Earthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

by Octavia E. Butler

“I would like to give them a grove of oak trees,” I said. “Trees are better than stone—life commemorating life.”

“Do you think she could stand … or forgive company now?”

“I have acorns enough for each of us to plant live oak trees to our dead—

“There’s been so much dying. There’s so much more to come.”

As bright as you are, I don’t think you understand—I don’t think you can understand what we’ve lost.

“God is Change,” I said. “Olamina, that doesn’t mean anything.” “It means everything. Everything!”

“You know, as bad as things are, we haven’t even...

Federal, state, and local governments still exist—...

And the money is still good. That amazes me. However much more you need of it to buy anything these days, it is still accepted. That may be a hopeful sign—or perhaps it’s only more evidence of what I said: We haven’t hit bottom yet.”

Haha father figure, hero,

Acorn.

Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again” by Abby Aguirre - In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler’s “Parable” books may be unmatched. https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/octavia-butlers-prescient-vision-of-a-zealot-elected-to-make-america-great-again (By Abby Aguirre 7/26/17) Talents starts in 2032, p. 386 (Just 5 years after Sower.) But when is the prologue being written?

she’s always needed devoted, obedient followers—disciples—who would listen to her and believe everything she told them. And she needed large events to manipulate. All gods seem to need these things.

so focused, and yet so misguided, there for all the world, but never there for me.

That is my reason for writing and assembling this book.

It has always been my way to sort through my feelings by writing.

I’m glad she badgered him. I’m glad to have known him at least through his writing. I wonder why I’m not glad to have known her through hers.

Earthseed: The First Book of the Living.

FROM Memories of Other Worlds BY TAYLOR FRANKLIN BANKOLE

“the Pox”

2015 through 2030—

I was born in 1970.

I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive.

I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous ...

I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for ...

the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III.

Haha - simile’s metaphor

Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.

Taylor Franklin Bankole was my father.

Five years, p. 301

His mistake was in seeing her as a young girl. She was already a missile, armed and targeted.

The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER...

Arriva...

the fifth anniversary of our establishing a commu...

Humboldt ...

my recurring nig...

He taught his classes by computer, and only had to go to the college once a week,

found in the Bible, the ones he plucked from history, or from folk tales, and of course he used those he saw in his

My father was a great believer in education, hard work, and personal responsibility. “Those are our talents,”

2027 Ch. 14

Danger is walled in with me.

the Dovetree place

He keeps wanting to give me some stuff that prevents my sharing by keeping me sleepy, slow, and stupid. No, thanks!

the poor still get arrested and indentured for indebtedness, vagrancy, loitering, and other “crimes.”

Aubrey, the healthy Dovetree wife,

She said the attackers were men, but they wore belted black tunics—black dresses, she called them—which hung to their thighs. Under these, they wore ordinary pants—either jeans or the kind of camouflage pants that she had seen soldiers wear.

that wasn’t the way gangs operated.

This was something new. Or something old.

Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret.