Andromeda’s Reviews > Parable of the Sower > Status Update

“It’s better to teach people than to scare them”

“‘These things frighten people. It’s best not to talk about them.’

‘But… that’s like ignoring a fire in the living room because we’re all in the kitchen and besides, house fires are too scary to talk about.’”

It’s giving “don’t talk about sex, religion, and politics”

lesson from a banned book: dialectics

“‘People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the good old days to come back.’

‘Your father says he doesn't believe people changed the climate in spite of what scientists say. He says only God could change the world in such an important way…

‘My father has his blind spots… He's the best person I know, but even he has blind spots.’

“The police…may be able to avenge you, but they can’t protect you.”

Maturing is realizing the police, by definition, do not exist to prevent crime.

“Donner has a plan for putting people back to work. He hopes to get laws changed, suspend ‘overly restrictive’ minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws…

Will it be legal to poison, mutilate, or infect people— as long as you provide them with food, water, and space to die?”

Octavia Butler was out here predicting Project 2025 in the 90s damn

“Hey, we can run a space station, a station on the moon, and soon, a colony on Mars. That proves we're still a great, forward-looking, powerful nation, right?“

sounds familiar.

“Old Testament… God sounds a lot like Zeus-a super-powerful man, playing with his toys the way my youngest brothers play with toy soldiers. Bang, bang! Seven toys fall dead. If theyre yours, you make the rules. Who cares what the toys think. Wipe out a toy's family, then give it a brand new fam-ily. Toy children, like Job's children, are interchangeable.

Maybe God is a kind of big kid, playing with his toys.”

There are over 700 known dead so far. One hurricane. And how many people has it hurt? How many are going to starve later because of destroyed crops? That's nature. Is it God? Most of the dead are the street poor who have nowhere to go and who don't hear the warnings until it's too late for their feet to take them to safety. Where's safety for them anyway? Is it a sin against God to be poor?

“A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.”

“I saw at least three people who weren't going to wake up again, ever. One of them was headless. I caught myself looking around for the head.”

The casual way she says this is so shocking to me.

Then again, many people are casual about roadkill, even though it’s chilling to me every time I see an animal dead in such a violent way.