Seattle Reads: Read Deeper

Shelf Talk

April 30

Whether the 2024 Seattle Reads selection of Parable of the Sower was your introduction to the work of Octavia Butler or you're a long time fan of the author, I hope you're enjoying diving into Butler's world of speculative fiction. Her creative and sometimes terrifying visions of the future, centering of Black experience, dreams of anti-hierarchical structures, embracing of change, and so much more have influenced countless writers in the years since she began writing. For works that inspired or were inspired by Butler's books, check out these titles to dive deeper.

adrienne maree brown is one of Octavia Butler's most vocal disciples. She co-edited and contributed to Octavia's Brood and used the Earthseed teachings from Parable to ground her theories of change and strategic organizing in Emergent Strategy. Butler's influence is obvious, too, in brown's first novel, Grievers, which follows a young woman, Dune, living in Detroit as a strange epidemic hits the city. Dune's mother is one of the first victims of Syndrome H-8, which puts otherwise healthy people into unending comas. As the virus spreads throughout Detroit, mass migration out of the city begins, reminiscent of the migration Lauren Olamina and others undergo in Parable of the Sower. Publishers Weekly praised this short novel for "its deep, moving exploration of loss, family, community, gentrification, and rapidly changing urban landscapes."

Acclaimed Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich is mostly known for her historical fiction based in rural North Dakota and exploring the rich lives of Native Americans, often through familial struggle and connection. She's not the first author you'd think of when it comes to speculative fiction, though she has acknowledged Butler's influence in multiple interviews. Her most dystopian novel is undoubtedly Future Home of the Living God, the story of Cedar Songmaker, an Ojibwe woman adopted and raised by white parents, who becomes pregnant as the world is experiencing a reverse evolution and pregnancy becomes increasingly feared and hunted. The thoughtful examination of authoritarianism, community care, environmental collapse, and faith in the natural world pair perfectly with Parable.

Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, but is set 30 years later, envisioning a world to come if current trends remained unchecked. Similarly, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, published in 2022, looks 30-50 years into the future, imagining the societal collapse post-revolution and eventual communization of the world. This imaginative work by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi takes the form of a fictionalized oral history, a series of imagined interviews with folks who were instrumental in fighting injustices and building something better. The vivid depictions of new family structures, communal ways of providing food and care, and radical reimaginings of gender have stuck with me ever since I've read it and provided me with a vision of what could be, while never ignoring the trauma and suffering that often precedes radical change.