I want to use the novel “The Parable Of The Sower” by Octavia Butler. My question is How does the use of survival seen in The Parable Of The Sower influence the way we see climate change in other cli-fi novels?

How does Parable of the Sower use speculative fiction to explore psychological responses to climate change anxiety, and preparedness in the Anthropocene?

In Jenny Offil’s “Weather,” our lead protagonist Linzie can be described as someone who takes life day by day and has no particular “goal” that keeps her going every day. This to me was very interesting because, comparing this to the protagonists in “The Parable of the Sower,” Lauren and Piya from the Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide,” we have three different kinds of female protagonists. 

In Butler’s Sower, Lauren is this very strong female character that defies the norms of what a woman should be in her town. The women in Robledo were expected to get married and stay home with the children. If they wanted to work, they could work from home or service their community in “safe ways.” Lauren actively fought against these stereotypes; she was the pastor’s daughter, and this came with access to scriptures and books. Lauren lived in a totally dystopian world where at any moment they could lose their livelihood and their lives. Lauren made the decision to learn as much as she could about maps and nature to increase her chances of survival for when the inevitable happens. When the inevitable happened—the burning of Robledo and its community—the only person who was prepared for this was Lauren. This preparation gave her a chance to survive and create a new community where she is the leader but not a dictator.

In Ghosh’s Tide, Piya is a scientist who is going to Sundarbans to survey the Gangetic and Irrawaddy river dolphins. Piya is the kind of protagonist who also, in my opinion, defies the stereotypes placed on women. When other people tried to delay her trip, she found other ways around it. Even if this meant going to the boat of a stranger and trusting them with her life. This bravery she has is what leads her to meet Fokir, someone who becomes crucial to leading her to these dolphins. The thing I see most in common between Lauren and Piya is that they both have strong personalities and motivations that give their lives meaning. Their stories are based on this common need to survive or to excel.

This is important because going into “Weather” by Jennifer Offil, I was expecting a similar protagonist, with something in her life that’s pushing her to prove herself.. Linzie, however, is the complete opposite, in my opinion. The novel is written in random entries of Lizzie’s life, almost like her inner thoughts. Nothing is really explained, and yet from what I have understood, she doesn’t have this “driving force” in her life that she actively wants. Someone in class said that “she doesn’t affect life; life affects her,” and that’s the best way to describe her character. Compared to Lauren and Piya, Lizzie is married and has a child named Eli. She works as a librarian in what we assume to be a college since a few of her writings have some students she interacts with. This is an interesting parallel for me because we have Lauren and Piya, women, who ran away from the traditional gender roles, and they are made to be these motivated women, yet there’s Lizzie, who took this traditional path, and she is unmotivated—her job as a librarian she got from a friend. Life just happens to her, while Lauren and Piya make life move. I am interested in finding out where Linzie goes in this story and the role climate change is going to play and how this is going to push her to become a better version of herself, as it did for Piya and Lauren.

In Jenny Offill’s Weather we are introduced to an almost passive yet observant main character. In many ways she is unlike a typical protagonist as she navigates through scenarios that kind of seem to happen to her, rather than her driving anything forward. However, her wit does not fail her, as she is obviously an intelligent person–at the very least very observant, which is evidenced by her reflections of the dinners and conferences she goes to with Sylvia. I think this passive attitude but awareness of the world is what makes Lizzie a good main character in a cli-fi novel, since she seems to reflect the attitude of many people today. We know about the climate disasters, of injustices, but we don’t really do anything about it–maybe because we feel stuck or not in control or have other things going on in our lives, just like Lizzie. For example, she notices at her first conference that there were “lots of people who were not Native Americans talking about Native Americans”; at another she reflects on the idea that when “older” generations die, there will be no unnerving feeling around technology because nothing will feel lost to the younger generations: “But wait, that sounds bad to me. Doesn’t that mean if we end up somewhere we don’t want to be, we can’t retrace our steps?” (24-26). Clearly, Lizzie sees the disconnect in speaking for cultural groups you aren’t part of, and worries about the future, but these thoughts are kept mainly to herself–they don’t speak some kind of movement, research, or anger in her. They just exist as the problems in the world. Similarly I think people today might feel this way about the things we are experiencing, where they are just things that exist and there isn’t much we can do about it, other than wait for doomsday. 

I think this lack of hope or lack of motivation to do anything is evident in another place in this novel, where Lizzie is talking about dreams. She gives an anecdote about how she had a dream she was in the supermarket, unable to find the switch to turn down the lights, “what happened to the flying dreams?” she asks (Offill 27). I think this is a nod to a concern Canavan also talked about, which is the societal loss of an ability to think of a future. The same way Lizzie has grown out of dreaming of flying (a common dream I am assuming)–or maybe depressed out of such whimsical thinking–we have also become too diluted to think up a plausible future for ourselves. We deal with the problems of the world as something happening TO us, and something we just have to live with, because there is no collective drive to envision a future where we adapt, are conscious about our autonomy or role as it relates to living along with nature, or “flying”. Instead, we look at the climate change clock in Union Square, take a deep breath out, immediately aware of all the history, paradoxes and injustices, and systems that got us here, and keep going along our day. 

Ecocriticism and postcolonial theory, at initial view, don’t seem to necessarily intersect or interact. Ecocriticism concerns the “trees and plants,” and postcolonial concerns “the third ld.” Yet this initial impression is naive and reductive. We see this sort of opposition in the book itself, with the conservatory efforts of the state being in conflict with the settling of Dalits in the Sundarbans. The book points out, and as many critics have, that one cannot separate the two spheres. That is to say that if one is to be ecocritical or speak of the environment, of the “natural world,” one must engage with postcoloniality. Critic Brandon Jones states this accurately when he remarks

Mark McGurl writes that the Anthropocene as geological present “exacerbates and magnifies the dilemma of human agency, locating the blowback of the waste products of modernization on the blurry line between intention and accident” (383). What this means in the case of The Hungry Tide is that through the lens of geological deep time, one of the novel’s central conflicts becomes how consciously to reconcile modern colonialist responsibility for human violence and environmental exploitation in South Asia with the accidental consequences of stratigraphic encroachment and global climate change. (Jones 2018)

The novel presents seemingly accidental “hand of god” type climatological phenomena as not isolated happenings. The type of happenings that we in globalized society have all grown accustomed to, yet here this is not the case. The book in very a elegant and tragic way historizes these phenomena as being wrapped in the social and political lives of the Dalits. Hence, space in the novel is not empty or dead but carries with it in very postcolonial fashion significations towards the past and present. This can be seen throughout the novel, but especially in the ending, as Forkir’s presence in time is sprinkled throughout the Sundarbans as routes on a GPS.

Time and history play a role in novels likewise, in as much as they seem to always find their way into the lives of our characters. The book is driven in part by Kainai and Piya, who have conscious and unconscious reasons for taking part in this adventure. On the surface, it’s purely pragmatic. Piya is going there because it’s her job to study dolphins, and Kainai is going begrudgingly to retrieve something. Yet as the novel descends deeper into the history of our characters, we find not just personal revelations but historical ones. By the end of the novel, the sphere of the personal and political is disrupted. For instance, what seems to Kainai as the ramblings of an old socialist turns into a beautiful and tragic account of a seemingly forgotten history. It points to the way globalized, postcolonial societies intertwine temporalities and spaces to erase the consequences of colonialism.