Research Question:

How does Parable of the Sower’s representation of the 2020s portray a future based off of trends of the average American life in the 1990s?

Research Process:

1. I first had to research about the United States in the 1990s as a whole and then went on to research about California in the 1990s, as that was where the setting of the book is.
2. After that, I used Google Scholar, OneSearch and JStor to look for sources. While doing this I found that a good number of these sources would be shown on each website which did not help in finding new sources. Keywords I used were: 1990s, 20th century, 21st century, change, future, social inequality, crime, illiteracy, drugs, addiction, and climate change.

Sources:

Despite 10:04 being a novel, which makes it fiction, the story is written in such a way that it seems like it could be non-fiction. The novel does this by making the events in the story very ordinary and relatable. It starts off with our main character who has a real heart disease, Marfan. As the story goes on, we see popular places that exist in New York appear in the story, such as the High Line, Prospect Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To further solidify the feeling of the story being nonfiction, we see references to real life events that happened, with the first being 9/11. “‘When all the skyscrapers freeze they’re going to fall down like September eleventh,.’ he said in his typically cheerful tone, but more quietly, ‘and crush everyone’ (12). Shortly after that they mentioned global warming and Kony 2012 which kind of startled me because of how recent these events were. I then found out that this book was published in 2014 and then the reality started to hit. It has been nearly a decade since this book was published and there was has been little to no change in our fight against climate change which has started a long time ago. In fact majority of the events in the story seem like they could have happened today or tomorrow which is kind of scary knowing that it’s been many years since we knew of our approaching demise, yet we have not changed at all. As we go deeper and deeper it all the experiences within the story remind me of more recent experiences that we have had. On page 16 where it talks about shutting down the subway system because of a storm, it reminded me of September 29th when there was huge rainfall and caused the entire subway system to shut down. A couple of pages later on page 18 they mention people panic buying and there not being enough stock of certain items for everyone. All of these scenarios that are shown in the story could be seen as predictions of the future if we didn’t change anything about our climate. Unfortunately it seems that we have not changed at all which makes this story all the more relatable as some of these events in the story are so similar to what we have went through that it feels like the novel has predicted everything. In chapter 2, we find out that there is an author that is also trying to write a novel. This is where it started to feel like an autobiography, and that 10:04 is possibly based off of Ben Lerner’s own experiences living in New York. That would help explain the use of very specific locations that exist in our world and also further gives the feeling of familiarity and no change, as someone who has lived in New York for majority of their lives would know and possibly visited these places and have yet to see any of them ever change from the way we know them.

How does Parable of the Sower’s representation of the mid 2020s compare to our present and future?

While both Parable of the Sower and The Hungry Tide both take place in a world where climate changed affected it heavily, they both portray a vastly different world despite the same disaster striking their worlds. In Parable of the Sower, climate change has caused society as a whole to collapse, to the point where people are forced to wall themselves away from the outside world in order to survive. Everything from food, water, and jobs are scarce, to the point that if you are seen enjoying the basic necessities of life outside, you would get robbed or killed. To make it worse, there’s a really popular drug going around, pyro, that makes the user bewitched by fire. The user will set any and everything they can on fire, to the point that they would sometimes set themselves on fire. In this world, robbing, raping, killing and arson is commonplace.

However, in The Hungry Tide, while they also face disaster from climate change, their world is not nearly as bad. Unlike Sower, we get a before and after on the climate change, where Kanai recalled, “the Malta as a vast waterway, one of the most formidable rivers he had ever seen. But it was low tide now and the river in the distance was no wider than a narrow ditch, flowing along the center of a half-mile-wide-bed” (21). As the novel goes on, we get mentions of a future catastrophe that will do lasting damage to their community. At first many are skeptical of this prophecy, but as time goes on, more and more examples are shown that display a drastic change in the environment due to climate change, such as the Kolkata suburb. “‘It wasn’t always a suburb, you know,’ Piya said, peeling another banana. ‘In 1852 it was just a wetland with a few scattered ponds.’ In July that year, Piya said, an unusually high tide caused a sudden surge in the rivers of the delta. The wave traveled deep into the hinterland, flooding the swamps and wetlands that surrounded Calcutta. When the tide turned and the waters began to recede, a rumor swept the streets of the city: a school of giant sea creatures had been stranded in one of the salt lakes on the city’s western outskirts” (189). Despite climate change also affecting this world pretty bad, society has not fallen yet, and the people do not resort to crime to get by, but instead they help each other out.

Despite both worlds being affected by the same disaster, both worlds have drastically different ways of living. While one world is burning down literally and figuratively, the other world is rebuilding itself with the people each offering to do something for their community such as teach. I think this is a good portrayal of climate change done by cli-fi books. They have different scenarios while pushing for the same idea. This is similar to how many people have different interpretations of climate change. Some see it as our inevitable demise and that there’s no saving it, while others see it as a problem that can be solved if everyone does their part in stopping it.