SOURCE: "Future Tense," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. XI, Nos. 10 and 11, July, 1994, pp. 37-8.

In the following review, Zaki asserts the utopian potential of the dystopian society Butler sets forth in Parable of the Sower, and ponders the possibility of a sequel to the novel.

Octavia E. Butler has not lost her capacity to imagine horrifying societies set in the near future. Her Clay's Ark (1984), a work of science fiction set in California, describes the spread of an extraterrestrial organism that changes its human carriers to something other than human. In Parable of the Sower, her tenth novel. Butler returns to some of the ideas she explored in Clay's Ark. Here, in a novel written in the form of a journal and not billed as science fiction. Butler describes California in the years 2024 and 2025 through the eyes of a young black woman, Lauren Olamina.

It is not...