Aelfgyfu

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

I seem not to have posted about Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and I finally read Parable of the Talents this summer and haven't posted that either. I started writing about those two books and had to add Kindred. I recommend all three highly. They remain first-rate speculative fiction and timely.

Octavia Butler is phenomenal. I read Kindred years ago and was deeply moved. If you haven't, consider it! She wrote it in 1979, set in 1976—the bicentennial of the United States of America as a country. Dana is a Black woman married to a white man, Kevin; when she wakes up in the hospital missing an arm in the prologue, the police think Kevin must have done it. He didn't. Of course, you have to read almost the whole novel to find out what did happen. Dana finds herself unexpectedly transported back in time—to the early ninteenth century in the US, and yes, that's as bad as you think it is. She travels between her own time and the past several times in the novel. I couldn't stop reading even though at some points I feared what I would read next.

What I love about Octavia Butler: her works are simultaneously unsentimental and yet deeply felt, unsparing and yet optimistic. She doesn't romanticize either the antebellum US or the 1976 version, yet she shows how people in both eras find life worth living—or make it worth living. Her protagonists are imperfect; her antagonists are generally not pure villains. She was writing about systemic racism and the damage it does long before the term critical race theory came into use, but it's surely an excellent lens for appreciating how the flaws in her characters are a combination of personal characteristics and the society in which they live. Everyone is damaged by racism, sexism, and other prejudices. Yet no one has to let that define them. People have to fight for their hopes, but hope is worth fighting for, and it's not in vain!


Parable of the Sower: a lot of people talked about this during Trump's first term, and rightly so. The president campaigns on "Make America Great Again" (though that might be only in the second book); it's eerily prescient, though it was written in 1993. The novel opens 20 July 2024. The first person narrator, Lauren Oya Olamina, is a teenager in a gated community. Life outside the gated community really isn't safe: her father is a professor at the college in town, but he travels only during daylight hours. He's also a pastor, for a faith she no longer believes. She has her own faith: Earthseed. God is Change—a force, not a being. Prayer can help those who pray, but there isn't anyone to pray to. She's convinced that society will fall, and she's making plans for what to do about it. She knows they're not safe even in their gated community. This novel works at every level: the society feels chillingly close to our own. Her family feels real, with its complicated dynamics: Lauren has tensions with her stepmother and complicated relationships with her half brothers. Oh, and the drug her now deceased mother used while pregnant with Lauren caused Lauren to be born with hyperempathy: she feels what she sees other people experience. She feels the pain she sees anyone experience—or that she thinks they experience (a younger brother uses this against her, as a younger brother would). 

I first read this novel back when Progeny was small, and I had an edition that seemed to be riddled with typos. Between that and the heavy material, I didn't seek out the sequel. Then I saw them both in a two-volume boxed set when I was Christmas shopping a couple of years ago and bought books for family and then (even more) books for me, including the set. This edition has a few errors, but not like I remember the previous version! (It may seem shallow, but that many typos would just throw me out of the world of the novel: I started wondering about the editor, the publishing house, what the heck had gone wrong here?)

So I reread Parable of the Sower a year or two ago, I recommend both books with the caveat that the second is even heavier, and if you don't want even vague spoilers, stop reading here.




I wrote about her Dawn here and Adulthood Rites here. I meant to write about Bloodchild, a book of short stories, but never got around to it.

Butler is one of the greats, and I recommend her highly. She's among my favorite novelists.




 

I read paragraph after paragraph of this essay thinking, "Yes. Yes!" Great analysis here. (Don't read the comments. I accidentally scrolled too far when I was checking the byline at the bottom and saw some. Just savor the essay and stop there.)

Leah Schnelbach, "I Didn’t Expect Dr. Gurathin To Be My Favorite Part of Murderbot," Reactor, 22 July 2025.

So we just finished watching and  

Alexander Skårsgard transforms into Murderbot "in five quick, easy steps" in this Facebook video from Apple TV.

Yeah. That's about how I thought it would go.


ETA: revised to use one of my new Murderbot user pics!

I do hope to make posts about the first two episodes of the season, but "The Well" is the first one of the season that really grabbed me!

( Cut for spoilers )

Happy Easter to all who observe it in any way!

And a good springtime (or autumn, for my friends Down Under) to all.

 I had read some negative reviews of the book and so postponed reading it, even though I'd given it to Brilliant Husband as a gift, and he liked it. Progeny's enjoyment made me pick it up, and it was quite a ride. No regrets!


This book is significantly more ambitious and tremendously inventive. I should not have waited so long to read it! It opens with a character waking up who can't even remember his name, let alone where he is, and it feels like horror: he can scarcely move, and metal arms come at him and do things like drug him. He realizes after a little bit that two other people are with him—and then that they aren't alive any more. If you want no spoilers, stop there, but it's not really horror! (I should know, because I keep picking up things I think aren't horror only to find that they are.) Our protagonist sciences the dren out of everything while remembering what got him there in a series of flashbacks. It's well paced and a lot of fun to read.

Much of the science is real, and I think all the math is. The novel also has a lot of speculation, though, and I can't always tell the difference! 

I have nitpicks, which should probably go behind a cut. 

( And here's the cut. )
I just realized I missed Artemis, and the poor reviews might actually have been for Artemis rather than Project Hail Mary, because I thought I was reading his second book. I'm also now not sure which one I gave BH.

I will definitely watch for his next book (and probably read Artemis, but I think I'd best keep my expectations low for that one).

I hardly ever write up my reading because I want to write something better than I can with just a little time. Then I regret it later—I can no longer remember which books I read in 2024, for the most part! So I'm turning over a new leaf. (heh heh! I never understood what "turn over a new leaf" meant until the mid-80s, when Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" had "turned over a new leaf / then tore right through it"—until that moment, I thought the metaphor had to do with trees!)

Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman, written in 2020, was the first novel I finished reading this year. I'm not sure I had read anything by her before, but I may look for more.

One of the two main characters is based on her own grandfather and how he fought the 1953 Termination Bill. I didn't even know that there had been such a bill. Arthur V. Watkins, of Utah, really did sponsor a resolution to eliminate Native American reservations, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and all the services they provided; and force Native Americans to assimilate. He really seems like a mustache-twirling villain, except without a mustache. 

While learning of the bill and trying to save the tribe—their land, their jobs, their schools, their ability to live together— are major parts of the novel, the interwoven plots are also very personal. Thomas Wazhashk tries to balance his work for his tribe and against the bill while holding down a job as night watchman at the real Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant and farming. His niece Patrice (who does not want to be called Pixie! even though everyone does) works at the plant but wants to find her sister Vera, who moved to Minneapolis with her husband, had a baby, and then ceased all contact. Patrice also does not want the attentions of some besmitten young men.

The novel kept surprising me, in good ways. I became very attached to Thomas and Patrice, and Millie Cloud, a grad student whose white mother didn't want her to have too much to do with her Native father, but who makes connections when asked to help. Millie is neurospicy (which DW really does not want to let me type!) The tensions between traditional ways and modern life are very much at play without easy answers. 

A blessed Hanukah to all who celebrate it!