Help me do my homework for Potlatch

[kate_schaefer]

Are 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.

Comments

[paulcarp.livejournal.com]

Parable of the Sower reminded me how much I appreciate the luxury of having a car when I decide to.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. The characters go through enormous difficulties to get, keep, maintain, and fuel a vehicle, and it's essentially a tank.

It's clear that Butler thought carefully about what people need to survive an emergency. I bet she had an earthquake kit by her door. The same theme shows up in Kindred, that idea that one needs to be prepared for difficult circumstances at all times.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Above all else, the book made me think about how hope stays alive. And about the courage to invent a new paradigm.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Deb. Yeah, that's the core message of SF as a genre, to me: hope that there will be a future, and that the future will not be the same as the past.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I just finished re-reading Parable of the Sower. One of the things I keep doing is forgetting what happens in which book. The vehicle stuff is all in Parable of the Talents. Sower is all done by foot. Hell of a trek by foot.