I’m ashamed to say this is my first Octavia Butler book. I’ve had a copy of Kindred sitting on my bookshelf for a few years now, but so far, it’s still untouched. Honestly, the only reason I finally listened to this audiobook was because my book club voted to discuss it. I ended up having a conflict with the meeting to discuss this particular book, but I figured I should still read it, given that Butler is an icon and all.
It certainly lives up to the hype. It takes place over the course of a few years starting in 2024, and considering Butler was writing this in the ’90s, I’m impressed with how accurately she predicted some of the effects of climate change. The book takes place in California where the main character/narrator, Lauren, is living in a neighborhood with her father, stepmother, and half-brothers.
A “neighborhood” is a town or village (it didn’t sound big enough to be a city) surrounded by a wall designed to protect its inhabitants from outlaws and drug addicts. Resources are scarce (especially water), so there’s a lot of violence between the haves and the have-nots. Lauren’s family doesn’t have much, but her dad has a good job and they’re not starving, so by some people’s standards, they’re rich.
Water is so scarce because it only rains once every few years in California, and given the years-long drought California has been experiencing in real life, I was very impressed with Butler’s ability to predict the future.
Butler didn’t predict the wildfires that have been rampaging across the state as a result of the drought, but in her fictional future there’s a drug nick-named pyro (sometimes ro for short) that apparently makes watching stuff burn as pleasurable as sex. The drug is everywhere, and so fires are everywhere. For some reason, she didn’t seem to make the connection between all these fires being set and the dry conditions leading to the whole state going up in flames.
Lauren is only a teenager when the book starts, but she’s smart. When random acts of violence start killing her neighbors one by one, she sees the growing tensions between the haves and the have-nots and realizes there will probably be a time when they’ll have to survive outside their wall. She makes a point of learning about local herbs and vegetation to know what she can eat to survive, and her dad teaches her how to work a gun so she can protect herself and hunt for food.
Sure enough, one night a group from the outside manages to batter down the gate to Lauren’s neighborhood and pretty much burns the place down, raping and murdering as they go. Lauren manages to make it out unscathed, but her family didn’t. Someone later told Lauren she saw all her brother’s getting killed, but Lauren doesn’t want to believe she’s lost her whole family without seeing it for her own eyes.
Lauren is left with just two people from her neighborhood. People she’s grown up with, but doesn’t know very well, and one of whom lived outside the neighborhood before her mom sold her to be some dude’s wife, so she knows how to live outside the neighborhood. Lauren relies on her expertise as well as her own studies, and between the two of them, they manage to make it work.
They head north where it actually rains once in a while, hoping they’ll be able to get jobs. Along the way, they pick up a man, a woman, and their baby (who is conveniently quiet during dangerous situations), two sisters, a woman and her toddler daughter, and an old man who promptly starts up a romance with Lauren. It should be pretty gross, given the difference in their ages, but it doesn’t feel gross. Lauren isn’t a virgin when they meet, so it’s not like she doesn’t know how it works. And she’s attracted to him almost as soon as she sees him, so it’s not like he was ever manipulating her into having sex with him. She’s also super mature for her age, so even though they’re physical ages are very different, I think in maturity they’re not too far off.
He owns a farm in northern California where his family is staying and he offers to let Lauren and the whole gang stay with him. It’s set back from the road, so it should be fairly safe, but when they get there, they find the house burned down and everyone dead.
They bury the dead and debate whether to stay or keep moving. They ultimately decide to stay, determining that, since they’re a larger group, they can do a better job of keeping a 24/7 lookout. Lauren also thought to pack some seeds, so they can start farming.
Religion is a theme running through this book. It starts with Lauren getting baptized, despite the fact that water is expensive and she doesn’t really want to bother, since she’s already decided she doesn’t believe in Christianity. Since her father is the local preacher, she can’t exactly talk about her lack of faith, but the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes her own religion, in which people help each other out, and God is not an entity, but is change itself.
Like I said, she keeps this to herself, but she starts jotting down her thoughts in a journal, which she eventually ends up calling “The Book of Earthseed”. As she travels north with her companions, she starts talking about Earthseed, they ask questions, and despite their skepticism, she revels in the debate and in explaining her thought process to them, and eventually, most of them start to come around.
Lauren is also what’s known as a sharer, meaning when she sees other people feel physical pain or pleasure, she feels it, too. As she points out, there’s a lot more pain than pleasure in her world, so it mostly feels like a curse, although it ensures she never hurts anyone else unless she absolutely has to. The condition is very rare, and since no one else in her neighborhood had it (thereby making her different, and thus a freak), her dad encouraged her to hide it, and she became very good at it.
I’m still pretty heavily immersed in comfort reads, and even listening to this audiobook when I could have been listening to a fun podcast on a lighter, more fun topic, was kind of a struggle, so I don’t think I’m going to be picking up the sequel anytime soon, but I am definitely interested to see what happens to Lauren and her friends, and where she ends up taking this crazy Earthseed idea.