Paperback, 345 pages
English language
Published Aug. 7, 2000 by Warner Books.
In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.
When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean …
In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.
When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.
We might not have quite reached this level of dystopia but having nearly reached 2024 nothing seems too farfetched. Butler shows that she needs nothing supernatural to power a story. This one will stick with me should I manage to live through the time period it is set in.
On a second read, I feel a lot differently than I did the first time around. I can't separate uncomfortable feelings of reading about a teenager basically starting a cult and attracting people who are at their absolute most vulnerable to join. It doesn't sit well with me to read about Lauren's glee to "raise babies in Earthseed." And the intense, intense, dehumanization and otherizing of people using drugs, making them into physically unrecognizable monsters, is something I can't get past. If Lauren has hyper-empathy, and is more sensitive to people in need of help, then why does the buck stop with people using drugs?
Still processing this book, but I think it might be one of my favorite sci-fi books I've recently read.
This is stronger in many respects on re-read, somehow my dystopia lens last time glossed the climate youth aspect, the neurodiversity aspect, the ways she keeps the story focused on community and change at the same time so structurally.
Maybe I didn't fully understand how much of a Young Adult novel this was, but I found this book very slow and literal. Boring even.Update: NYTimes reviewer seems to agree? Points to the sequel as the "masterpiece" www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/books/review/the-essential-octavia-butler.html?smid=tw-nytbooks&smtyp=cur
blew my mind, changed the way i see the world and my fears and vision of future. but gave me hope. Realllly hard to drive n a freeway in so called los angeles and stare at the land on the sides.......
If I think of this as YA, it is brilliantly dark and informing, pulling no punches in portraying a dystopian near future of societal collapse and the violence inherent in the preceding and decaying systems, while the young woman telling the story dreams of a bold utopia.
Great story, featuring excellent writing that has truly held up over the decades. Only a few of the ideas presented here seem dated or goofy (primarily the language used to address futuristic drugs). For whatever reason, I didn't immediately consider the potential differences between a post-apocalyptic book written by a woman of color and similar books I'd explored that were written by white men or women. Having a strong, black female youth as a narrator is refreshing, and the maximized potential for even more obvious and egregious examples of class war, racial tension, and misogyny as "civilization" breaks down is explored more comprehensively than in any other work of fiction I've read. Thus, the landscape described by Butler seems (sadly) infinitely more realistic. Looking forward to the next book in the series.
