Entry at the ISFDB.
A snippet from my chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Economics and Literature:
Nonetheless, speculative fiction often generates knowledge or exercises agency in much more intricate and indirect ways as well, operating through satire, allegory, metaphor, and estrangement. Octavia Butler’s duology The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998) make an excellent case study. Butler’s narrative opens in California in 2024, in the midst of interconnected ecological and economic crises. Despite their relative affluence, Lauren Oya Olamina’s family live precarious and hardscrabble lives in a gated community. Lauren knows the slow and unevenly distributed apocalypse will find her eventually, and when it does, she is as prepared as she can reasonably be. In the context of loss and trauma, Lauren sets out on a perilous journey and lifelong project of world-making, intent on founding of a kind of secular religion, Earthseed, that is more rational and robust than the political and economic systems whose disintegration she is enduring. God, according to Earthseed, is Change: indifferent to you, but potentially something you can shape. In such a context, Butler’s representation of cash may feel rather curious. Yes, there are hints in Parable of the Sower of hyperinflation. But for the most part, cash is sought after with a special fervor. This reliability of money in this free-for-all world of cannibals and pyromaniac drug addicts could be interpreted as just another small but significant failure of the science-fictional imagination: another example of money’s curious tenacity through the downfall of capitalism and beyond.Then again, Butler’s representation of money is inseparable from her exploration of slavery. For Butler, the cycle of acquiring and using money may imply autonomy, but she is crystal-clear that it doesn’t always imply this. The company town is a repeated motif: “[Emery Mora] had been a debt slave. [...] The debts were accumulated because she worked for an agribusiness corporation that underpaid its workers in company scrip instead of money, then overcharged them for food and shelter, so that they could stay in ever-increasing debt.” With this in mind, perhaps the duology does not ‘transcendentalize’ money as an unchanging and compulsory feature of any possible future economy. Nor does it advocate for any particular future form or forms for money. Rather, it articulates a sense of money’s immanence in history as a particular distribution of tools and traps.For Lauren, any given bundle of cash is just another locus of ‘Change,’ one with its own distinct features, and one that is often versatile, unpredictable, and—on the long time-scale Lauren thinks on—ephemeral. When Lauren hides and then retrieves caches of money, her acts suggest Matthew 25:14–30, ‘The Parable of the Talents,’ about a rich man and the stewards of his estate. In this parable, two stewards please their master by trading actively and growing his wealth, while the third angers him by merely burying then retrieving the money. The lessons of doing what you can with what you are given, and of thinking long-term—the Kingdom of Heaven may take a while!—are clearly relevant. But Butler also complicates, and even resists such lessons. Significantly, debt slavery was a pervasive condition in the Ancient Near East, and the word often translated as ‘servants’ in ‘The Parable of the Talents’ is probably better translated as ‘slaves.’ Butler pairs the figure of God as one who “reaps where he has not sown” with the figure in Matthew 13:1–23, ‘The Parable of the Sower,’ who sows (at least some seeds) where he cannot reap. So should this composite Sower be understood in a broadly anti-theodician manner, as a representation of the unfathomable nature of God’s goodness? Possibly, although Butler tends to deploy religious discourse in service of a more secular idea of justice. Both Lauren and the disfavored slave confront God as something entirely without mercy. Whereas the two slaves who have traded actively are rewarded by being ‘set over’ a large part of his estate, the slave who perhaps quite reasonably refuses to risk increasing his debt to such a master is rebuked and ‘cast into the outer darkness’—an image which takes on a more ambiguous resonance in a narrative which is, ultimately, about yearning to travel to space.
