Octavia Butler’s dystopian “Parable” series reaches a powerful conclusion with “Parable of the Talents.” The book’s premise feels alarmingly familiar. It’s set in a nearly collapsed United States, one beset by climate change and rising religious fascism. Penniless migrants head north on foot to try to start new lives in Canada or Alaska, but they’re threatened the whole way by criminals and slavers.

Our lead character is Lauren Olamina, a young black woman who is a community leader and the founder of a new faith, Earthseed, that posits that God is Change and that humanity’s destiny is to work together to venture out into the stars. As “Parable of the Talents” starts, though, Lauren are her small community are stuck in decidedly earthly circumstances, living a “nineteenth century existence” in a community they’ve built on a patch of land in northern California.

Given all the trauma these characters have experienced–murder, kidnappings and worse–it seems like a safe haven. But then things go wrong. Few authors are better at having things go wrong than Butler. She’s a master of the sudden reversal, taking what seems to be a hard-won, uneasy peace and dropping it to peaces, like a porcelain plate.

I won’t go into details about how things go wrong–that would spoil the surprise–but scarily, the chain of events starts with a near-fascist U.S. Presidential candidate promising to “Make America Great Again.” Considering that Butler wrote her book in 1998, that’s a frightening bit of foresight.

“Parable of the Talents” is an easy page turner, and the author does a wonderful job conjuring the despair of the oppressed as well as enough twists and reversals to keep the story flying along. She also sets up a nicely complex structure, with multiple narrators and different perspectives, all converging for a surprising ending. A great piece of storytelling.

Quotes

“I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climactic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.”

“The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose. We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. They’ll have to. That will break the old cycle, even if it’s only to begin a new one, a different one.”