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Jul. 28th, 2009 10:59 amI'd heard that Wild Seed was the best of Octavia Butler's Patternist books, so I've been saving it for last! And now I am sadly out of Patternist books. (But not, thankfully, out of Butler - I still have the vampire one and the one with the mpreg story to go!)
Wild Seed focuses on the relationship between two near-immortals. Doro's a body-jumper - he kills people's minds with a touch and moves in for a few months or a year, before his control starts to slip and he feels the need to switch bodies again. Bodies that are talented "taste" better to him, and so he's made it a project to breed special people in an attempt to create a powerful pool of meta-humans. Anyanwu is pretty much his exact opposite, in that she has completely perfect control over her body - she can shape-shift, heal herself from just about any injury, and even manufacture medicines inside herself. Doro comes across Anyanwu sometime in the 1600s, when he's already thousands of years old and she's around three hundred, and decides to lure her away from her African village and get her to join a group of his people in America.
The first part of the book is the least comfortable to read, when Doro has a more complete control over their dynamic. Once Anyanwu establishes a more equal standing, their relationship becomes a lot more fascinating - here you have two people, with completely opposing worldviews and morals and goals, who are enemies much of the time but in the long term literally only have each other. Once again, Butler is really really good at putting her characters in a difficult situation and saying, "This is what you have; you can't change it. How do you deal with it?" The identity politics are also really cool - both Anyanwu and Doro have the ability to switch race, gender and anything else essentially at will, Anyanwu by shapeshifting and Doro by taking a different body, and Butler does a lot of very interesting things with that.
Basically, though I think Clay's Ark is still my favorite of the Patternist books, but there's no denying that this one is amazing. And, I mean, guys, I may be wrong, but I suspect that complicated and twisty love-hate relationships between meta-humans are relevant to some of your interests, I'm just saying.
Wild Seed focuses on the relationship between two near-immortals. Doro's a body-jumper - he kills people's minds with a touch and moves in for a few months or a year, before his control starts to slip and he feels the need to switch bodies again. Bodies that are talented "taste" better to him, and so he's made it a project to breed special people in an attempt to create a powerful pool of meta-humans. Anyanwu is pretty much his exact opposite, in that she has completely perfect control over her body - she can shape-shift, heal herself from just about any injury, and even manufacture medicines inside herself. Doro comes across Anyanwu sometime in the 1600s, when he's already thousands of years old and she's around three hundred, and decides to lure her away from her African village and get her to join a group of his people in America.
The first part of the book is the least comfortable to read, when Doro has a more complete control over their dynamic. Once Anyanwu establishes a more equal standing, their relationship becomes a lot more fascinating - here you have two people, with completely opposing worldviews and morals and goals, who are enemies much of the time but in the long term literally only have each other. Once again, Butler is really really good at putting her characters in a difficult situation and saying, "This is what you have; you can't change it. How do you deal with it?" The identity politics are also really cool - both Anyanwu and Doro have the ability to switch race, gender and anything else essentially at will, Anyanwu by shapeshifting and Doro by taking a different body, and Butler does a lot of very interesting things with that.
Basically, though I think Clay's Ark is still my favorite of the Patternist books, but there's no denying that this one is amazing. And, I mean, guys, I may be wrong, but I suspect that complicated and twisty love-hate relationships between meta-humans are relevant to some of your interests, I'm just saying.
