skygiants | Entries tagged with octavia butler

Fledgling, Octavia Butler's last novel, is sort of . . . . well. Okay. The experience of reading Fledgling is a bit like this:

OCTAVIA BUTLER: So I hear that the kids these days think that vampires are pretty hot. You know, sexy blood-drinking, being in sexy vampire thrall, just plain old vampire sex, that kind of thing.
BECCA: That is true of some kids these days I guess, it is not so much my bag but to each their own.
OCTAVIA BUTLER: WELL, I bet it is suddenly less sexy when the vampire in question is an amnesiac juvenile who looks like an eleven-year-old girl!
BECCA: Octavia Butler I am not sure I like where you are going with -
OCTAVIA BUTLER: Who literally makes the people she feeds on addicted to her vampire venom so that they'll die if they're separated from her, and exerts vague mind-control powers over them, which makes all the sex she has with them highly dubcon as well as awkwardly pedophiliac, even though she doesn't realize that she's dubconned them until after it happens! AREN'T YOU UNCOMFORTABLE NOW.
BECCA: YES, IN FACT. I am VERY uncomfortable now!
OCTAVIA BUTLER: LOLOLOLOLOL okay now that we've gotten rid of all the people who heard this was a vampire novel and are here for the sexy vampire times, we can start talking about the things I am actually interested in talking about, which are the ethical questions raised when one intelligent being is required by its nature to impose symbiosis on another intelligent being, and the kind of communities that that necessary symbiosis creates, and the ways that people adapt to becoming posthuman sort of without their consent, and the ways that people react to posthumans (or post-vampires as the case may be) and also racism.
BECCA: Yes, these are all really interesting things to talk about, and your interest in these topics is a large part of the reason why I read your books! And once you get past the squick this book is actually much less bleak than most of your other explorations of these topics, and it's nice that for once in a Butler book the whole of the human race is not doomed, but -
OCTAVIA BUTLER: Oh right, I guess I also needed a plot for the second half of the book while I'm busy showing Shori the vampire and her symbionts adapting to vampire society? VAMPIRE LEGAL THRILLER, GO.
BECCA: . . . okay? I'm pretty sure the plot is besides the point. Anyway, I do find the vampire (or Ina) society that you have set up really interesting, but . . . Octavia Butler, I know you want your books to be sort of uncomfortable to read, but seriously was it really necessary to squick us all out THAT MUCH?
OCTAVIA BUTLER: Yep! :D
BECCA: I AM NOT SURE I AGREE.

So, um, yes. Fledgling! As with all Butler books it was an interesting read, if uncomfortable in SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT ways than most of her others. But in a lot of ways, also similar to her others too. Vampire protagonist Shori's voice is a lot like Lauren Olamina's in Parable of the Sower; the dubcon-symbiosis of the vampire communities reminded me in different places of Dawn and Mind of My Mind and Clay's Ark. I think it's worth it if you've read a lot of Butler already to see what she's doing differently here (and can deal with the fact that she starts out the book trying her hardest to make you REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE), but I would definitely not tell new readers of Butler to start with this one.

Semi-relatedly: while I was looking for reviews on the internet, I totally found Fledgling listed on a "If You Like Twilight, Try . . . !" page, along with L.J. Smith and the Sookie Stackhouse books. Which I think is the FUNNIEST THING I HAVE SEEN ALL WEEK.

I'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.

But damn, Octavia Butler's Clay's Ark is dark. I mean, I have read a lot of her stuff and I am generally pretty good at coping with Butlerian bleakness! And I am really glad I read it, because it was amazing and fascinating. But wow.

It's harder, because I think this book combines exceptional hopelessness with some of her most sympathetic characters. The 'past' storyline of the novel follows Eli, a man who has been infected with an alien organism that alters his body, strengthens all his physical drives, and forces on him an uncontrollable compulsion to pass the disease along as much as he can through infection and procreation. Because of the physical changes, he essentially can't die, and he has to infect others or he will go insane. Within these compulsions, he has to try and hold onto his humanity as best he can. In the 'present' storyline, which takes place simultaneously, there is already a small community of the infected, doing their very best to hold themselves in check, only infect a limited number of people and keep the community completely isolated so as not to create a pandemic. Blake and his two sixteen-year-old daughters - one of whom has leukemia - were unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and are therefore about to join that limited number of people.

What Butler does amazingly well, again, is unrelentingly show a situation where a return to what we would consider normal humanity is impossible. The only choice is adaptation to what would have been unthinkable previously. This is always a question that I think is really, really fascinating, and also hits a particular terror kink of mine - when people are slowly losing their humanity, and are aware that they are losing their humanity but unable to stop it, and augh! It's the awareness of it that gets me. It takes a lot for a book to really scare me. Stephen King doesn't manage it most of the time. This did.

(ETA: I should add, however, that once again the LULZ of Twilight saved the day and staved off at least some of the grimness, because guys, the Cullens are totally clayarks! The strength, the speed, the dramatic leaps off high buildings, the irresistible compulsions, the magic babies . . . the clayarks even have the sparkle! Well, okay, profuse unnatural sweating, but it probably creates the same effect.)

I finished the book last night before going to sleep; I woke up this morning, looked out at the gray rainy sky, and thought, "Gosh, today I really feel like getting out of bed and going about life is essentially a losing proposition. I wonder why that is!

OH YEAH."

I think - I think next I will be reading something cheery. Just possibly.

In the meantime, though, tell me I'm not alone! What was the last book that really scared you?

One 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?)

I've read a fair number of Octavia Butler's books, but I picked up Kindred for the first time last week, and found out there's a reason why it's her most famous. I've been impressed by everything I've read by her, but this one has just shot to the top of my list.

In Kindred, twentieth-century Dana finds herself time-traveling back to a nineteenth-century plantation again and again to save the life of her white slave-owning ancestor so that she can, someday, be born. The strength of this book is in the characters, and the exploration of the twisted relations and dynamics that the slave-owning system brings about. Dana is an extremely active character, and though she is by necessity forced to pose as a slave when she is in the past, she's never just a victim. She is in her ancestor's power due to the plantation dynamics, but he is also in hers, because his life is continually in her hands (because he's an idiot with a death-wish, as she has no qualms about pointing out). The dynamic that makes between them is completely fascinating. Alice, Dana's ancestress, is another character who could be very easily portrayed as a victim and nothing more, but is instead strong and three-dimensional, with an equally strained and complex relationship with Dana. The fourth central character is Dana's white husband, Kevin, and the depth and difficulty of that relationship is never glossed over. All the other characters are individuals in their own right, too; not one of them easily falls into a stereotype.

Dana is a very strong character, and I think she's stronger for the fact that, unlike some of Butler's other protagonists (I am thinking especially of Lauren in Parable of the Sower) she is not always completely sure of herself or confident directing the lives of others. Some dilemmas don't have any right answers. (I also really liked the frank description of how the chance of being whisked off to another time at any moment would really, seriously disrupt and constrain your life. Time-Traveller's Wife fans, take notice; Butler did it first.)

Obviously, this is not a cheerful book or an easy read - I would probably not, for example, tell you to take it to the beach - but it's incredibly well done, and I think worthwhile for just about anyone.