Help me do my homework for Potlatch
Feb. 4th, 2008 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_schaeferAre you coming to Potlatch? Have you read the Book of Honor, Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower? What did it make you think about?
I'm looking for short, snappy answers I can string together in a coherent way for an article in the program book. Longer, more thoughtful answers are good, too. Proper credit will be given, and you're welcome to participate even if you aren't coming to Potlatch.
I'll go first: it made me think about how much post-apocalyptic fiction, even including Parable of the Sower, is more hopeful than the definition of the genre would suggest. There's that convention of sweeping away all the mistakes of the past, allowing the survivors to build a new, better society in the ruins, avoiding said mistakes. There is a magnifient, tragic optimism that somehow human beings will be able to find a way to live without enslaving and killing each other. Parable of the Sower doesn't show a future without slavery and murder; it shows a horrific future, with appalling slavery, violence, and injustice, while still holding out hope that it doesn't have to be that way.
I'm looking for short, snappy answers I can string together in a coherent way for an article in the program book. Longer, more thoughtful answers are good, too. Proper credit will be given, and you're welcome to participate even if you aren't coming to Potlatch.
I'll go first: it made me think about how much post-apocalyptic fiction, even including Parable of the Sower, is more hopeful than the definition of the genre would suggest. There's that convention of sweeping away all the mistakes of the past, allowing the survivors to build a new, better society in the ruins, avoiding said mistakes. There is a magnifient, tragic optimism that somehow human beings will be able to find a way to live without enslaving and killing each other. Parable of the Sower doesn't show a future without slavery and murder; it shows a horrific future, with appalling slavery, violence, and injustice, while still holding out hope that it doesn't have to be that way.
