2014 read #46: Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler.

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
365 pages
Published 1998
Read from May 17 to May 20
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Science fiction loves to traffic in religion. Ignoring the sci-fi scribblers who went out and actually founded religions, we're left with an enormous reliquary of star religions, eugenic religions, political religions, most intended to reflect some allegorical or didactic goal of the author's. We often see Campbellian heroes or Randian ubermensch in the process of founding these systems, which, once founded, roll along with irresistible momentum -- and of course every secondary world story will have long-practiced beliefs somewhere in the background. Parable of the Talents is an interesting outlier, sketching the early years of a new and useful belief system as it struggles for survival against a much larger, predatory species of Christianity.

Talents was easier to endure, emotionally, than Parable of the Sower -- partly because the Christian theocracy it depicts, with slave labor "reeducation" camps and uniformed Crusaders killing or uprooting "heathen" families is (just slightly) more remote from the big business dystopia of Sower, but also partly because Talents isn't structured with quite the same skill. There is no rising, inevitable dread as one disaster creeps after another, only a quiet, bucolic interlude of personal and ideological productivity in the first third of the book before Christian America comes to power and (literally) crashes the gates. The plausible horrors of life on the road are replaced with life in a slave camp -- a subject never far removed from the thoughts and experience of a huge number of Americans, but in execution erring a little too near to misery porn. It felt nihilistic, an extended depiction of the evils of what ordinary people (zealots in particular) do with unchecked power, numbing and dreary rather than powerful and sobering. The way Oyamina and Earthseed escape from the camp, and how later Oyamina finally lucks into spreading her message, feel like dei ex machina. I guess it's too hard to write a believable scenario for the origin of a forward-thinking religion in a time of cultural regression.

Butler's writing is absorbing and powerful in its directness, however, and even if outright Christian theocracy is a little bit further away than the libertarian dream-come-true of Sower, it's still a present-enough danger to raise chills. The structure of the narrative as a reluctant hagiography is interesting, but perhaps not fully exploited.