mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

In this sequel to Parable of the Sower, things get a lot worse before they get better.

I liked this book much less than the first one, and I don't just mean it wasn't really what I wanted to read right now but I felt obligated since I'd been on the library hold list for so long (though that was also admittedly an issue). I found that many things about it were not believable and raised (I think) unintended questions about the plot and the general messaging of the series.

rambling spoilers (cn: fascism, rape)

- The US takes a hard turn into Christianist fascism, which leads to everyone in Lauren's growing "heathen" community being arrested and sent to reeducation camps to be tortured, brainwashed, raped, etc. I understand, narratively, why something like this had to happen; now that Lauren's mission is well-developed and she's had some success with it, it has to be severely tested. She loses everything—her community, her husband, her daughter, her freedom—but she still doesn't give up. But the violence was too extreme for me to read, so I only got the gist of what was going on in the middle section of the book, therefore my opinions on the book as a whole may be taken with a grain of salt.

- It seemed implausible to me that Lauren would be able to keep writing in a journal during this period and that it would survive for her daughter to find later, thus allowing the novel's framing story to conveniently continue uninterrupted. But maybe that was explained in a part that I skimmed or skipped.

- I was surprised that Lauren's "hyperempathy" is now characterized as a delusional disorder. In the first book I assumed she actually had psychic powers. It's sf, so why not? The explicit rejection of that interpretation here makes me wonder if Butler realized from reader responses that it wasn't clear in the first book, and felt she really had to hammer home that that wasn't what she meant.

- I had problems with the arc with Lauren's brother. We thought he died in the first book, but he actually survived and was sold into sex slavery. Lauren rescues him but he rejects her religious teachings and joins the fundamentalists instead. The issue I had with this is the revelation that he is gay. For me this put a very weird spin on everything about his storyline—the fact that he's the only important male character who's sexually abused, the constant reiterations of how pretty he is, the religious conflicts between him and Lauren, and how he tries to prevent Lauren from finding her daughter. The presentation of this character felt stereotyped and exploitative to me.

- I also didn't really buy into a lot of things about the eventual global triumph of Earthseed. It's pretty hand-wavey and actually seems too easy after all that's happened. Like, the solution to religious fascism is to just kind of wait until people realize it isn't solving their problems and get tired of it, so they'll be more receptive to your diametrically opposed religious philosophy instead? I am skeptical, and the lack of detail and decades-long time skip seem designed to dodge hard questions about how this would really work. (Come on, give us something we can use!)

- Although the book roundly condemns religious fanaticism, Lauren's fantasy of every child being raised to believe in Earthseed actually strikes an alarming chord of religious intolerance. In her scriptures she writes "embrace diversity or be destroyed" but it does not sound like pluralism is what she really wants. She wants everyone to think like she does, which makes the "destroyed" part come off more like a threat than a statement of moral principle. You can't just be like, it's bad for those other religions to demand conformity, but it's okay for me because my religion happens to be The Truth. All zealots think that! This is partly why religious reforms tend to face the problem that after they topple existing power structures, instead of creating an antiauthoritarian utopia they just calcify into new power structures. This book didn't do enough to convince me that Earthseed would be any different. (It's a little convenient, don't you think, that Lauren's husband gets killed off pretty early in the book, since he's the one who begins to voice some of these concerns?)

- But maybe I'm not giving Butler enough credit. She intended to write more books in this series and never finished them, so we don't know what her plans were. I will say that these two books don't feel incomplete as a duology since they at least follow Lauren's personal story to the end. We just don't know how her reforms will hold up and what happens to the incipient space colonies.

- In the end, I was not sure what the book wants us to think about Lauren and her choices. She achieved her dream, but her daughter argues that she sacrificed her relationship with her family for it, so it's a hollow victory in that way. But I suppose Lauren herself couldn't rightfully complain about the way the book presents her; after all, she's the one who insisted that Earthseed sermons should end with a debate!