Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 - Plot & Excerpts
The only solace her mourners could take was that Butler had produced a substantial and fairly sizable legacy that seems in no danger of vanishing with her. Although much goodness was undeniably lost, including the third unwritten book, Parable of the Trickster, meant to conclude this series, after Parable of the Talents. Butler was a hard-headed and hard-nosed individual not beholden to any party line, as her final novel, Fledgling, might well reveal, given its gender-powertripping, quasi-pedophile, vampiric sexual antics. And in fact, Parable of the Sower and its sequel surprisingly owe more to Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land than to, say, Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, writers with whom Butler might be expected—by the unenlightened and uninitiated—to share sensibilities. The first Parable is the story of Lauren Olamina, a young woman coming of age in an America gone to hell. Armed enclaves offer the only precarious security in a world of rapists (who seem, contrary to history, totally uninterested in equally succulent boyflesh), cannibals, and marauders.
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