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.