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May. 14th, 2009 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOne of the things Octavia Butler is really really good at is forcing you to accept the unthinkable as necessary. I am pretty sure that Patternmaster and Mind of My Mind were her first books, and she's already doing it amazingly well in them.
(Sidenote: apparently, there are debates about what order it is best to read the four "Seed to Harvest" books in - Wild Seed, Clay's Ark, Mind of My Mind and Patternmaster. I'm going in publication order, which I think is the reverse of the chronological order listed above, mostly because I have read convincing arguments that Wild Seed is the best and should be saved for last!)
Patternmaster drops you in the middle of a society where the Earth is ruled by a complex society of telepaths, who are ruled by the strongest - the Patternmaster - and fight against an alternate variety of human, the genetically mutated clayarks. All non-telepathic humans are enslaved to the telepaths. This is not a book about freeing the slaves, and it is not a book about changing the society to be more equal, and it is not a book about making peace with the clayarks and recognizing their common humanity. This is a book about protagonist Teray's attempts to negotiate the rules of his society to come out on top instead of on bottom - that's it. The rest, the reader has to accept. Octavia Butler's genius is her ability to make you root for Teray and his independent healer ally, despite the fact that they are only marginally if at all better ethically than their opponents.
This comes out even more strongly in Mind of My Mind, which takes place in a period that is recognizably contemporary, but describes the creation of what will eventually become the society of Patternmaster. Protagonist Mary is part of a vast breeding program of almost-telepaths, called 'latents', who occasionally produce someone with viable psionic powers. The latents cannot block out mental noise, and are therefore all possessed of violent, addictive, often crazy personalities, making for family situations that go way beyond disfunctional. The full telepaths and healers and so on have mental shields, but for the most part can't stand one another. They are all, to one extent or another, descended from Doro - the body-switcher who runs the breeding program and is interested in creating a society of telepaths, for purposes of his own. Mary is supposed to be the first telepath who can tolerate others of her kind, but she takes it further than Doro had anticipated, to the point where she becomes a danger to him. The ethical dilemmas are explored a lot further here than in Patternmaster. The telepaths in their latent state are suffering and need help - but in their matured state, and as a society, they pretty much can't help but mentally enslave ordinary people. It's a question of survival, and though the reader is (probably not) telepathic, Butler still effectively forces an identification with the 'them' rather than the 'us'.
Patternmaster is interesting; Mind of My Mind is kind of fascinating. This makes me look forward exponentially to Clay's Ark and Wild Seed!
(On a less review-y note - has anyone else read Mind of My Mind? Am I the only one who was constantly picturing Jan as Angela from The Office?)
(Sidenote: apparently, there are debates about what order it is best to read the four "Seed to Harvest" books in - Wild Seed, Clay's Ark, Mind of My Mind and Patternmaster. I'm going in publication order, which I think is the reverse of the chronological order listed above, mostly because I have read convincing arguments that Wild Seed is the best and should be saved for last!)
Patternmaster drops you in the middle of a society where the Earth is ruled by a complex society of telepaths, who are ruled by the strongest - the Patternmaster - and fight against an alternate variety of human, the genetically mutated clayarks. All non-telepathic humans are enslaved to the telepaths. This is not a book about freeing the slaves, and it is not a book about changing the society to be more equal, and it is not a book about making peace with the clayarks and recognizing their common humanity. This is a book about protagonist Teray's attempts to negotiate the rules of his society to come out on top instead of on bottom - that's it. The rest, the reader has to accept. Octavia Butler's genius is her ability to make you root for Teray and his independent healer ally, despite the fact that they are only marginally if at all better ethically than their opponents.
This comes out even more strongly in Mind of My Mind, which takes place in a period that is recognizably contemporary, but describes the creation of what will eventually become the society of Patternmaster. Protagonist Mary is part of a vast breeding program of almost-telepaths, called 'latents', who occasionally produce someone with viable psionic powers. The latents cannot block out mental noise, and are therefore all possessed of violent, addictive, often crazy personalities, making for family situations that go way beyond disfunctional. The full telepaths and healers and so on have mental shields, but for the most part can't stand one another. They are all, to one extent or another, descended from Doro - the body-switcher who runs the breeding program and is interested in creating a society of telepaths, for purposes of his own. Mary is supposed to be the first telepath who can tolerate others of her kind, but she takes it further than Doro had anticipated, to the point where she becomes a danger to him. The ethical dilemmas are explored a lot further here than in Patternmaster. The telepaths in their latent state are suffering and need help - but in their matured state, and as a society, they pretty much can't help but mentally enslave ordinary people. It's a question of survival, and though the reader is (probably not) telepathic, Butler still effectively forces an identification with the 'them' rather than the 'us'.
Patternmaster is interesting; Mind of My Mind is kind of fascinating. This makes me look forward exponentially to Clay's Ark and Wild Seed!
(On a less review-y note - has anyone else read Mind of My Mind? Am I the only one who was constantly picturing Jan as Angela from The Office?)
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Date: 2009-05-14 06:35 pm (UTC)BECCA ARE YOU STALKING ME
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Date: 2009-05-14 06:40 pm (UTC)(Come back to this post when you have read it and talk to meeee!)
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Date: 2009-05-14 11:32 pm (UTC)I'm glad this series is living up to the hype, though I can't say I'm surprised.
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Date: 2009-05-15 01:55 am (UTC)I will still have a few left after the Seed to Harvest quartet, though - one of the reasons I'm reading this set now is because I've read two out of three of the Xenogenesis books, and somehow never got to the third one, and now I am in that weird in-between period where I cannot remember them well enough to read the third but it is too soon to reread the first two. So that is a series I will definitely be returning to! I think they're the kind of books that reward rereading, too.