Sample excerpt from Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower”

Chapter 1

Everything you touch changes.

Everything you change changes you.

The only lasting truth is change.

God is change.

Earthseed: The Book of the Living

Saturday, July 20, 2024

I had the same dream last night. I should have expected it. This dream appears when I am struggling – when I am trying to twist my own personal hooks and pretend nothing unusual is happening. It appears when I am trying to be my father’s daughter. Today is our birthday – mine is 15, my father’s is 55. Tomorrow I will try to please my father, my community and God. So last night I had a dream that reminded me that it is all a lie. I feel I need to write about this dream because this lie is bothering me so much.

I am learning to fly, to levitate. Nobody is teaching me. I am learning bit by bit, in my dreams, little by little. Not very subtle images, but persistent images. I have taken many lessons, and I am better at flying than I was before. I trust my abilities a lot more now, but it still scares me. I still can’t control my direction very well.

I lean toward the door. It’s the kind of door between my room and the hallway. It seems far away from me, but I lean toward it. I stiffen and tense, releasing everything I’ve been holding onto that’s kept me from rising or falling. I lean into the air, straining upward. Not moving upward, but not falling completely either. And I begin to glide on the air a few feet above the floor, oscillating between fear and delight.

I drift toward a doorway. A cold, pale light shines from it. I slide a little to the right, then a little further. I pass the door and nearly hit the wall beside it, but I can’t stop or turn. I drift away from the doorway, away from the cold, glowing light and into another light.

The wall in front of me is on fire. Fire has come out of nowhere, eating through the wall, coming towards me, towards me. The fire spreads. I drift into it. It burns around me. I struggle and struggle, grasping for air and fire, kicking and burning, trying to swim back out of it. Darkness.

Maybe it wakes me up a little. When the fire engulfs me, I wake up sometimes. That’s bad. If I wake up completely, I can’t go back to sleep. I try, but I’ve never been able to fall asleep.

This time I didn’t wake up completely. I gradually blended into the second half of the dream, the part that actually happened years ago when I was little, the part that seemed like no big deal at the time.

darkness.

Darkness turns to light. Stars.

The stars cast a cold, pale light.

“We were invisible So “When I was little, I could see a lot of stars,” my mother-in-law tells me. She speaks Spanish as her native language. She stands small and still, gazing up at the wide sweep of the Milky Way. She and I went outside after dark to retrieve the laundry that was hanging on the clothesline. The day was still hot, and we both like the cool darkness of the early evening. There is no moon, but it’s easy to see. The sky is full of stars.

The neighborhood wall is a huge, looming presence. To me it looks like a crouching animal, ready to pounce at any moment, more threatening than protective. But my mother-in-law is there and she is not scared. I am with her. I am 7 years old.

I look up at the stars and the deep black sky. “Why didn’t you see the stars?” I ask her. “Everyone can see them.” I speak to her in Spanish, just like she taught me. It feels somehow intimate.

“The city lights,” she says. “The lights, the progress, the growth, all that stuff, I just don’t care anymore because it’s too hot and too poor.” She pauses. “When I was your age, my mother told me that the stars, the few stars we could see, were windows to heaven. Windows through which God could look at us. And for almost a year, I believed her.” My stepmother handed me an armful of diapers for my youngest brother. I took them and walked back to the house where she kept a big wicker laundry basket, and piled the diapers on top of the rest of the clothes. The basket was full. I made sure she wasn’t looking, and then collapsed backwards onto the pile of stiff, clean, soft clothes. For a moment, the fall felt like floating.

I lie there and look up at the stars, pick out some constellations and name the stars that make up them, which I learned from an astronomy book that belonged to my paternal grandmother.

Suddenly, I saw a streak of light from a meteor streak across the western sky. I stared at it, hoping to see another one. Then my mother-in-law called me, and I returned to her.

“We have city lights now,” I told her. “They don’t hide the stars,” she shook her head. “There aren’t as many as there used to be. Kids today don’t know how bright the city lights used to be, and that wasn’t that long ago.” “I want stars,” I said.

“The stars are free,” she shrugs. “I want the city lights back, I wish they’d come back soon. But you can buy the stars.”

excerpt The Parable of the Sower Written by Octavia E. Butler and published by Headline, this is the latest selection from the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up here to read it with us.