Set in July 2024, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was written in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. According to Craig Laurance Gidney, after being accused of using a counterfeit bill at the grocery store, Butler was swarmed and detained by police officers. The ordeal inspired the second novel in her Parables series: Parable of the Talents.
Despite apocalypse, the Sower’s police system remains intact. It serves capitalism, not the people. Citizens pay cops to respond to crime. Literal walls separate the unhoused and poor from everyone else.
In “Talents,” a paramilitary group carries out incarceration, policing, and chattel slavery. The town’s citizens wear surveillance collars monitored by the police. The authorities inflict pain upon anyone trying to evade forced labor or escape.
As the protagonist, Lauren, comments, “Even if the cops came today instead of tomorrow they would only add to the death toll.” Still, elders trust and rely on police. The system is violent, but it’s all they’ve ever known. “I wonder what a badge is, other than a license to steal,” Lauren says. “What did it used to be to make people … want to trust it?”
Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist vision doesn’t condemn us to an apocalypse. It’s a cautionary tale. The police system has only been emboldened by increased militarization and impunity. But there’s still time to reimagine and build the future we’d rather have.