it in your journal or like saying it to yourself in the mirror or just like holding it in the quiet of your heart. The like your vision for what you hope that things will. How you hope things will turn out and what you are working for. And to declare it this way, like there are some evangelical roots and some Baptist roots in this. Like this might be something that she learned in some ways at Church that you can. You can speak things into existence, you name it and claim it. So there is some, you know, religious stuff happening that probably is from early education for her. But this is like, everybody needs motivation to do work. And being an artist is hard. And I love to see the human side of someone that we have, you know, sort of deified in a way, or at least sainted. You know, Octavia Butler is in the realm of saints for modern readers. And to look at her journal pages and be like, even this person had to hype herself up to keep doing the work that she was doing. And that bit about like, whether I'm paid a high advance or not, whether my publishers push them hard or not, is the reason. Idealist thing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, that's very, very, very pragmatic. I also want to mention, if you look at this, you'll see it, but for those of you don't get to it, the top three quarters of are in a larger handwriting, but then you get to the bottom third and it gets smaller. And this is the. The top is really the what, but the bottom is more the why. Right? So it says, I will buy a beautiful home in an excellent neighborhood. I will send poor black youngsters to Clarion or other right. Writers workshops. I will help poor black youngsters broaden their horizons. I will get the best of all health care for my mother and myself. I will hire a car whenever I want or need to. I will travel whenever and wherever in the world I want to choose. So, like, I find this really powerful, amazing. And there's an element of Octavia Butler's life that interestingly maps onto, like that Saint Octavia thing you just said. Said, you know, she died early, kind of mysteriously, tragically. The work was unfinished. She leaves behind these testaments and saints. To be sainted, you have to perform a miracle. And if there's a miracle you can perform in science fiction, there's one you can perform, and that's to be prophetic. And she did that, right? So, like, she did it really checks a lot of secular saint boxes, which I hadn't really thought before. So. So thank you for that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And that the motivation here is not ego. Like, she's not. I want to be a best selling author for fame and fortune. It's because the fame and especially the fortune will be tools for buying homes for people, for getting young black writers into workshops that might open up their careers for them. It's getting her mom a nice house like this comes through in the kind of book and character that she created as well, like, what are our motivations for being a good person? What does it mean? To be successful is about more than the material impact of it. And it's cool to see her do that in the privacy of her own journal here.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. I didn't know where to put this last one because it's. It's not really part of the what's about. But I like the idea that Lauren is aware of science fiction tropes. She writes at one point, cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. I thought that was a weird breaking of the fourth wall. It's like, yeah, Lauren has read all the science fiction. And so science fiction exists in this world. World of science fiction, like kind of. I got a little bit of literary vertigo reading that, but I thought that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Was pleasure when you stand in the hotel room bathroom and the mirrors do that infinite hall of mirrors thing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. I have a new quick category that I. I had meant to do for the secret history and it's called that's what literature's Metaphor and got it. Sometimes the metaphor is. Can be too obvious and sometimes it's not. I wanted to adjudicate the case of the equal acorn here.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A lot of action for acorns in this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So they call the town acorn. And there's a lot of stuff with seeds. Is this generative useful, beautiful, or is this too on the nose? The idea of the acorn tea.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think it walks the line.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It walks the line. It's kind of where I came the same place. And go ahead. Why does it walk?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, and that's like. Well, no, I mean, it's walks the line. And I think that's what makes it work. That like a lot of the thing, a lot of the ideas that are relatable and easily translated to a wide array of readers are a little trite, like. Or they are a little familiar. It's not overdone. It's not live, laugh, love science fiction, but it's. It's also not that far.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think I came around to liking it because I think it is both. It takes the obvious version of the acorn, which is a seed that can turn into an oak. But because earlier in the book, what we get, the use of acorn there is that you eat it. Food, you turn into food. But Lauren takes the acorn from eating it to survive to something that she can plan into the future to thrive. So that's why I kind of like. I think it. I think it transcends the bound of like, duh, that's a metaphor because it actually takes the the first level reading of an acorn and does something else with it. So like, there's a version of this where you can subsist on frankly, pretty unpleasant stuff. Right. There's a reason you and I and even like the weird Richmond and Portland restaurants aren't like, here's our acorn pone because it doesn't taste good. Right. Like, if you've ever thought about there's a reason we don't eat acorns. But in that mode of the acorn, when you're reduced to eating it and then you stay eating this unpleasant thing, that's the mode Lauren's trying to get out of. She's trying to get to a place where she can plant an acorn, invest in the future and imagine a world in which people are going to enjoy it the tree, rather than having to eat the raw and bitternut. All right, Hot takes. You have a couple.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think if this were published today, it might be young adult fiction.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

There's like youthful conviction, a lot of black and white thinking in a post Hunger Games world.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It does. It does feel like it could be more.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. And like, I'll acknowledge it. I might be jaded, but I related more to the the older characters in the book who were skeptical of Lauren's preaching. At least at first. I did feel some like, okay, honey, you're young. You know, in response to it, it feels like she is speaking in a way that's really powerful to young people. But I, I think this would be young adult fiction if it came out today.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I have this is a story about inflation.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Incredible. It is. It's a story about affordability.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it is. It's a story about affordability because, like, resources become more scarce, so more people are vying for them to the point that they will do extra legal activities to do them. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Octavia Butler just powered the 2025 election.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Jerome Powell read Parable of the Sower.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I also have reality acceptance is an underrated superpower.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I like that too. I already did my thing about epistolary novels and novels and journals are disarmingly not the same as first person narrative or omniscient. Third, be very wary. They are performing for you. They want you to think they're telling you secrets, but they are performing for you. Further reading. You'd mentioned the Flournoy, I've Got the Dog Stars in the Road, but these are all, you know, children of, of this book in a lot of ways, either directly or indirectly. They're about post survival, rebuilding what's worth fighting for. How do we get out of this? This stuff?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Station 11 if you're looking for this. Plus some more beautiful artsy stuff. And of course you'll see Butler's influence in the work of N.K. jemisin and Nettie Okra for. And countless other writers working today.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Cocktail party crib sheet, three to five takeaways. You go first, man.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You can just say this book is groundbreaking and scarily prescient. Like it's sci fi by a writer who opened the door for today's science fiction stars. And as I said earlier, like, there's no NK Jemisin winning a MacArthur. If Butler hadn't gone first.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. I think we. I think you have a nice one here about change is inevitable. If we learn to work with it, we can shape to our advantage. That's interesting. We didn't talk a bunch about the idea of change being central to this. Maybe because it's so obvious in the book. But Lauren wrestling with what to do with that inevitability is fascinating and a different kind of. Of a different kind of attitude towards changing worlds than we get a lot of the time. Which is the doomerism. Right? The doom. There's doom. Scrolling is an interesting metaphor for many reasons. I don't think Butler would be a big fan of that.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

No.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You know, a change gon come is both good and bad, but it's going to come. And you know, to quote Hamlet, the readiness is all like, I don't know what's going to happen, but Hamlet's ready, Lauren is ready. And you're not going to fight against it. You're going to kind of surf it, I guess. I don't. I don't have a good metaphor for how you're supposed to.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Surfing is a great metaphor.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. But it's not shaping the wave. Right. But in endemic. And Lauren's metaphysic is that you can shape, you can't control the change, but you can mold it to a degree. And to think you can control it or to think that you have no power, both of those directions are misguided. But there's this third way of some limited agency that's hard to kind of wrap my head around, I find interesting. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I think the big one here is really that the way to save ourselves is communal and not individualistic, that we have to recognize that our freedom, our liberation, survival are tied up with everyone else's. And we have to be willing to be in community and to Work alongside others even when we don't agree with them like that. That happens and this group, there are philosophical differences but the people agree to live by the same general principles and that's fine and necessary.

[Jeff O'Neill]

My other one, I didn't write it here, but it's more of a half baked takeaway. I wonder if this is the first book in which in a. In a castaway apocalyptic setting it's someone realized it's really good to have like a primary care physician as part of the group. We get this a lot later with like lost in some others or cast like it's really good to have an emergency room doctor. And if you want to save yourself and be a useful in the apocalypse like emergency room doctors would be my first overall draft pick. So there you go.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, you want Dr. Robbie in your band of people walking up the California coast.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Final beat Zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest. I guess we could say zero. We're not going to give anything a zero hasn't had occasion here. The five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read credit and O damn factor. Interesting one, Rebecca. Historical importance.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I feel like this is still being written.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like the historical importance of Octavia Butler is still unfolding.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's like a seven in pencil.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

It's.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. That it could go to eight or nine over time depending on how the world continues to unfold. It's hard to imagine it really going below a seven, but it feels like a seven to me right now with an asterisk for it's incred. This is incredibly 9. Once you figure out. Yeah. Once you figure out what's happening with the Earth Seed verses and the journal entries, which is not that hard to like get into the flow of. Yeah, I think it's a 9.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Current relevance of central questions 1. 10. Yeah. 11. Can we spinal tap this one?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

10. Book nerd read credit Interesting. I think this is related to historical importance. We could put something in pencil here. I think right now it might be pretty high.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I think some familiarity with Octavia Butler is pretty high for read cred. 7 or 8. Like I had imposter syndrome when I started reading it and realizing I hadn't read it before.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You had false consciousness. It's so read credit that you had imagined yourself into the all right. Show notes@book riot.com. listen, you can shoot us an email. 0 to well read@book riot.com 0 to well read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network and if you can spare a moment for us, rated, rate and or review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or others. If you listen to the show and like it and you use Apple Podcasts, hit that follow button. Apparently that really helps. Rebecca, thank you so much. A joy and a pleasure as always.