The Parables
Earthseed is Octavia E. Butler‘s science-fiction duology, final, career-finalizing opus, and recipient of the Nebula Award in 1998 — science-fiction’s highest laurel, haughtily.
Earthseed, duly composed of the above two novels, concerns the dual convergence of peak oil and climate change in a fictional, but factually well-founded, California — in the long and lean, leaning hours of 2024—2027 (Parable of the Sower) through 2032—2035 (Parable of the Talents).
Raiazome commends, with fair and flickering praise, both novels to all afficionados (fledgling, long-found, or otherwise) of pessimism and the twining, twin-whining hiss of 10,000 years of rupturing, life-razing civilization. Now, brazenly rushing our way.
It is one thing, distantly, in the sheltering pinion-flares of pistoning, eye-distracting affluence and — aye! — affable, painably laughable wage slavery, to view an inconvenient slideshow of inscrutable, half-truthing statistics, prognostications, and calculations on the unsustainability (inherent in the fibrous mettle of the machine) of mechanized, industrialized, plannedly centralized civilization.
It is another thing to read, and thereby rashly live, this unsustainability — as the centralized world unwinds; globalism teeters, then fractures, then folds, frays, and gladly decays apart; and all securities, social, economic, and politic expediencies, disrupt and burst into so many spindling, mangled flames: the untameable consequence of hubris is humbling collapse, the untenable, knowable consequence of hope is hobbling barrows and barren soil-tracts of renewal.
Let us begin renewal
This day.Let us dispatch
And dispense with this,
Our hubris
Today.
To the burgeoning, flaming gyres of the future, we lay these wielded prayers.