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Humans have always thought about the future. Some think of a utopia when they imagine the future, others a dystopia. Some people dream of the day when they would not have to work anymore and would have everything that they could ever want at the touch of a finger, where there is no such thing as scarcity or competition. Others dream of a place where there is no hierarchy anymore, everyone is equal to everyone else. A commonality between many of these dreams is that the future government is better than the current one; only in a true utopian society is the government perfect. In his paper Four Futures, Peter Frase describes four types of post-capitalist futures that society could head towards. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower embodies one of them: Exterminism, where people constantly compete against each other for scraps and there is no functioning or effective government. Mikhail Bulgakov’s Hear of a Dog is Socialistic.
Parable of the Sower takes place in California in an alternate reality where the government is failing and resources have gotten so scare that people in gated communities have to guard their measly scraps so that outsiders cannot steal them. When the outsiders do manage to get in and kill someone in a fight for resources, getting the police involved is futile: they will just take the money and go. Throughout this novel, Butler mentions that it has gotten to the point where people peddle water. The cost of water has gone up again… Peddlers are being found with their throats cut and their money and their handtrucks stolen. Dad says water now costs several times as much as gasoline. …It’s a lot harder to give up water…You’re supposed to be dirty now. If you’re clean, you make a target of yourself. People think you’re showing off, trying to be better than they are. (Butler 20)
Based on this quote from the story, the reader can see that the city has gotten to the point where even water is something that only the rich can really afford. That if a person is clean, that means that they are rich which means that they are an excellent target for mugging. People peddle water, which is a true sign that the world is becoming a really bad place. Frase points out that if a world gets to such a moment when resources are so scarce that it is not a question of how much to charge, but how much more can use them, then that world is heading towards exterminism.
What if resources and energy are simply too scarce to allow everyone to enjoy the material standard of living of today’s rich?… unable to provide everyone with an arbitrarily high standard of consumption?…if, instead, we remain a society polarized between a privileged elite and a downtrodden mass, then the most plausible trajectory leads to something much darker… exterminism. (Frase). According to Frase, materials that could be considered as necessities in modern times have gotten so scare that there is definitely not enough to provide for the entire population but yet the government still regulates them is a sign that the society is headed towards the exterminism future. As the book progresses from 2024 to 2027, the future keeps getting more and more bleak, supporting that the conclusion of that society is going to be dark.
As conditions deteriorate even further, 2024 turns into 2025 and Lauren’s relatively secure gated community gets broken into multiple times which causes the people to take up arms against everyone, both inside and outside; gone is the trust and here is the shoot first, ask questions later. The outside becomes even worse; people who were lucky enough to have jobs externally are encouraged to be on their guard and in a group or just cease travel between the city and their homes. This marks the final beginning of the end.
Now we have a regular neighborhood watch—a roster of people from every household who are over eighteen, good with guns—their own and others—and considered responsible by my father and by the people who have already been patrolling the neighborhood. Since none of the watchers have ever been cops or security guards, they’ll go on working in pairs, watching out for each other as well as for the neighborhood. They’ll use whistles to call for help if they need it. Also, they’ll meet once a week to read, discuss, and practice martial arts and shoot-out techniques (Butler 65).
Frase says that a failing government is key to achieving such a future. It is even better if the society that is approaching the future is gated off from the rest of the population. “Gated communities, private islands, ghettos, prisons, terrorism paranoia, biological quarantines; together, these amount to an inverted global gulag, where the rich live in tiny islands of wealth strewn around an ocean of misery… “catastrophic convergence” of ecological disruption, economic inequality, and state failure (Frase).” It is evident that the government is corrupt when the police just take the money and not provide their services, and force vigilante justice just for the peace of mind of the people within the community.
As more years pass by, the more society degenerates. A few months into 2026, the new president announces that he is going to make sure that all major cities are going to be like Olivar; run by big companies and will provide every workers with enough money to rent a place to live and feed themselves (Butler 103). However, as someone who has actually lived long enough to know better, Lauren’s father translates the politically correct wording into what it actually means: a new form of slavery. “That’s an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery” (Butler 104). As anyone who has ever taken World history knows, nothing good can happen when companies start to treat their workers like property and even worse things happen when the workers cannot quit and continue to sustain themselves. “Once mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor” (Frase 10). Frase’s quote proves that nothing good can come when work does not provide resources, and that is seen a few months later when the outside finally catches up with the gated in community of Robledo.
Towards the end of 2026, Lauren’s father disappears and is assumed dead after a few weeks. Mere months after the funeral in 2027, a fire set by drug addicts ravages her entire community, killing her entire family and almost all of her close friends, and forcing her to grab and go if she wants to live. She ends up reuniting with two other people from her community close to her age and then setting off based on the maps that her grandparents left her. Henry, Zahra, and Lauren set off North, hoping to reach a place where people can find a decent paying job where they will not have to commit any heinous crimes in order to live. Some months into their journey, they run into an old doctor named Bankole, who says that he has land up North where they can all go. After weeks of tortuous walking, faced with multiple obstacles, they finally reach the so called promised land, and they finally realize what kind of future they reached. The book ends with this dialogue between Lauren and Bankole
Human beings will survive of course. Some other countries will survive. Maybe they’ll absorb what’s left of us. Or maybe we’ll just break up into a lot of little states quarreling and fighting with each other over whatever crumbs are left. That’s almost happened now with states shutting themselves off from one another, treating state lines as national borders. As bright as you are, I don’t think you understand—I don’t think you can understand what we’ve lost…“You know, as bad as things are, we haven’t even hit bottom yet. Starvation, disease, drug damage, and mob rule have only begun. Federal, state, and local governments still exist—in name at least—and sometimes they manage to do something more than collect taxes and send in the military. And the money is still good. That amazes me. However much more you need of it to buy anything these days, it is still accepted. That may be a hopeful sign—or perhaps it’s only more evidence of what I said: We haven’t hit bottom yet (Butler 284- 285).
At first glance it appears that Lauren’s group is heading towards communism, but upon further examination, it is evident that as soon as they get everything out of the earth on Bankole’s land and exhaust those resources, they are going to be stuck there forever with no escape and thus why their future is exterminism. People will always be at war with the environment.
Just because there will always be an inherent war between the people and the environment for resources, does not mean that the people within will be at war with each other. Lauren’s vision for Earthseed, the new religion that she is trying to get people to follow, does not really leave any room for internal conflict. She imagines such a world where race and gender do not play a role in anything. A world where no one has to fight anyone in order to live. “an equal distribution of goods and work can ensue; one which is not based on an essentialist perception of the sexes and races, but on a perception of any subject as a site of creative differences that enriches the group (Agusti 359).” Her definition of a utopian future is simply one where there is no active threat against her life every minute of every day. The fact that there would be no internal conflict anymore, only the need for resources, with no interference from any government further proves that the new Earthseed community is heading towards a future of exterminism.
Bulgakov’s story on the other hand is vastly different than Parable of the Sower. While Butler’s book is more of an end of the world as they know it type of story, his story is just plain science fiction, with emphasis on the science. Taking place in the 1920s in the USSR, Heart of a Dog is about taking the human male brain and testis and transplanting them into a dog and seeing what would happen all the while fighting the Russian Revolution and the Russian Intelligent vs the working class. The USSR tried to establish a communist government, in reality, the government was a mix of both socialism and communism. As Kim points out in her article, Bulgakov’s goal was not to romanticize communism but to poke fun at eugenics and the USSR ideology.
In the early 1900s, the people of Russia experienced a political shift towards communism…During that time, Soviet physicians and medical researchers promoted eugenics…They advocated that communistic values and ideals were hereditary traits that could be passed down to future generations and encouraged those who had traits considered desirable to reproduce to improve the Soviet people (Kim)
One of the first interactions in the book where the idea of a future is brought up is when the Professor, Philip Philipovich, is approached by the House Committee because he occupies too much space for one person. “‘But the general meeting, after due consideration of the question, came to the conclusion that, by and large, you occupy too much space. Much too much. You live alone in seven rooms.’ ‘I live alone and work in seven rooms,’ replied Philip Philipovich. (Bulgakov 26-27)”. The Professor’s mindset goes along with the capitalistic agenda: “If I can work/ earn enough to afford this, then I should be able to get it”, whereas, the House Committee ideology is the total opposite. If anything, Frase sums up their thinking in his Socialism section. “The need to control labor still disappears, but the need to manage scarcity remains.”. The professor is still living based on the pre-1917 rules, where people can live based on what they can afford, not what the government tells them to live on, thus it starts showing that he is going from living in a capitalistic society to a socialistic society. The next example happens halfway through the story, when the operation has been successful and Sharik (the dog/ person) is continuously getting more and more humanoid.
Just like any teenager, Sharik (Sharikov as a man) also goes through a rebellious phase, serving as the prime example of the clash of the classes and ideologies of the time. “‘We understand. Of course we are no comrade of yours! How could we be? We never had the benefit of being taught at universities, we never lived in flats with 15 rooms and bathrooms. Only now the time has come to leave all that behind you. At the present time everybody has their rights.’ (Bulgakov 75-76).” Sharikov goes off on a tirade against the Professor because he is tired of him lecturing about how to do everything. However, in the midst of his monologue, he says the most important identifier that their future is socialist. As Frase says “Suppose that everyone received a wage, not as a return to labor but as a human right. The wage would not buy the products of others’ labor, but rather the right to use up a certain quantity of energy and resources as one went about using the replicators.”. Sharikov believes that he is entitled to live in the Professor’s flat because the Professor is the one who created him and according to the Socialistic future, he is.
Against the Professor’s wishes, Sharikov does not grow out of his Socialistic mindset, in fact, his views become even more extreme. Towards the end of the story, Sharikov remarks that he disagrees with Engels and Kautsky, two political philosophers of the time, and that they should just take everything and divide it equally amongst the masses. While his opinions did not really bother the Professor originally, his actions did. While the Professor understood that he was still developing mentally, he was appalled that Sharikov would have the gall as to file a complaint to the government against him.
Likewise threatening to kill the chairman of the house committee Comrade Shvonder from which it is clear that he is in possession of a gun. And he pronounces counterrevolutionary speeches and even orders his social servant Zinaida Prokofievna Bunina to bum Engels in the stove, which proves him a typical Menshevik together with his assistant Bormental, Ivan Arnoldovich, who secretly and without registration lives in his flat. Signature of the Head of the Sub-Department of Pest Control P. P. Sharikov witnessed by the Chairman of the House Committee Shvonder and the secretary Pestrukhin. (Bulgakov 129-130).
The fact that a heated argument resulted in the Professor being visited by someone very high up in the government about a complaint made by a former dog shows just how far the future has departed from the present in the story. Conflicts between locales, between generations, between those who are more concerned with the long-term health of the environment and those who prefer more material consumption in the short run — none of these will be easy to solve. But we will at least have arrived on the other side of capitalism as a democratic society (Frase 9).
These examples show that the new future of Moscow in Heart of a Dog is socialistic because it is not just pay for what one wants/ can but take what one is given no matter how much one actually works or earns. This conflict can really be considered as ironic because the Professor, who is very much against the socialist agenda, has created a man who is the definition of it. “While the Professor is the very incarnation of good taste, refinement, and intellect, Sarikov exhibits shabbily ostentatious taste and aggressively stupid intellectual pretensions. While attempting to create something better than the low-grade humanity that surrounds (and threatens) him, the Professor has unwittingly given the “Soviet dogs” entree into his private world of taste and intelligence (Burgin 503)”, no wonder that towards the end of the book, Sharikov had gone from the Professor’s pride and joy to his regret.
Though both stories are science fiction, they are vastly different from each other. One shows what could happen if the world goes through an extreme environmental disaster that limits every single resource out there. The other presents the traditional class conflict with a twist. Parable of the Sower is about a post-apocalyptic world where everyone fights against everyone else for mere scraps in order to survive and is heading towards a future that is not any better. A future of exterminism where even if money is not a problem, finding the actual resources is. On the other side, Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog is about a scientist switching around a part of the brain and the testis between a human male and a dog in order to see what will happen meanwhile introducing the traditional class conflict in a new light. The Professor represents the old Russian Intelligent people while Sharikov represents the new working class who think that the new government, socialism, will solve all of their problems and let them live a better life.
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