Jemisin, the award-winning author of the Broken Earth trilogy.
Check it out below.
The new edition ofParable of theSowerwill be published on April 30.
Credit: Ching-Ming Cheung
Jemisins Foreword toParable of theSower, by Octavia E. Butler
THREE READS
Theres power in threes.
Two repetitions isnt enough to establish pattern recognition; four repetitions and the mind gets bored.
Three is the sweet spot.
Grand Central Publishing
Im still not sure.
The mid-20s read wouldve been a few years afterParable of the Sowerdebuted in 1993.
The books seemed to merely be set in the future.
Now, note: I was very much a baby black-power militant in those days.
This was echoed by the fiction I read.
There was no future for us, beyond whatever limited use the heroes might find for a few.
(We were never the heroes.)
Just more dire predictions.
Still wasnt ready; I know that now.
Naturally, I like her better the older I get.)
I needed to understand the difference between good intentions and good outcomes.
Still, I didntlikethe books, not back then, nor did I find them particularly prescient.
For context, this was the 1990s.
Laurens world still felt unrealistic to me, even impossible.
Roving, uncontested gangs of pedophiles and drug-addicted pyromaniacs?
A powerful coalition of white-supremacist, homophobic, Christian zealots taking over the country?
Nah, I thought, and hoped Butler would get back to aliens soon.
Look, I was young.
Octavia Butler, to our collective horror, died in 2006.
Yet here were we, her spiritual children numbering in the thousands, come to claim the future.
Worse, Id seen how complicit science fiction and fantasy were in making our futures so hard to imagine.
It was time for this to change.
So we fought them.
Of course we did; Butlers memory demanded no less.
Eventually, though, his need for the status quo, for conformity, trumps his basic goodness.
This resonated powerfully with me amid the ongoing context of the American social justice movement.
After that, I couldnt help wondering how much of Marc was informed by Butlers fellow authors.
All that you touch, you Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
What we have touched has changed: the SFF genre has improved slightly, despite its plague of Marcs.
And as science fiction reflects its present, the same ugliness afflicts our society on the macro scale.
In the wake of Americas first black president, we now endure an incompetent crook and bigot.
Human beings are resilient and resourceful; theres little doubt that as a species well survive.
So this time around, what I find myself resonating with most is Earthseed itself.
Butler does not appear to have intended the Parable novels to be a guidebookand yet they are.
Now, like the communities of Earthseed, its our job to create change in fiction and in life.
The future is worth it.And in ten more years?
Ill check in again, and see what else I can learn from these brilliant books.
N. K. JemisinDecember 2018
Foreword copyright 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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