In high school I took a dystopian fiction class. We read books like 1984, A Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, and The Handmaid’s Tale. All were good books that captivated me at the time and feel pertinent to today, but having just finished Parable of the Sower it made me realize the aspect of the genre we were missing. All those books took place under an oppressive, centralized, authoritarian government, and what I find fascinating about Parable of the Sower is the lack of “leadership.”
