Parable of the Sower

Parable of the Sower is a speculative fiction novel by the American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 1993. Butler sets it on a damaged near-future Earth shaped by climate change and social inequality, and its protagonist is a young woman who feels other people's pain, and who is displaced from her home. It won several awards, including a 1994 New York Times Notable Book citation, and has been made into an opera and a graphic novel.

The novel opens in 2024, with American society destabilised by climate change, widening wealth gaps and corporate power. The narration is the journal of Lauren Oya Olamina. She is an African American teenager living in a walled street outside Los Angeles, in a country where public services are unreliable, work is scarce and clean water is expensive. Her hyperempathy makes her feel other people's pain as her own, which is dangerous where nobody can afford it.

She also has a religion, worked out in notebooks since she was twelve, based on the idea that God is change and that the point is not to worship it but to shape it. When the wall finally fails she walks north with what she can carry, gathering people as she goes. Several characters from different walks of life join her on the journey and learn about the belief system she calls Earthseed.

Earthseed teaches that humanity's destiny lies in settling other planets and carrying Earth's life outward. It is the first of two Parable novels, followed by Parable of the Talents, and Butler left the series unfinished.