Earthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

by Octavia E. Butler

The Yannis family

They couldn’t afford to subscribe to any of the new multisensory stuff,

They have no reality vests, no touch-rings, and no headsets.

radios.

Her two sisters have moved in with her, and they’re working so maybe it will be all right. One is a pharmacist and the other is a nurse.

All three sisters are widows and between them they have twelve kids,

The police investigated, collected their fee, and couldn’t find a thing.

But the Secretary of Astronautics says no. He says her body might be a contaminant. Idiot.

Secretaries of Astronautics don’t have to know much about science. They have to know about politics.

Christopher Morpeth Donner,

As far as I’m concerned, space exploration and colonization are among the few things left over from the last century that can help us more than they hurt us. It’s hard to get anyone to see that, though, when there’s so much suffering going on just outside our walls.

He’s going to vote for Donner. He’s the only person I know who’s going to vote at all. Most people have given up on politicians.

After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century ever since I can remember.

Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet.

Alicia Catalina Godinez Leal.

I think she can be a kind of model for me.

Mars is a rock—cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it’s heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world, but too nearby, too close within the reach of the people who’ve made such a hell of life here on Earth.

Mrs. Sims

Cory and Dad

At least she cared enough about neighborly relations to do her talking about them behind their backs.

Haha

Lazor wire is terrible stuff.

“Corazon”

A little more hypocrisy to keep the peace.

Haha

I’ve heard there’s a new illegal drug that makes people want to set fires.

the Sims/Boyer families.

Odd, that. Eleven people, and no one got out.

Cory gets upset. She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.

Haha

She believed,

She believed

she decided to trade pain for eternal pain in...

Did she really believe in anyt...

Or maybe she just went crazy because her God was demanding too much of her. She was no Job. In re...

the scattered verses that I’ve been writing about God since I was twelve.

I don’t care about any of those things, but they keep me busy and make me tired,

I care

time with a dictionary and a thesaurus

God can’t be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused.

This means God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that persons resolve.

Like “open theism.”

Alicia Leal,

Every one knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season”), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom.

We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough. Then we go on to create super-people—super-parents, super-kings and queens, super-cops—to be our gods and to look after us—to stand between us and God.

Maybe it’s like my sharing:

Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner

he’ll begin to dismantle the “wasteful, pointless, unnecessary” moon and Mars programs.

Near space programs dealing with communications and experimentation will be privatized—sold off.

Also, Donner ha...

suspend “overly restrictive” minimum wage, environmental, and wo...

What’s adequate, I wonder:

And what about people with big families? Won’t they be seen as bad investments?

homeless