Road to Dystopia

     This life is the epitome of luxury, though it teeters on the threshold of desperation.  It was an uncomfortable dichotomy of feeling mercifully yet momentarily safe while absolute chaos emerges nearby that I took away from reading Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower.  I had no idea what to expect from the book initially.  I was in the local library, perusing the shelves for a sci-fi book that wasn't as much sci-fi as it was literature; i.e. something that would, for thematic reasons, be necessarily categorized as 'sci-fi' but was essentially just a very well written story about weighty issues worthy of contemplation, as opposed to an action packed spaceship/alien adventure.
    I suppose it is a bit like online dating.  You know you are seeking this specific type of individual who is a "genre outlier" but all you have at your disposal are some profile pictures and if you click on them you can see a short blurb about them.

"The library is closing in ten minutes.  Please bring your final selections to the circulation desk.  It is now too late to apply for a library card."

 

 

  So I did the inevitable, the unavoidable, the ethically unthinkable...I judged books by their covers.  I weeded out any sporting spacecraft.  I alienated aliens.  I demoted any featuring fancy future military insignia.  For some reason, our library combines sci-fi and fantasy so I had to slay a few dragons too.  But then I saw it, a very unassuming book, pages slightly yellowed and dogeared, with a cover featuring a hand holding a book.  It didn't even look like a sci-fi book.  I didn't read the blurb on the back cover but I did read the first paragraph and the writing was clearly on point.

     Parable of the Sower is an eloquently written and absolutely harrowing story that grips you from the first chapter and doesn't relent; I actually read all 350-ish pages in one weekend, unable to put the book down because I was so concerned for what would happen to the characters in their precarious world.  This is one of the most plausible dystopian scenarios I have ever read or seen, rife with the effects of global warming (it was written in the mid 1990s), unchecked corruption and corporate greed, and the extreme results of societal distrust that has emerged as the zeitgeist of our past decade.  The narrator is an intelligent and pragmatic teenager living in a gated community outside of Los Angeles.  By gated community, I mean a neighborhood that has a huge wall around it, topped with broken glass and "Lazor" wire in an attempt to keep out not only rampant arsonists and other violent criminals but also the large homeless population who are forced to scavenge for their basic needs. 
    In high school I remember reading such cautionary tales as Brave New World and 1984 but Parable of the Sower seems much more likely and therefore, more frighteningly poignant.  It is a disturbing reminder of what happens when people are pushed to the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: what choices they are forced to make from there and of how much life they are denied access.