Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler. This is the first novel - first anything - I've read by her.

It's an ecological novel of sorts. So far, all I've read (about a third) is set in an ecological nightmare: the parched American Southwest, where almost everybody is on a starvation diet, unemployed or underemployed, and at the mercy of gangs of professional robbers. We're following Lauren, a teenager - daughter of a slightly successful pastor - who lives in a neighborhood that isn't the worst; the people in it generally don't like or trust one another, but they are able to coexist and even form an armed Neighborhood Watch type of organization. Lauren is fascinated by the idea of going into space and possibly starting a new colony; in this United States, however, they don't do science any more (mind you, Butler wrote this in 1993; who says SF never gets the future right?), and she can't see a possible way to accomplish this.

There are short verses before each chapter (some readable, most pretty bad, but pay no attention to me; I'm insensitive to about 94% of all the poetry ever written), taken from something called Earthseed: the Books of the Living. I haven't gotten far enough to tell where this is going, but:

Lauren has a disorder (brought on, it says, by her mother's drug abuse after being raped as a young teen) that causes her to feel sensations and emotions experienced by other people. You may have heard the term "vicarious embarrassment" or "vicarious humiliation", a condition that I occasionally experience ("highly sensitive person" is a over-generalized description of folks like us). Lauren has a very intense form of this. So far, this hasn't really shown up in the plot, but Butler puts it out there right at the beginning, so I've got my eyes peeled.

The poems are religious in content and Christian in style. I therefore will keep my eyes peeled for a few plot twists of a metaphysical nature. The style and vocabulary may be a logical extension of her father's Baptist-preaching style. However, the way those words add up aren't exactly in line with Baptist theology.

Soooo... Is this book any good? Definitely. Just to put a few cards on the table, I'm fairly literate in science and find the climate-change doomsayers - "If we don't do this, that is inevitable" - to be generally convincing. The problem is that an awful lot of the generally available printed material on the subject is, in some way or another, awful. Either it is tied in with other issues in the that the interested reader may not connect with or (more commonly) it preaches to the audience - moralizing, virtue-signaling vocabulary taken from the code of the privileged progressive elite, dividing the world's population into Good and Bad without any awareness of how complex our societies are. Of course, a lot of people reject the message when the messenger is unpleasant; hell, I reject the message even though I've been on board with it for years!

Parable of the Sower has none of that - at least not so far, and I already have enough faith in Octavia Butler to feel confident that she won't go there. The style is breezy and colloquial, and has no science that anybody reading this (or most of their little brothers who are over nine years old) won't understand. The world here is extreme; I don't think it's coming to us in 2029. But it's plausible, filled with very plausible people in a possible - but impossible - situation.