It's late summer, 2024. Climate change is wrecking California with forest fires, beach erosion and storms. A populist is about to win the presidential election. The country is descending into violent conflict over race, religion, class. Those who have hide behind private armies and reinstated indenture, those who have not starve in the streets, and those in the middle hide behind whatever walls they can put up and wait for the day they come crashing down.

It's a 1993 novel, btw.

The Parable of the Sower is an astounding novel in a lot of ways, and any prescience it might have for our times is really the least of it. A dystopia that has to find utopia not in violence or in organisation but in community around a common ideal, where empathy is a terrible double-edged sword when you're forced to show it to your oppressors, what we can trust when we can't trust anything. More than once, I'm thinking this might be the US version of Watership Down. That's not idle praise from me.

That said, I feel like it loses a lot of momentum in the last third. Not because the danger to our characters diminishes the more the world breaks around them - not from plague, not from war, just from the chaos of society eating itself - we just get stuck in a loop of walking, finding new recruits, walking, finding new recruits, etc. Very strong 4/5, and I'm open to raising it.