Reviews and Comments

Which feels like a cheesy thing to say in a review about dystopian fiction, but I genuinely didn't realize this book was published in the year 1993 until I read Butler's biography at the back and realized she passed away in 2006. It feels... pertinent

Others have said this is a pretty grim novel. I agree. It hurt to read, quite often. I feel like I've mostly moved out of my dystopian fiction era but this one hooked me a lot harder than most I've read. I haven't finished a book this quickly in quite a while.

I think Parable of the Sower has a lot to say about eco-fatalism, as well as the many "fatalisms" of neoliberalism in general, which it delivers on very well. I also felt like it would have a lot to say about the value of religion, divorced from the way people in my life and I suspect many others in the west tend to equate religion with Christianity. It delivered on the former part, but not so much the latter in my opinion. Still very compelling, and very well written nonetheless.

Kimmerer spends a lot of time in this book comparing and contrasting Western science to indigenous ways of knowing, specifically from the Potawatomi tradition. As she's someone formally trained in western science, I understood her thesis being that indigenous ways of knowing can coexist with western science, but more than anything, I felt that this book did a really good job justifying why we shouldn't treat science as the end all be all of knowledge.

On one hand, I think this book reintroduced my very secular mind to the ways in which having a spiritual connection to nature can be extremely enriching and can add to our collective understanding of the natural world

On the other hand, it provides a basis for understanding where exactly science falls short in its attempt to catalogue the universe, as well as exposing its "objectivity" for the many ways in which it is actually ideologically motivated.

All in all, this book is definitely going to be a cornerstone of my worldview with respect to knowledge for the foreseeable future. Not to mention the fact that Kimmerer is just a really awesome writer in general