In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the fictional world is an allusion to the world we are living in today. Published in 1993, Butler took inspiration from the state of things and exasperated them to create the dystopia of the novel. However, she doesn’t just let the reader suffer within the world along with her characters. She offers a solution through her protagonist Lauren Olamina. Lauren has a condition called hyperempathy which functions as a suggestion from Butler on what it takes to fix the world.
Lauren’s hyperempathy means that she feels other pain and pleasure as they feel it. This causes a problem in a world where violence is more prevalent. The callused, malicious people of the novel see weakness as their gain, leading to Lauren hiding her hyperempathy to avoid being a target, but wishing others felt the effects of their violence to reduce the abundance of such acts. Lauren says, “If hyperempathy syndrome was a more common complaint, people couldn’t do such things… I’ve never thought of my problem as something that might do some good before, but the way things are, I think it would help. I wish I could give it to people” (Butler 115). This implies that the world would be a better place if more people felt the pain they were causing. If everyone, or at least most people, had hyperempathy syndrome, then there would be far less pain, and the societies would be more likely to have a focus on pleasure. This represents a solution to shift from a dystopia to a utopia through the focus on a lack of suffering.
The suggested shift is continued in Lauren’s creation of Earthseed, a religion inspired on her life experiences. Her aim is to build a community where the inhabitants will one day live among the stars. This is represented in an Earthseed verse saying:
Lauren believes that the old way of living, before the world fell apart, needs to be discarded, so that a new way of life can take its place. Her suggested new way of life will eventually leave the broken Earth. To prepare for this, Lauren learns how to live off the land, so she can build a community that doesn’t require the capitalist nature of the old world. This will also guide the community into knowing how to make a new planet habitable. These two ideas function as the beginnings of both an ecological and technological utopia through the attempts to reconnect with a natural environment.. The ecological utopia will lead into the technological one as the community grows and gains resources to leave the planet, where they will return to the ecological system in order to maintain survival.
The two ideas of Earthseed and hyperempathy come together to form a proposal of how to build better societies. The concept of hyperempathy sets the groundwork for a caring and cooperative community which will be born out of the Earthseed ideology, and Lauren’s Earthseed utopia won’t survive without a community willing to function as if they feel each other’s pain.