“WOULD THEY CARE ABOUT A CRYING CHILD?” BELONGING IN A DYSTOPIAN COMMUNITY: OCTAVIA BUTLER’S PARABLE OF THE SOWER
“WOULD THEY CARE ABOUT A CRYING CHILD?” BELONGING IN A DYSTOPIAN COMMUNITY: OCTAVIA BUTLER’S PARABLE OF THE SOWER

Summary/Abstract: Octavia Butler revolutionized the SF genre by providing a perspective acutely aware of the complexity imbedded in the intersection between gender and race. She voiced the voiceless, while she was creating numerous alternative future, present, and past scenarios. Parable of the Sower (1993) and its companion piece Parable of the Talents (1998) stand among her greatest achievements as novels that ponder ecological concerns before they were discussed on a wider world scale. The aforementioned, being set in the beginning of the 2020s, it allows for a comparative reading that evaluates its prescience. The following paper examines the connection between age and community situated in a certain place or existing on-the-go. The youngest members of the community under danger play a decisive role in the survival of said spaces. Their nurture or the lack of it reveals core tenets of African American culture and belief system. In addition, the dystopian genre is allotted consideration in view of definition, canonicity, and origin. Butler’s unfinished trilogy supplies another page to the ongoing debate on pressing ecological calamities.

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