Earthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

by Octavia E. Butler

Curtis Talcott

I hadn’t thought about my own absence of tears. I hadn’t cried at all.

Maybe my dry face was just one more grudge she held against me.

I hated Keith at least as much as I loved him.

he was also the most sociopathic person I’ve ever been close to. He would have been a monster if he had been allowed to grow up.

Where does sociopathology come from? It’s a personality defect, not subject to cure.

fuck the earth.

I think he was killed by monsters much worse than himself.

If hyperempathy syndrome were a more common complaint, people couldn’t do such things.

if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture? Who would cause ...

A biological conscience is better than no conscience at all.

Any Change may bear seeds of benefit. Seek them out. Any Change may bear seeds of harm. Beware.

6 weeks later ...

The Cruz family,

Dorotea Cruz’s

Hector and Rubin Quintanilla,

This is the seventh incident since Keith was killed.

an 11-household community.

No doubt the tougher, smarter, more courageous thieves hit stores and businesses. But our lower-class thugs are killing us slowly.

Stolen money to help victims of theft.

Haha

Something new is beginning—or perhaps something old and nasty is reviving.

Olivar.

Sea level keeps rising with the warming climate

Like coastal cities all over

Then the people of KSF showed up.

privatized.

KSF will expand the desalination plant to vast size. That plant will be the first of many. The company intends to dominate farming and the selling of water and solar and wind energy over much of the southwest—

with Olivar, it gets an eager, educated work force, people a few years older than I am whose options are very limited.

There are still people in Olivar who are uncomfortable with the change. They know about early American company towns in which the companies cheated and abused people.

He needs to explain why. Question

“Robledo’s too big, too poor, too black, and too Hispanic to be of interest to anyone—and it has no coastline.

Room and board. The offered salaries were so low that if Dad and Cory both worked, they wouldn’t earn as much as Dad is earning now with the college.

Every surviving community is full of unemployed, half-educated kids or unemployed, uneducated kids.

In not very much time, I think the new hires would be in debt to the company. That’s an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder.

Debt slavery.

There’s nothing safe about slavery.”

“Kagimoto, Stamm, Frampton: Japanese, German, Canadian.

“I don’t think many do,” I said. “I don’t think they’d dare let themselves know.”

I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.

“When it comes to strangers with guns,” I told her, “I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.”

This business sounds half antebellum revival and half science fiction.

Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it’s precious, too. You can’t just throw it away or let it slip away.

You can’t sell it for bread a...

Gen. 25:29-34, theology

Marcus

Garfields

Robin ...

cousin ...

Joanne, Jay, Phillida.

She’s not pretty at all—all skin and bones and brains—but she’s funny and sensible.

Haha