Octavia Butler's Parable of the Trickster

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was intended to be part of a series of six novels, which was planned as Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay, but only the first two were ever published, in 1993 and 1998 respectively. The first three Parables take their titles from the three biblical parables of the same names, in the Books of Luke and Matthew, and each of the published novels concludes with a quote from the relevant Book. In The Parable of the Sower, the sower is symbolic of God and the seed of God’s message. Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of the first two Parables, creates a new religion called Earthseed and founds the first Earthseed community in Humboldt County, California. Following the discovery of extrasolar planets that sustain life in 2025, the ultimate aim of Earthseed is to ‘take root among the stars’. The Parables are referred to as Butler’s Earthseed books in order to distinguish them from her other two series and her standalone novels. In The Parable of the Talents, the monetary talents (a unit of weight used as currency) are symbolic of personal talents (God-given abilities and aptitudes), both of which are granted for the purpose of serving their respective masters. Olamina dedicates her life to the service of Earthseed, which becomes one of the most popular religions in the Americas, and launches the first starship in 2090, the final year of her life. In The Parable of the Trickster, which is better known as The Parable of the Dishonest Steward (or the Shrewd Manager), the steward’s alternating incompetence and prowess is symbolic of the inability of human beings to serve both God and money. The Earthseed settlers on the planet Bow (an abbreviation of 'Rainbow') cannot both cling to the form of life they had on Earth and thrive in the extrasolar colony.

Butler began work on Parable of the Trickster in 1989, made numerous false starts from 1999 to 2004, and continued compiling notes and drafts until her death, early in 2006. The premises, outlines, and fragments have been available in The Huntington’s Octavia E. Butler Papers archive since 2013 and I was lucky enough to gain access to these while researching Literary Theory and Criminology in 2022. There are several aspects of Butler’s premises, outlines, and fragments that remain fairly consistent, most of which concern the protagonist and setting of the novel. There is less consistently about the structure of the narrative, but two plotlines can be discerned as well as a third that is only sketched. Butler seemed certain that Trickster would be written in the first person from the perspective of the protagonist and narrator, who would be named either Imara Hope Lucas, Imara Wright Drew, or Imara Dove Holly. Imara is an African American woman who was adopted by Olamina during her teens (between 13 and 17) and is aged between 35 and 45 when the story begins. Imara is an Earthseed therapist in some versions and a sharer (suffering from the organic delusional disorder called hyper-empathy, like Olamina) in others. Some time between 2090 and 2095 she leaves Earth in an Earthseed Instar with between 4700 and 5339 colonists to realise the Earthseed destiny. Given the dates this appears to be the starship fleet led by the Christopher Columbus described at the end of Talents.

After a flight of between 107 and 137 years, during which Imara is placed in DiaPause, a method of suspended animation, she arrives on Bow, which is 11.8 light years away from Earth. Bow can support human life, with plenty of oxygen and water. The planet has no moon, is cooler than Earth, and has days that are just under 20 hours long. The ships have arrived near the equator, where it is warm, wet, and windy and the plan is to build the colony in a river valley. In most versions, Bow has no fauna beyond earthworms and microorganisms and flora that is limited to a slimy moss-like substance. The settlers immediately miss the beauty of Earth, a feeling that is exacerbated by the fact that the colours on Bow are all muted and the atmosphere smelly, varying from being merely unpleasant to smelling like vomit. Two of the three plotlines begin five years after the arrival of the humans, by which time there is a fully functioning settlement and society. The colony is divided into 50 to 60 housing groups of 30 to 100 people each, built in a protective semicircle around their crops and water supply. Each housing group has a communal gathering house at its centre, but the individual houses are inhabited by nuclear families. The aim is to develop the colony by having a new housing group split off from the parental house once a group reaches 100 inhabitants. The minimal governmental functions, including leadership by an Earthseed shaper (clergyperson) and record-keeping by an archivist, are based in a gathering hall, which serves as the community centre. The colony is multinational and multi-ethnic, with each of the colonists being selected for their skill set. By the fifth year, the colony is fully established, with the colonists living off the land. At some time in the future, after Trickster, it will break up, with some housing groups choosing to merge into a town, others developing around industrialised farms, and others adopting pre-industrial gatherer or monastic lifestyles. Once one moves beyond the protagonist and the setting, there is little consistency in the Trickster archive. Three plotlines nonetheless emerge from the notes and fragments, two of which are fairly substantial. I shall consolidate the notes and fragments to produce an account that sacrifices accuracy for coherence.

In the first, which includes a fragment of 47 pages, Imara Lucas Hope is the expedition’s archivist. She was raped by her mother’s partner at the age of 13, became pregnant with his child, was abandoned by the couple, and tried to commit suicide in an orphanage. The unborn baby died, but she survived to be adopted by Olamina. Imara and Olamina became very close as the years progressed and she was appointed ‘Guardian of the Ashes of Lauren Oya Olamina’, which are to be scattered on Bow in an Earthseed funeral on Day 2000 of the arrival of humanity. The narrative begins on that day, in medias res as the community leader, shaper Eric Parnell, appears to lose his mind when he starts shouting nonsense in his opening speech. Imara, waiting to play her part in the ceremony, has a hallucination of the thousands of colonists in the hall panicking, stampeding, and injuring one another in a race to exit. Eric is taken to the clinic and Imara realises that he, she, and the community’s dentist, Luis Huerta, have all had hallucinations. They all seek physical explanations, but none can be found and they have concerns about their sanity, worrying that they may not be able to cope with prolonged exposure to the conditions on Bow (which can support them physically, but perhaps not psychologically). Claire Lawless, Eric’s deputy, and Muir Parnell, Eric’s wife, have also been hallucinating and there is some tension between Claire and Imara. In the following chapter, Imara wakes up the next morning feeling fine, but immediately hallucinates a conversation with Olamina. Seven more people are admitted to the clinic with hallucinations during the day and Imara realises that the community’s psychiatrist, Ross Kuusi, is trying to conceal the fact that he is also hallucinating. Concerns about prolonged exposure to the planet are exacerbated when Imara works out that everyone who has been hallucinating is either part of the last transit crew or the first ground crew, the only people who were awake in the first 100 days of arrival.

In the second plotline, which has more dedicated fragments but of shorter lengths than the first, Imara Wright Drew is the expedition’s psychiatrist. The narrative opens with her awakening from her ‘coffin-sized DiaPause tank’ and gradually recovering her senses and motor control. Imara is part of the first ground crew and the reports from those who have explored Bow are negative: while it can clearly sustain human life everyone has found being on it either disconcerting, unpleasant, or both. Imara finds out that after she was put in her DiaPause tank, her husband, Powell Davidson, changed his mind and decided not to join the Earthseed expedition. She is given a letter from him apologising for his decision and realises that he is now long dead. In the following chapter, Imara begins to regain her strength and other colonists are introduced: Aaron Wen, a shaper; Nissa Swan, an anthropologist; Julian Gamero, a farmer; and others. Imara begins helping other people wake from DiaPause. Three days later, Nissa goes missing. She had previously explored Bow and claimed to have seen an indigenous species. A search party is sent out for her. They find her trail, track her, and quickly locate her corpse at the bottom of a canyon. Imara is asked to attend the scene. As soon as she goes outside she has an hallucination and it will subsequently be suggested that the hallucinations were responsible for both Nissa’s sighting of an indigenous species and her death by falling. Imara starts thinking about adapting to rather than curing the hallucinations, at least in the short term, and this is both the resolution to the plot and the core theme of the narrative.

In the third plotline, which is sketched in the barest detail, Imara Dove Holly is the expedition’s law enforcement agent, the Sheriff of Bow, selected personally by Olamina before the expedition departed. Imara is married to a farmer, Aurio Cruz. When she does not have law enforcement duties to fulfil, she assists both her husband and the colony’s archivist. Five years after the colonist’s arrival someone sets a fire outside the largest greenhouse of the Rose Housing Group, causing considerable damage. When Imara begins her investigation, she has her first hallucination and subsequently learns that many people are hallucinating frequently. There is a second fire, in consequence of which one of the colonists is killed. The ubiquity of the hallucinations make the case almost impossible to solve, but Imara eventually finds a way to make use of the hallucinations to detect the arsonist while the medical professions continue to seek a cure. Strangely, given the amount of relative detail provided, there is no suggestion of a central theme in the archivist’s plot. The strongest suggestion is in the psychiatrist plot, in which the solution to the problem of the hallucinations is not to ‘cure’ or overcome them, but to accept them as one of the features of life on Bow in order to minimise their impact on everyday life. The sheriff’s plot goes even further, suggesting that the hallucinations are not just a phenomenon that human beings can live with, but a phenomenon that can actually be exploited for gains of some sort. There is an allusion to this idea in the archivist’s plot, in which the narrator reflects that ‘two of the most important tenets of Earthseed were foresight and adaptability’ before Parnell addresses the community about their adaptation to life on Bow. In the context of the other plotlines and extracts, the double emphasis on adaptation immediately prior to Parnell’s very public hallucination may well be an instance of foreshadowing the resolution to come: adaptation rather than cure.

The theme of adaptation is developed in Butler’s notes by means of two concepts or metaphors, the xenograft and the trickster. A xenograft is an interspecies transplant and she described the story as one in which people xenograft humanity onto a new world whose immune system tries to expel them. The resistance of Bow to humanity is the sense in which the planet itself is the trickster of the title and parable and the hallucinations suffered by those with prolonged exposure to the planet are the most dangerous means by which it tries to expel them. Butler was explicit as to the planet’s trickery, ‘a world that seems to be one thing (dull, drab, and harmless) and is something else entirely.’ Her planned conclusion to the novel was that the colonists would be forced to make a choice, ‘to try to hold on to what they were as normal human beings on Earth or to allow the change they have both fought and adapted to for years to continue.’ She also wrote that in the end Bow ‘will adopt them and they will be of it.’ As a sequel to both Sower and Talents, this theme is completely consistent consistent with the Earthseed principle of ‘God is change’ and Olamina’s insistence on employing it as a guide to one’s life. To return to the biblical parable, the human beings on Bow cannot retain their human form of life on Bow, but must develop and establish a new form of life that is adapted to the planet on which they have chosen to live. This also provides a neat juxtaposition to the dark note at the end of Talents, in which the starship is revealed to have been named the Christopher Columbus, predicting that the form of life in the extraterrestrial colony will be as unjust and unsustainable as it was in terrestrial colonies. As such, it seems as if Trickster was intended to proceed through conflict and tragedy to a conclusion with life-affirming meaning. As Butler writes: ‘The community will suffer greatly at the hands of the hallucinations, but eventually pull through.’

Butler had little more than premises for the second half of the series. The colony would divide into two in Parable of the Teacher, with one group determined to adapt to the planet and the other determined to conquer it. Parable of Chaos would see the rise of ‘an absolute Stalinesque figure’ whose every word and whim is passed into law by his sycophantic followers. Finally, in Parable of Clay, humanity would not only have adapted to life on the new planet, but actually evolved into a new species or subspecies. The themes the four novels set on Bow would explore would be the roles of creativity and repression in adaptation to the environment and new ways of being human that revealed marginalised aspects of humanity. Butler suffered from high blood pressure in her final years and died following a fall while walking in Lake Forest Park, in Seattle, at the age of 58. She became the first Black woman to be a published science fiction writer when Doubleday released her first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976. Along with Samuel R. Delany, she is recognised as inaugurating Afrofuturism as a literary movement. As far as the continued relevance of her work, Butler’s Earthseed novels are only matched by Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 feature film, Children of Men, and the eight seasons of HBO’s Game of Thrones, released from 2011 to 2019.

The Last Days of New Paris | review by Rafe McGregor

The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville, Picador, paperback, £9.00, 23 February 2017, ISBN 9781447296553

China Miéville has been publishing speculative fiction for the better part of three decades, beginning with King Rat in 1998. In the course of this career, he has become known as the foremost exponent of the New Weird, rivalled only by Jeff VanderMeer, and last year he published The Book of Elsewhere, co-authored with none other than Keanu Reeves. I defined the New Weird as philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the alienation within ourselves in Weird Fiction, Old, New, and In-Between, also published last year. It is difficult to avoid appreciating The Last Days of New Paris in one of two misleading contexts. The first is as an Axis victory alternative history along the lines of Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle or Len Deighton’s 1978 SS-GB, both of which have been released as popular television series, the former in 2015 and the latter in 2017. Miéville weaves two narratives together – one set in a recognisable France of 1941 and the other in an unrecognisable Paris of 1950 – and populates each with a mix of real and fictional people, but does not invite one to ruminate on the possible consequences of, for example, Franklin Roosevelt’s assassination (Dick) or a Luftwaffe victory in the Battle of Britain (Deighton). Instead, the geopolitics that led up to and followed on from the ‘S-Blast’ (presumably ‘surrealist blast’), the explosion that both created living manifestations of surrealist works of art and opened the gates of hell, are for the most part circumstantial. The second context, which may be related to the first, is to see the novella as a response to the global rise of nationalism, often in extreme forms, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but it is neither a call for political resistance nor a naïve allegory of art’s revolutionary power.

The Last Days of New Paris consists of nine chapters, with the odd numbers devoted to events in the 1950 present and the even numbers to events in the 1941 past. The story is followed by an afterword and a notes section and my only criticism concerns the inclusion of this supplementary material. The afterword is subtitled ‘On Coming to Write The Last Days of New Paris’ and constitutes a curious conceit in which Miéville claims to have met Thibaut, the fictional protagonist of 1950, and to have merely edited the manuscript passed to him. This was a common device in Victorian fiction, but contemporary readers require no such faux guarantees and the superfluity is exacerbated by Miéville’s reference to non-existent sketches he has (not) included. The notes are explanations of the artworks referred to in the narrative and feel gratuitous in an age where reader research is almost effortless. Miéville’s textual representations of these works are a seamless merging of the realistic with the oneiric and his expert evocation of the pervasive sense of the strange that is New Paris equips the reader with all he or she requires to experience the intense pleasure afforded by the novella.

New Paris is Paris after the S-Blast, which occurred in 1941. In Miéville’s alternative Europe, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) – the German drive to the Channel in May 1940 – was sufficient to cause the collapse of France, making Fall Rot (Case Red, the push west and south the following month) unnecessary. The S-Blast transformed Paris from a city of occupation to a city of resistance, with various French factions rising up against the Germans and the ‘battalions from below’ rising up to join the chaos. The resistance includes the Free French, led by Charles de Gaulle and backed by the United States, and the Main à plume, the surrealist irregulars, some of whom (like Thibaut) have been able to harness the power released by the detonation. The most significant effect of the S-Blast was not the release of hell’s minions (who show only a passing interest in the city), but to create the living manifestations of surrealist artworks, ‘manifs’, that roam the streets either on their own or under the less than perfect command of surrealist or SS handlers. By 1950 the Germans have sealed the ‘city become free-fire zone and hunting grounds for the impossible’ and are attempting to destroy the resisters by all available means, including the control of manifs and devils and the creation of manifs of their own, using the work of Nazi artists like Arno Breker. The S-Blast has of course given literal meaning to metaphors such as art coming to life, having a life of its own, and being a form of life.

The Last Days of New Paris is an extraordinarily original work that underscores Miéville’s considerable ingenuity and innovation. The opening scene is wildly fantastic, a suicidal charge by the Vélo – the manifestation of Leonora Carrington’s I am an Amateur of Velocipedes (1941), a bicycle-woman centaur – at the German lines. There is also a satisfyingly overdetermined symmetry in the work’s design as the onset is bookended by the appearance of Fall Rot, a Panzer III-giant man centaur, in the first stage of the story’s tripartite climax. The symmetry is superbly complex: in the same way that science and the supernatural are the dual interests of Jack Parsons, the real-life protagonist of the 1941 narrative, so Fall Rot has been created by the combination of the biological experimentation of Josef Mengele and the perverted faith of Robert Alesch, a Catholic priest who collaborated with the Nazis. In a further parallel, both of the plots begin with the arrival of an American on the scene, Parsons in Vichy Marseilles in 1941 and an American photojournalist named Sam in the free part of Paris in 1950. Sam is researching her own book, The Last Days of New Paris, a photographic essay-within-a-novella that pays homage to Dick’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy novel-within-a-novel.

Miéville is too sophisticated a writer to promote a conception of art as essentially opposed to oppression and his mention of Breker and the second part of the climax (which I shall not reveal) shows that he is well aware of the variety of ends art can serve. While Breton’s surrealism provided a Marxist opposition to European fascism and American Fordism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurism provided active and enthusiastic support for Mussolini and the fascist sympathies of many prominent modernists are well documented. Miéville is concerned with surrealism in particular over and above art more generally because movements like surrealism (and now New Weird) resist nationalism and elitism in virtue of being politico-artistic movements in the first instance. Surrealism is not an artistic movement in the service of Marxism, but a Marxist artistic movement. As such, The Last Days of New Paris calls for a revolt in art rather than a revolt in politics, for integrating politics into art rather than employing art as a means to political ends. The link from New Paris to the contemporary world comes in the perfectly pitched anti-climax with which the narrative concludes, as Thibaut takes it upon himself to write his own book, to start ‘from scratch, redo history, make it mine.’ In Thibaut’s return to the fray to write his revolution, Miéville urges readers to their own artistic revolt, to the reconception of art as essentially rather than circumstantially political and the New Weird as essentially rather than circumstantially resistant to nationalism, elitism, and related mass harms.

Apologies and scheduling: TQF in 2025

A quick note to apologise to everyone who has sent in submissions for issues 78 to 81 and is waiting for me to do my bit. The magazine isn't dead, don't worry, work is progressing, albeit slowly, on them all, but my daytime work has been keeping me busy in the evenings too, so I've been struggling to finish things off.

I'm past the worst of that now, though, and I'll be cracking on with all the outstanding work needed on TQF. Most of the next three issues are already typeset and waiting to be proofread, while my co-editor John and my co-habitee Mrs Theaker have been assiduously reading new submissions, and Douglas Ogurek has been hard at work at the next Unsplatterpunk! special.

It seems sensible to close submissions for regular issues until October, since there's no point adding more to the queue just yet. But submissions to Unsplatterpunk! 8 are open till the end of April.

So, my plan for the year is now to put out an issue of TQF monthly until I am all caught up, working through the issues already in hand, and slotting Unsplatterpunk! 8 in when it's ready.

My apologies again to everyone. Each time I said I was hoping to have the next issue ready at the weekend or by the end of the month, I genuinely did mean it, but I ended up having to put other things first. Don't get me wrong, I've been loving my work this year, but by the end of the day I was too worn out to do much more than read manga and play a bit of Monster Train. I haven't finished a single novel yet this year!

Finally, I have to express my gratitude to Douglas Ogurek and Rafe McGregor, who have kept the lights on here with reviews and articles while I've been slacking off.