Review the Tech: Parable of the Sower
What does the technology depicted in the story tell us about ourselves?
I read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower on the recommendation of a friend. I have long wanted to get into graphic novels and so I asked a few of my friends for graphic novels they thought were good. I have not read the original novel Parable of the Sower, just the graphic novel, though I will be reading the book in the future. Still from what I’ve seen, the graphic novel is a faithful adaption from the novel and so for the sake of my reviewing the technology in the book, the graphic novel will suffice.
For those of you who don’t know, Parable of the Sower is a post-apocalyptic novel that highlights elements of climate change, crisis profiteering, and social unrest/social injustice. Butler does this by detailing the life of Lauren Oya Olamina, who, due to the consequences of her birth developed a hyper-empathy condition. While its not my intent to review the narrative or artistic quality in this series. I do want to take a second to say that this graphic novel was a marvelous read and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who is looking for well-rounded post-apocalypse narrative.
Characterizing the technology in Parable of the Sower becomes an interesting challenge as instead of any particular technology, we are instead dealing with the absence of technology. The theme for Parable of the Sower, from a technology perspective, is the failure of infrastructure in the face of a brittle social fabric. What I mean in characterizing this theme is that in this world, there hasn’t been any event that has enabled all technology inert, nor has it been so long in this story that people simply don’t remember the technology. Instead, rising inequality, perhaps brought on by climate change, though that wasn’t explicit—so they are more than likely compounding factors than anything—has made accessing the infrastructure of technology untenable. And it is this confluence of factors that has created post-apocalyptic conditions.
It was mentioned many times over that the price for was simply too high and often too dangerous to obtain. You can see it in the following panel from page 12:
And, perhaps because of this rising price of water, or the general inaccessibility of it, we see a new service emerge, the water station (pages 165-166).
Because the quality of water may not be able to be guaranteed by other means, companies developed a service stations for water, for a cost. These stations are generally unsafe, as people who congregate to these stations have money, and with minimal means of protecting the public, lives are at risk at these locations. A friend of mine who I read a draft of this told me that this was much a return to the old danger of the watering hole, where animals such as gazelles and the like would have to be on high alert while drinking water from a lake or river in case a predator is nearby. This is when they can be most vulnerable however.
This factor highlights another service that is less technological and more a byproduct of poor water infrastructure: water peddlers, and as is mentioned in the above panel, their quality was much less certain. This is because of a third curiosity in this narrative, rampant illiteracy.
Illiteracy in this world seems to be much more prevalent. In fact, outside of major settlements, illiteracy seems to be the standard. This too is a failure of another kind of infrastructure: Education infrastructure.
You might think, that given the present set of problems, that scientific progress would be impossible. This is not the case though. Instead, there is a depiction of a more or less successful landing on Mars.
This is a clear example of the scientific capability of the US within the narrative, even as factors worsen. (Note: the astronaut wishing to be buried on Mars is ultimately not allowed to be buried there due to concerns that her remains would somehow contaminate Mars). Infrastructure fails, for some, and meanwhile allows for significant technological and scientific advancement for others. Progress in the face of such abysmal conditions is of course unjust. It highlights a nearly two different worlds that rely on each other to exist. It is the kind of reality that allows communities to be burned down without so much as a timely fire department response. These services, after all, are to be paid by the communities now.
What do we learn in all of this? First, that a failure of infrastructure does not look like a failure of science and technology progress. The science and technology mechanisms that we have built between academia and supposedly public organizations can advance despite social and economic downturn. This should be common sense to us. How many despotic, oppressive regimes can we list off that have made advancements in, say nuclear weapons technology? It might be easy to say that government corruption or some other such boogeyman created this situation. I don’t have evidence within the graphic novel particularly of what caused this situation. Clearly climate change plays a role, but it can’t be the whole story. And rather than attribute this infrastructural failure to actions on an individual, it makes for better analysis and seems more in line with the text to say that it was a number of well meaning (within degrees) decisions and inactions that lead to this scenario.
We can point to governmental failures easy, but as it seems as though many of these functions have become privatized (why else would one pay for firefighting or police services?) we cannot, at the infrastructural level blame the government. The massive privatization of most services in at least America, which is the only country we really get a glimpse of in this narrative, must be indicative of something larger. This is where I have to become speculative, as Butler doesn’t make this statement at all, but this privatization seems to be a response to climate change. I say this because we’re currently see this play out. In response to climate change, we are seeing a rising private intervention in various parts of the climate response. Including, interestingly enough climate risk insurance. The idea underpinning this is the classic refrain that companies would be able to respond faster and with more quality, products and services for the public, for a fee of course.
The further concentration of wealth as a response to this privatization makes sense, and it also makes sense that by privatizing massive portions of the government, that the government would be able to spend more toward science and technology progress to go to Mars, for example.
Parable of the Sower, from the perspective of technology, shows us a few interesting realities. It shows us legitimate concerns of over-privatization, or at least the troubles of having brittle infrastructures. Two, it shows that one person’s apocalypse is another’s trip to Mars even if you do end up dying there. A country does not have to be prosperous to advance science and technology, and the well-being of the public is by no means mandatory for science and technology’s advancement.
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