Specimen FL-01.0010
Lauren Oya Olamina is fifteen and lives behind a wall in Robledo, twenty miles from Los Angeles, in a cul-de-sac of families who grow their own food and take turns on night watch. Outside the wall, water costs more than gasoline, a drug called pyro makes watching a fire better than sex, and the country has not so much collapsed as stopped being maintained. Lauren has hyperempathy syndrome, a delusion inherited from her mother's drug use: she feels the pain she sees, which in a world this violent is a disability she has to hide. Her father is a Baptist minister. She has quietly stopped believing what he believes, and is writing her own scripture, Earthseed, whose first lines say that God is Change and whose Destiny is to take root among the stars. When the wall fails and the neighborhood burns, Lauren walks north up the freeway with two survivors, Harry Baiter and Zahra Moss, gathering strangers as she goes and teaching them Earthseed on the road. One of them is Taylor Franklin Bankole, a doctor decades older who owns land in the north. The novel ends with the group burying its dead, planting oak trees, and naming the place Acorn. It never argues that the religion is true, only that it holds people together.
The Fiction Laboratory pairs science fiction novels with structured reading packets for science and English classes. This is the companion page for this title: where to find the book, every source behind its packet with live links, and any correction made since the packet was printed.
Your public library. Search the catalog or ask at the desk. It is widely held and it moves, so expect a hold on a popular copy. Interlibrary loan is free if your branch does not carry it.
Libby. libbyapp.com. Library ebooks and audiobooks on a phone or tablet, free with a library card. Both formats are usually available.
Open Library. openlibrary.org. Free borrowing accounts, one copy out at a time, no library card needed.
Your school library. More likely to hold it than the 1993 publication date suggests. The Parable novels returned to bestseller lists in the 2020s and collections were restocked.
Not the novel. It was published in 1993 and is in copyright. Anything offering a free download is pirating it. The library is the free route, and for this title it is a good one.
But Butler's own essay is free. "Positive Obsession", her account of her childhood and of becoming a writer, is hosted in full by the Library of America. About 2,500 words, and the source for much of what the packet's author section says. Worth reading before the novel.
Bookshop.org. bookshop.org/9780446675505. Orders send the money to independent bookstores rather than to a warehouse. That is the Warner paperback, the edition this packet was read and checked against.
Your local bookshop. Any independent store can order it within a few days.
Bookshop.org links here are affiliate links. A purchase through one earns the Laboratory a small commission, paid by Bookshop out of its own margin and never added to your price. Borrowing is listed first for a reason, and it is still free.
It is a journal, and there is no other narrator. Lauren Olamina writes dated entries between July 2024 and October 2027, each headed by a short verse from a religion she is inventing as she goes. Everything a reader knows, they know because a teenager wrote it down. Readers who expect a novel to step back and explain the world will wait a long time, because nobody in the book is in a position to.
It is the hardest book in this library, and a teacher should read it before assigning it. Sexual violence is constant in the background of the world and is referred to repeatedly, including against a child, though it is almost never depicted on the page. Children die, among them the narrator's brothers. There is cannibalism, glimpsed and turned away from, along with drug addiction, arson, and a great deal of ordinary violence done by and to teenagers. None of it is gratuitous or lingered over. In the last third the eighteen-year-old narrator begins a relationship with a man of fifty-seven, an objection the novel puts in his own mouth before a reader can raise it. Decide in advance how you will handle a disclosure.
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents. The direct sequel, and the book that won her the Nebula.
Everything in the packet is built on real research, and most of it is free. If a claim sparks a question, go to the source and check it yourself. That is the whole idea.
Banissy, Michael J., and Jamie Ward. "Mirror-Touch Synesthesia Is Linked with Empathy." Nature Neuroscience, vol. 10, no. 7, 2007, pp. 815-816.
Two pages, and the paper this packet rests on. Ten people with the condition against forty-five controls, and a result narrower than the title suggests. Read the table.
Ward, Jamie, and Michael J. Banissy. "Explaining Mirror-Touch Synesthesia." Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 6, nos. 2-3, 2015, pp. 118-147.
The field reviewing itself eight years later. The source of the prevalence figure and the two competing explanations, and a good model of an unsettled question in print.
Bell, Gerald D., and Alan N. Basist. "The Global Climate of December 1992-February 1993. Part I: Warm ENSO Conditions Continue in the Tropical Pacific; California Drought Abates." Journal of Climate, vol. 7, no. 10, 1994, pp. 1581-1605.
Not a retrospective: the weather written down as Butler finished the book, and the drought behind the novel's water politics ending in the season it was published.
Frank, Deborah A., et al. "Growth, Development, and Behavior in Early Childhood Following Prenatal Cocaine Exposure: A Systematic Review." JAMA, vol. 285, no. 12, 2001, pp. 1613-1625.
The paper that dismantled the crack baby panic, and the reason The Lawbreaker's first item is more than a correction. Reviewed together, the studies show damage tracking the child's circumstances rather than the drug.
Clausen, Daniel D. "Cli-Fi Georgic and Grassroots Mutual Aid in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower." Western American Literature, vol. 56, nos. 3-4, 2021-22, pp. 269-286.
The reading this packet follows, and the best argument in print against calling the book prophetic. A georgic is writing about work, and Clausen shows how much of this novel is work.
Calvin, Ritch. "An Octavia E. Butler Bibliography (1976-2008)." Utopian Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 2008, pp. 485-516.
Everything she published and much of what was written about her. Use it to settle a publication fact rather than trusting a search result.
"A Biography of Octavia E. Butler." Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler, Open Road Integrated Media, 2012.
The publisher's life of Butler, at the back of the ebook edition. Source for the two o'clock alarm, the potato chip inspecting and Devil Girl from Mars. Free with the book.
Butler, Octavia E. "Positive Obsession." Bloodchild and Other Stories, Seven Stories Press, 1996. First published as "Birth of a Writer," Essence, vol. 20, May 1989.
Butler on her own childhood, and the source for most of The Author: her mother's day work, the discarded books, and the two o'clock alarm in her own words. Free from the Library of America.
Banissy, Michael J., and Jamie Ward. "Mirror-Touch Synesthesia Is Linked with Empathy." Nature Neuroscience, vol. 10, no. 7, 2007. nature.com/neuro
Ward, Jamie, and Michael J. Banissy. "Explaining Mirror-Touch Synesthesia." Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 6, nos. 2-3, 2015. Published with commentaries from other researchers and the authors' reply, which is worth reading as a record of a live disagreement. tandfonline.com
Bell, Gerald D., and Alan N. Basist. "The Global Climate of December 1992-February 1993. Part I." Journal of Climate, vol. 7, no. 10, 1994. journals.ametsoc.org
Clausen, Daniel D. "Cli-Fi Georgic and Grassroots Mutual Aid in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower." Western American Literature, vol. 56, nos. 3-4, 2021-22. jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27117988
Phillips, Jerry. "The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 35, nos. 2-3, 2002. read.dukeupress.edu
Calvin, Ritch. "An Octavia E. Butler Bibliography (1976-2008)." Utopian Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 2008. jstor.org
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment, Policymakers Summary. 1990. What was actually established three years before the novel, including the explicit statement that confidence in regional detail was low. ipcc.ch
Frank, Deborah A., et al. "Growth, Development, and Behavior in Early Childhood Following Prenatal Cocaine Exposure." JAMA, vol. 285, no. 12, 2001. jamanetwork.com
Octavia E. Butler Papers. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The finding aid is public and searchable even where the material itself is not. huntington.org
Butler, Octavia E. "Positive Obsession." Bloodchild and Other Stories, 1996; first published as "Birth of a Writer," Essence, May 1989. Full text free from the Library of America's Story of the Week. loa.org
"A Biography of Octavia E. Butler." Parable of the Sower, Open Road Integrated Media, 2012. The publisher's life of Butler, printed at the back of the ebook edition and free with it.
Octavia E. Butler, official site. Maintained by her estate. Biography, bibliography and awards, and the source for the two o'clock writing habit quoted in the packet. octaviabutler.com
"Octavia E. Butler Landing." NASA named the Perseverance rover's Mars landing site after Butler in March 2021. The novel's narrator takes a dead Mars astronaut as her model, which makes this a pleasing coincidence and nothing more; it is not a claim of influence. mars.nasa.gov
Nothing yet. When a link here dies or a finding is superseded, the correction is posted here rather than left wrong in print.
Eight documents as PDFs, in two archives: the complete packet, and a student set holding only the four documents a class should see. Yours to use with every class you teach, this year and every year after. No subscription and no account.
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Last reviewed 2026-09-20 · Specimen FL-01.0010