Parable of the Sower

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Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993 - Fiction - 299 pages
Parable of the Sower is the Butlerian odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of "hyperempathy"&...which causes her to feel others&' pain as her own&...sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.

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About the author (1993)

Science-fiction writer and novelist Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947. She earned as Associate of Arts degree from Pasadena City College in 1968 and later attended California State University and the University of California. Her first novel, Patternmaster, was the first in a series about a society run by a group of telepaths who are mentally linked to one another. She explored the topics of race, poverty, politics, religion, and human nature in her works. She won a Hugo Award in 1984 for her short story Speech Sounds and a Hugo Award and Nebula Award in 1985 for her novella Bloodchild. She received a MacArthur Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The award pays $295,000 over a five-year period to creative people who push the boundaries of their fields. She died in Lake Forest Park, Washington on February 24, 2006 at the age of 58.

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