Parable of the Talents is a critical dystopian narrative in which the United States falls apart at the hands of religious zealots – Christian Americans – who purportedly seek to return America to puritanical values, but who reframe religion into an increasingly rigid and political force. The overlap of the political system with a religion that seeks to proselytize and convert people to the “truth” feels vaguely familiar. However, in this novel, there is no sanctioning body putting a stop to what would certainly be called human rights violations. We are launched into a dystopia without a back story about the function of the rest of the world, particularly the Western world. All of the world agencies, like the United Nations, that should be intervening in this world are seemingly no longer active. The United States democratic government seems to be a farce, allowing groups with power operate entirely outside of the criminal justice system and without the morals and ethics protecting individual autonomy that we value.  

In “Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler’s Parables,” Peter Stillman argues that that in the Parable series, the end of the world has risen from a world where individualism and self-reliance have led to systematic collapse of government the way we know it in the US today. Stillman insists that while Olamina has learned about Earthseed and change by rejecting autonomy in favor of the collective, there is a second, more radical outcome of Earthseed other than a vision of a “post-identity” society (28). Stillman writes that “the undermining of the barriers that separate human beings goes hand in hand with fracturing two other separations: that between human beings and animals, and that between human beings and technology. Although fraught with extraordinary risks, breaking both dichotomies is essential for Earthseed” (29). This is such an interesting reading of Earthseed. Stillman acknowledges the terrible uses of biotechnology like the collars and the treatment of people as sex slaves as horrible things. However he still ultimately argues that they “do not negate what Olamina realizes: if (and possible only if) human beings acknowledge that they are post-secular, post-humanist natural beings subject to evolutionary laws, then human beings can shatter the previous unbreakable historical patterns of war, domination, hierarchy, and destruction by founding multiple human settlements in space” (29). This vision of Earthseed as a mechanism/religion/belief system by which humans can transcend atrocity by admitting that they too evolve is not one that I saw from reading the novel.

Part of my reserve about this novel is that it is very different from the other Octavia Butler works that I have read. There, she writes this fascinating tales about aliens and vampires and discusses consent, and it’s all so fascinating. I really enjoy Octavia Butler. However, this novel was not my favorite. I felt really depressed about the total lack of control in the wake of Christian America’s takeover of Acorn. The dehumanization from the collars is just so . . . demoralizing. In combination with the failed relationship between Olamina and Larkin/Asha, the success of Earthseed as a hugely successful belief system doesn’t seem very positive. Collectively people accept that their aim should be the continuation of the species, but there isn’t any real understanding of what that means at the level of the individual. If even the creator of Earthseed is still unhappy, what are the odds that other people will be happy at the individual level? I’m not sure that I buy the argument about the continuation of the human species being conditional on the sacrifice of the individual.