Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2) in Apocalypse Whenever

May 04, 2010 Zach rated it liked it

Shelves: race, science-fiction, post-apocalyptic, feminism-gender

There are times when I wish I believed in hell-other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.

These are tough books to review, and I'll just use this space to talk about both of them.

Butler unflinchingly looks at the effect the steady deterioration of society would have on women, people of color, and the economically marginalized- I love this.

She also has a strong female character making her way through this world in a believable way- I love this too.

This black woman slowly gathers a band There are times when I wish I believed in hell-other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.

These are tough books to review, and I'll just use this space to talk about both of them.

Butler unflinchingly looks at the effect the steady deterioration of society would have on women, people of color, and the economically marginalized- I love this.

She also has a strong female character making her way through this world in a believable way- I love this too.

This black woman slowly gathers a band of survivors who take care of one another, who rescue orphaned children, and who eventually put together a new home based on communitarian values of sharing and mutual support- I love this.

She does this, though, by espousing this bizarro humanist/materialist "religion" that basically boils down to the assertion that "God is Change." Get used to that phrase-if you read these books you'll encounter it hundreds of times, often in the middle of some truly execrable "poetic" scripture that this character Lauren has written. After about 20 pages of the first book I quickly learned to skip anything in italics to avoid throwing the book down in disgust. Then when she was on the road I learned to do the same any time "Earthseed" (the religion) was mentioned in any kind of proximity to "truth" or "discover." In the second book I added "Destiny" to the list (the "Destiny" of Earthseed being to colonize the stars, further weakening and trivializing Lauren's commitment to building some sort of post-capitalist communitarian society here. ugh).

Butler almost (ALMOST) redeems this stuff in the second book, by expanding the number of POV characters (from one to four), and having all of the new ones react to this religion with varying degrees of scorn. The first book left me with the uncomfortable feeling that we were supposed to find this religion appealing, and to view Lauren's domineering personality as simply the result of someone who had, in fact, discovered the TRUTH. I think we were still supposed to sympathize with Lauren the most (and you do, at the end in particular, which is truly emotionally jarring for reasons I don't want to spoil), but it was still gratifying to have an acknowledgment of the fact that she consistently bullied or seduced people into embracing her religion.

To be fair, I am only being so critical of this stuff because Butler came so close to writing a post-apocalyptic story that was totally on-point with regard to the creation of a better, post-capitalist society in the ashes of the old, avoiding the libertarian/hyper-individualist bent that afflicts so many stories of this genre. She never stops hammering home the point that no one could survive this on their own, and even if she falls just short of expanding that into exactly the message I wanted her to, I think it was closer than anyone else has gotten.

(More negativity: I also think the "hyper-empathy" stuff is baloney, but it's much less irritating than the religion. While we're at it, I also hated that the 18-year-old Lauren ended up marrying a man who was almost 60.) ...more

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Jun 23, 2021 Brook rated it really liked it · review of another edition

3.5 stars, rounding up to four.

If I had not read Bloodchild and Other Stories, it would have been 4 or higher. Having read Bloodchild, and being amazed by Ms. Butler's writing there, this was enjoyable but paled (for this reader) in comparison.

That said, Butler is now firmly near the top of my dystopian/"sci-fi" writers list having read three of her works. I compare her again to Ted Chiang for creativity of ideas. I *loved* how this duology of books had such a grand "goal," that ended up not be ...more

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