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Parable of the Sower
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Parable of the Sower Unknown - 1995

by Octavia E. Butler

About this book

In acclaimed science-fiction author Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, we find the world in 2025, crippled by global warming, pollution, and socio-cultural tensions.

'Hyperempath' Lauren Olamina, a black teenager living just outside Los Angeles, flees with her community to escape the dangerous pyromaniacs who are destroying the remainders of civilization.  As she flees, she begins to preach her philosophy, her religion, called 'Earthseed' to the other refugees.

"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists that control the fool
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery."

From the publisher

Parable of the Sower is the odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of Paints, people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman, sets off on foot, moving north along the dangerous coastal highways. She is a sharer, one who suffers from a hereditary trait called hyperempathy, which causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own. Parable of the Sower is both a coming of age novel and a road novel, set in the near future, when the dying embers of our old civilization can either cool or be the catalyst for something new.

First Edition Identification

The first edition of Parable of the Sower was published by Four Walls, Eight Windows, in 1993. The First edition states “A FOUR WALLS EIGHT WINDOWS FIRST EDITION and has a full number line starting with 1. The dust jacket has a $19.95 price stamp on the inside front flap. 


Details

  • Title Parable of the Sower
  • Author Octavia E. Butler
  • Binding unknown
  • Publisher Tandem Library
  • Date 1995-02
  • ISBN 9780785756170

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