Earthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

by Octavia E. Butler

Leaving the rest of the kids, especially the little ones, was horrible.

I don’t know how to stop people like Cougar, but I don’t think killing off their victims, their human property, is the best way.

Beth Faircloth and Lucio Figueroa—

Zahra Balter

He’s only 15. He saw Cougar and his crew. He saw my brother. He saw Georgetown. And seeing all that, he learned nothing!

He is a good, brave, stupid boy, and I suspect he’ll pay for it.

We can’t chain him here. Or rather, we won’t. If he insists on dying, he will die,

The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been.

Yet every child Is cast from paradise— Into growth and destruction, Into solitude and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.

FROM Warrior BY MARCOS DURAN

The world outside was like my brother at his worst multiplied by about a thousand: stupid, mean, so out of control that it might do anything.

It was like a dog with rabies, tearing itself to pieces, and wanting to do the same to me.

And then it did just that. Oh, yes. It did. I could return the compliment. I could have reached for the power to do that. ...

How can he be so good, so altruistic?

beyond that, he had no ambitions. It never seemed to occur to him that he could or should fix the world.

Yet he was the father of two would-be world-fixers. How did that happen?

the chaos that she saw swallow so many of the people she loved.

She saw chaos as natural and inevitable and as clay to be shaped and directed.

she knew what was wrong with her world, and she knew what would fix it: Earthseed. Earthseed with all its definitions, admonitions, requirements, purpose. Earthseed with its Destiny.

FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2032

Dan

Jorge, Diamond Scott, and Gray Mora

the Coy street market

Halstead.

And they had their fun with Ben and Greg and Mama and me.

They were a middle-aged couple named

Duran,

believe it ...

Caridad.

Inez

I’d rather blow my own brains out than go through that again.”

the city of Robledo

It seemed to them that all the trouble of the past few years was our fault—poor people’s fault, I mean.

Homeless people’s fault. Squatters’ fault.

“Valley Street,”

They’d even pay you in American money if they thought they could get away with palming it off on you. Hard currency if they gave a damn about treating you right.

“I liked it, you know? I prayed with them, helped them any way I could. Their lives were so terrible. There wasn’t much I could do, but I did what I could.

It was important to them that I had recovered from burns and gunshots.

People kept trying to run back to get their things, and the cops kept stopping them—or trying to. Some of the cops were in armored personnel carriers. The ones on foot had full body armor, masks, shields, automatic rifles, gas, whips, clubs, you name it,

but still, some people tried to stop them, or at least to hurt them. The people threw rocks, bottles, even precious cans of food.

I would have been okay. Poor, but okay. Poor doesn’t matter as much if you can make a place for yourself and be respected.

It was a place where you could only be poor unless you were born rich or you were a really successful crook.

I was building a community—a group of families and single people who were still human.”

“You walk the roads for a while, and you wonder if anyone is still human.”

I’ve shaped it,

a belief system to help them deal with the world as it is and the world as it can be—

‘Shaper.’

Arcata

“It was just politics. You know those guys will say anything.

It was—is—a collection of truths. It isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t the only truth. It’s just one collection of thoughts that are true.