It’s 2024. The world is beginning to feel the effects of climate change, the federal government has lost its grip, states and local governments are losing theirs, and the bastions of civil society are small, walled communities.

A favored drug of the scavenging street dregs make users erotically fixate on fire. Another causes a birth defect called hyperempathy, an affliction causing the bearer to personally feel the physical pain they see or cause in others.

Parable of the Sower is structured as a diary of Lauren Olamina, a hyperempathic teen girl coming of age in a community that becomes overrun by pyromaniacs and scavengers just on the cusp of her adulthood. She flees northward through California, gathering former slaves and other sympathetic outcasts in hopes of establishing a community around her made up religion called “Earthseed.”

Every chapter begins with verses from “The Book of the Living”, the in-world religious text for Earthseed Lauren is composing. Earthseed is dumb. It's really dumb, and comes off as extremely bad "I'm 14 and this is deep" teenage poetry. It has the ultimate goal of colonizing other worlds, which is fine enough I guess, but its central tenet is "God is Change." Even other characters comment on how vacuous this is. One traveling companion, Bankole, tells her as much but also tells her there is still value in what others will project onto her teachings. Without his erudite commentaries the reader could easily conclude Butler herself is as sophomoric as the main character.

Towards the end of the book the characters are fleeing wildfires in hopes of getting to Bankole’s property, a sort of Canaan for the characters. Ironically, at one point they flee a pillar of fire chasing them, a reversal of the Israelites following the pillar of fire and cloud through the desert on their wandering. Also ironic is the deification of Change, while constantly fleeing fire and destruction. Perhaps the most obvious thinker to deify change in our own word is Heraclitus, whose stress on change was intimately connected to his fire based ontology.

I feel like there’s a lot of fertile ground conceptually with the worldbuilding that stays fallow as the particular seeds of the characters are cast on it. The eroticism of the antagonists with fire is unexplored. The hyperempathy of the main character feels forgotten about half the time. The accord between the title and the plot feels ham-fisted and stunted.

I went into this rather blind but was still expecting more, but maybe I'm just the rocky ground in the novel's namesake parable.