Written by the internationally esteemed African American author Octavia E. Butler, Parable is the third annual selection of the HSU/CR reading partnership. Faculty at both campuses are encouraged to recommend the novel to students and incorporate it in the Fall 2008 curriculum. Events and activities will be organized around the book’s themes, and updates will be posted at CR's Web site and HSU Library's blog.
The sci-fi tale centers on Lauren Oya Olamina and begins on her 15th birthday in 2024 when California is plagued with a ravaged climate, rampant crime and widespread poverty, homelessness and looting. Almost no one is safe, nearly everyone is armed and anarchy constantly looms. Lauren’s father dies, she cannot survive as a young black female and she disguises herself as a man as she embarks on her odyssey through a dystopia of hate and fear.
Butler, a native of Pasadena, died in Seattle’s Lake Forest Park in 2006 at age 58. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer eulogized her as a female African American pioneer in the white male bastion of science fiction. The obituary in The New York Times called her novels “evocative, often troubling” in their exploration of race, sex, power and the meaning of the human condition.
Butler is the only science fiction writer to win a distinguished “Genius Grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The money freed her from years of poverty and personal struggle. Her father was a shoeshine man, her mother a maid.
Vinnie Peloso, Professor of General Studies and Reading at CR, describes Parable of the Sower as a dark, sometimes violent book. “But the heroine is strong, honest and ‘hyper-empathetic,’ a condition that allows her to feel another’s pain. This young black woman struggles with her faith, her family and her friends while gathering a small group of all-age followers to walk to Humboldt County. The family of the man she loves owns a piece of property here and he says they can make it here.”
HSU students who have read the story are enthusiastic about it. “I felt this novel was particularly engaging and I felt quite compelled to read it from start to finish and didn’t want to put it down,” said undergraduate Mike Gross.
HSU’s Gordon Diehl said Parable “challenges minds to look at the world today and imagine the consequences of what we are doing.”
For details, contact Vinnie Peloso at 476-4565 and Vinnie-peloso@redwoods.edu or HSU’s Rees Hughes at 826-3504 and Hughes@humboldt.edu