Parable of the Talents
- Author: Octavia E. Butler
- Page count: 434
- Started on: 2026/09/30
- Finished on: 2026/10/07
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
-
Parable of the Talents started showing up in my book recommendations and top X lists regularly in the past year and a half. The book was first published in 1998, and its recent resurgence likely has to do with its narrative: a social and economic collapse of the United States, and the rise of a Christian fundamentalist, authoritarian president under the slogan Make America Great Again.
The book follows protagonist Lauren Olamina as she builds a peaceful community in northern California based on her newly founded Earthseed faith. This faith was mostly developed in the predecessor book Parable of the Sower (which I didn’t read) around the central tenet that ‘God is change’. The community gets raided by followers of the president, who kill a number of the Earthseed community (including Olamina’s husband), and send the children (including Olamina’s daughter) to Christian American homes, out of reach from their parents. After being enslaved for 17 months, they’re finally able to free themselves. Olamina sets out to find her daughter and other lost Earthseed children, and in the end builds Earthseed into a nationwide and even international network of communities.
Even when it was published, Parable of the Talents was set in a near-future post-apocalyptic world, but its story now begins just a few years into the future. I found the Earthseed philosophy interesting, as it’s the second novel I read recently that takes a nontheist view of religion1. That and its parallels with the current religious and political climate in the US made Parable of the Talents a hard book to read, for all the right reasons.
Footnotes
-
See my review of Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass from the His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman’s view on religion in those books is quite different from Butler’s Earthseed, though. ↩
