Earthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

by Octavia E. Butler

Well, Natividad was married while Zahra was rescued - that’s a huge difference.

Earthseed is being born right here on Highway 101—

Now it’s a highway, a river of the poor. A river flooding north.

We’ll have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us.

we must have arable land, a dependable water supply, and enough freedom from attack to let us establish ourselves and grow.

we might provide security in exchange for living room.

We might also provide education plus reading and writing services to adult illiterates.

We might be able to do it—grow our own food, grow ourselves and our neighbors into something brand new.

the brown hills around us.

So California

Haha

an older, but not yet old black man who still had his teeth, and who pushed his belongings in twin saddlebags hanging from a small, sturdy metal-framed cart.

I liked his smile. I smiled back. Then I remembered that I was supposed to be a man,

he had found a filthy rag knotted into a small, tight ball around something.

! Where did that come from? Question

farms, some working, some abandoned and growing weeds.

The problem: to scavenge means fighting other scavengers, left-over pyros, and maybe resilient owners. Also scavenging spreads like fire. “disaster-induced feeding frenzies”

many had flooded down into the small community to steal. The crowd would not confine its attention to the one burning house, and all the households would have to resist.

the unmistakable chatter of automatic weapons fire.

Stupid place to put a naked little community. They should have hidden their homes away in the mountains where few strangers would ever see them.

That was something for me to keep in mind.

Things to learn

It’s odd, but I don’t think anyone on the road would have thought of attacking that community en masse like that if the earthquake—or something—had not started a fire.

One small fire was the weakness that gave scavengers permission to devastate the community—

The shooting could scare away some, kill or wound others, and make the...

If the people of the community chose to live in such a dangerous pl...

Only power that strong, that destructive, that sudden would scare attackers off, would drive them away in a panic more overwhelming than the greed and the need that had drawn them in the first place.

They should have had hiding places already prepared or at least been able to lose themselves among the hills

now vast thick clouds of smoke rose behind us, drawing even more scavengers.

What a handsome old man.

Haha

“From what I’ve read,” I said to him, “the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.”

Nothing like this bad. I don’t think it’s ever been this bad.

Taylor Franklin Bankole.

Yoruba replacement names.

“My father had to do something different. All his life he had to be different.”

Haha

Bankole was one year older than my father. He had been born in 1970,

40 years older than Lauren

I took the gun out and gave it to him in case someone else’s pain made me useless.

a call for help could be false, could lure people to their attackers.

Haha hyperempathy at work

“Allie?”

“Jill!

“Here’s their stuff,”

What stuff? Gathered now, or ready to go? Question

Two medium-size, brown-haired white women in their twenties. They might be sisters.

she had to carry her own things. No one could carry a double pack for long.

Something about him said with great clarity that he would kill. If he were pushed even a little, he would kill.

hadn’t seen him that way before. It was impressive and frightening and wrong.

Right for the situation and the moment, but wrong for Harry. He wasn’t the kind of man who ought ever to look that way.

Dystopian ethics.

What the hell. We’re all men and women now, not kids anymore. Shit.

Before the attack began, I knew it would happen. Helping the two trapped women had made us targets.

The weak would be attacked today. The quake had set the mood.

And one attack could trigger others.