Cli-Fi Georgic and Grassroots Mutual Aid in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Abstract

Cli-Fi Georgic and Grassroots Mutual Aid in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower Daniel D. Clausen (bio) Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. —Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (1902) Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality. —Malcom X, “Message to the Grassroots” (1963) Octavia E. Butler’s beloved novel Parable of the Sower (1993) is regularly cited as one of the earliest examples of climate fiction (cli-fi). Stephanie LeMenager even suggests that “cli-fi begins . . . in the Parable novels of Octavia Butler” (223). And, while the novel and its sequel Parable of the Talents have enjoyed consistent reading and critical attention since publication, now in the 2020s (the period in which they are set) the Parable novels are reaching a broader audience than ever before, even finally landing on bestseller lists (Cox). Readers can enjoy a podcast devoted to chapter-by-chapter reflections on the novels (Reagon and brown). In March of 2020 Butler was the subject of an hour-long NPR special (Arablouei and Abdelfatah). NASA even named its most recent Mars lander site in her honor (Greicius). In our own field of western studies, she enjoys rising prominence and seems to be taught and cited ever more frequently. With the Parable novels’ seemingly clairvoyant thematic confluence of racial justice, climate crisis, and progressive politics it is easy to see why Butler is having a moment. Much of the critical conversation around Butler’s cli-fi builds on a well-established premise of speculative fiction criticism, a premise at the heart of ecocriticism’s attraction to the genre. The idea [End Page 269] is that speculative fiction offers readers something new: an imagined world that, without the narrative exploration at hand, would remain unthinkable. This interpretive model is generally traced to Darko Suvin’s concept of “cognitive estrangement” via what he termed the “novum” of “an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (qtd. in Moylan, “Look” 52). Moylan and others credit Suvin’s intervention as enabling critics to recognize speculative fiction as a “didactic literary form with its own history” (53). That framework, applied to Butler’s Parable novels, has produced a rich body of criticism that celebrates the narrative as a “critical dystopia” representing interracial community, depicting empowered Black motherhood and disability, and even proposing an alternative “solarpunk” religious ideology.1 Generating novelty is certainly an important role for literature—fiction can and does imagine a future than can then be realized (e.g., the widely circulated story of Star Trek communicators inspiring the inventor of the cell phone).2 Speculative fiction can estrange the “empirical environment” of the reader and thus help us see the world anew. But I worry there can also be a flattening tendency to such criticism, as utopian readings easily drift into a potentially naïve position that seems to imagine that plotting a story with good outcomes is sufficient. We should be cautious of slipping into the idea that all we as scholars (or even the general population) need to be doing is merely finding and reading “the right” stories—a climate canon, or a left orthodoxy. There are still, of course, more or less useful ways to read these stories. On the other hand, to imagine a better future is a prerequisite for advancing toward it. But readings that hinge too fully on novelty and plot seem destined to paradoxically reinforce the idea that readers don’t already have cultural tools for adapting to climate change. I am arguing here in support of attending to the way stories can pass on existing knowledge. Teaching Butler’s Sower in 2020, the tension between “the right story” and the way we read stories came home to me. In teaching this novel to early undergraduates during the pandemic, I encountered a spectrum of student responses. These ranged from the complacent view that Butler obviously got the 2020s all wrong (clearly things aren’t that bad, my students would argue to my [End Page 270] surprise) to reading the narrative as an uncomplicated gunslinger Western complete with a rugged individual hero...