Parable of the Sower

by Octavia Butler

Session recap, July 23, 2026

Something unusual happened at our last session.

Nobody read the book for the book club.

Everyone who joined us on Thursday, July 23rd had already read Parable of the Sower — some a few years back, one of us when it was first published in 1993. They came because it had stayed with them, in some cases for decades, and they finally wanted a room where they could talk about it.

That tells you something about Octavia Butler that no review can. Some books you read; some change you.

The conversation ran long, and we let it

We have facilitated enough sessions to know the difference between a group that’s being polite and a group that can’t stop. This was the second one. Everyone had something to say, and every thread opened three more. We went well past our time and nobody left.

A few of the places we ended up:

• The false sense of safety. We spent real time on how a sense of security — even a false one — keeps people inside systems that are unsafe or simply complacent. Robledo’s wall doesn’t fail because it isn’t high enough. It fails because everyone inside it agrees to stop looking. There’s something uncomfortable in that, because the wall is also genuinely doing something. It is keeping something out, for a while. That’s what makes it so hard to leave.
• What “hopeful” actually means here. We run a book club called Hopeful Speculations and this month we read one of the bleakest novels in the canon, so the question was unavoidable: where is the hope in this? The answer the group kept circling was that hope in Parable isn’t a feeling and it isn’t optimism. It’s an action, and specifically it’s the act of trusting a stranger. Lauren’s community isn’t built out of people who were already safe with each other. It’s built on the road, by people who decide, repeatedly and at real risk, to take a chance on someone they don’t know. Community as something you assemble out of strangers, deliberately, while everything is on fire.
• The systems we’re inside right now. We talked about systems we participate in that aren’t okay. This is always a harder ask than it sounds — each session brings new faces, and often we’re strangers to one another, which makes candour a big thing to request of a room. But people went there. And it didn’t stay heavy: we also talked about the hopeful systems we’re part of, the ones worth feeding. Both halves of that conversation matter.

The futures activity: Causal Layered Analysis

For this session we returned to Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), a foresight tool we last used for 1984.

The short version: CLA treats an issue like an iceberg. At the top is the litany — the headlines, the surface story, the thing everyone already thinks they know. Below that are the systemic causes — the policies, structures, and institutions holding it in place. Below that is worldview and discourse — the ideas and assumptions that make those structures seem legitimate. And at the bottom sits myth, metaphor and narrative — the deep stories, often unspoken, that the whole thing rests on.

The move that makes CLA useful for futures work is that once you get to the bottom, you flip it. You write a new myth, and then climb back up: what culture grows from that story? What systems does that culture need? And how would we know it was working?

We ran Parable’s world down the left side and built its alternative up the right.

And then we ran out of time. Which is a lovely problem to have, but it means the group never got to stand back and look at what we’d made together.

So here’s my reflection on the board — offered as a starting point, not a conclusion. If you were there, I’d genuinely love to hear what you see.

• The wall, all the way down
  • The single strongest pattern is about safety. The old side is full of it: the wall will protect us, false sense of safety, stranger danger, a castle with a moat around it, the powerful will protect us.
    Look at what appears on the new side, up in the indicators: feeling innately safe, without having to be secured.
    The group didn’t respond to bad security by proposing better security. They described a safety that requires no infrastructure at all. That’s Robledo versus the road and it arrived in the activity entirely independently of the discussion we’d just had about complacency.
• A different idea of what a person is
  • The old worldview layer reads like a list of things we’d recognize: every man for himself, optimization of the self, all relationships are transactional, individualism, hoarding of power and money.
    The new side doesn’t answer that with “more teamwork.” Alongside thinking in we, not I and circles not hierarchies, someone wrote: understanding that the self is the relationships, not the being.
    That’s goes beyond policy change into a change in what a person fundamentally is.
• Old myths and older knowledge
  • The new side is threaded with Indigenous frameworks — Dish With One Spoon, the Three Sisters, planning seven generations out, respect for elders, oral storytelling. Sitting across from them, near the bottom of the old side, is doctrine of discovery.
    The board quietly stages the confrontation: a colonial myth on one side, and on the other, the knowledge systems that myth was used to erase.
• Butler’s argument, found independently
  • The old side is full of stuckness: inertia, holding on to “what used to be,” everything will go back to normal at some point.
    The new myth layer says: God is change.
    We didn’t set out to reproduce the novel’s central claim, but the CLA landed on it anyway, that the refusal to accept change, right there in the surface litany, is the mechanism of the collapse.
• Scarcity is a story before it’s a shortage
  • Scarcity of resources shows up in the old litany, where you’d expect it. But scarcity shows up again two layers down in the worldview, and money is power is sitting at the very bottom in the myth.
    Then the new side: there is abundance if we learn how to share, abundance mindset (instead of scarcity), sharing is power, not hoarding.
    Same material world. Different story about it.

What’s missing, and what I want to come back to

Two gaps I noticed, both interesting.

There’s almost nothing about repair. Disputes settled peacefully and set systems in place for active listening are the only real handles on harm and Parable is a book absolutely saturated in harm. What does the new world do when someone is hurt?

And there’s no transition. The right side describes a world that has arrived. Acorn hasn’t arrived. Acorn is small, fragile, and a lot of walking. The gap between the board’s new world and Lauren’s actual one is the most interesting territory on the whole iceberg, and we didn’t map it.

All that you touch, you change, All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.

– Octavia Bulter

Next up: This Is How You Lose the Time War

We’re lightening the load considerably. Next session we’re reading Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War — two rival agents, a war fought across time, and a correspondence that becomes something neither of them planned.

After a book about surviving collapse, we’re going somewhere stranger and a great deal more romantic. Same format: guided discussion, plus a futures activity built from the story.

Come be curious with us.

The Hopeful Speculations Book Club is a bimonthly collaboration between The Climateverse and the Department of Imaginary Affairs; a community-building space to connect over speculative fiction and read our way through the dark.