“When Apparent Stability Disintegrates”: Speculative Theology in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series

Abstract

Early on in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), we learn of an astronaut who has died in orbit. She “wanted to be buried on Mars,” but the US government sees her body as a potential contaminant and demands its return to earth (Sower 20). It’s a brief moment in the novel, which is rich with descriptions of disaster, corruption, and decay. But the framing of the body as contaminant is significant, suggestive of a cosmologic shift. The American ethos is turning from an outward-oriented imperialist optimism to a mentality of scarcity and containment. The problems on the ground have become too much to handle, and the frontier imaginary of outer space can no longer distract from this fact. This “return to earth,” then, is not about reckoning with the nation’s imperial history or embracing a sense of environmental duty. Instead, it suggests a retrograde territoriality in response to cultural and ecological collapse.