“I’ve seen religious passion in other people, though-love for a compassionate God, fear of an angry God, fulsome praise and desperate pleading for a God that rewards and punishes. That will break the old cycle, even if it’s only to begin a new one, a different one.”Įarthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. If there weren’t, the cycles wouldn’t keep replaying. “There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. That’s the way things always have been.” “It is,” Len said. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. “We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another.

Octavia butler earthseed