Books like Wild Seed

“Recently, however, I began to suspect that calling myself a science fiction critic without having read anything by Octavia Butler bordered on the fraudulent.”“Books to Look For” - Orson Scott Card I have to thank OSC for the above-mentioned article (from 1990) which piqued my interest for reading Octavia Butler. It is strange that I first read Wild Seed in January 2012, I loved it and it made me a lifelong fan of Octavia Butler, but since then I have not read any of the sequels. I have, however, read most of her other novels, and she has never disappointed me. Wild Seed is the first of the Patternmaster series, some of the later books in the series were written prior to this book, but in term of chronological order this is the first. I won’t do an overview of the series at this point as I have not read the other books, I will just stick to Wild Seed for now.Wild Seed is about an African woman named Anyanwu who is immortal and has shape changing abilities. One day she encounters a man called Doro who is also a shape-changer, of a very different sort. Where Anyanwu changes her shape by metamorphosis, Doro does it by evicting people from their bodies and taking over (and thereby killing the body’s owner). At the beginning of the narrative, Anyanwu is already about three hundred years old, living in a village among her descendants. While it is not clear how old Doro is, he was born in Egypt during the reign of the Pharaohs, so he is more than twice her age. Doro coerces Anyanwu into leaving Africa with him and move to a community he built in New York, he does this mainly by threatening the safety of all her descendants. It transpires that Doro is working on a project to breed people with unusual powers (the word mutant does not appear in this book) and he perceives Anyanwu as a “wild seed” to become a potent new ingredient in this project. What follows is a story of power struggles between these two characters, involving intimidation, submission, heartbreak, courage and rebellion.To say that Wild Seed is a page turner may give the impression that this is a sci-fi thriller that moves at breakneck speed. This is not the case at all; the story spans over a hundred years and is not particularly fast paced. However, it is very compelling, I always look forward to discovering what happens on the next page. Ms. Butler has an uncanny ability to effortlessly create vivid and believable characters. At times it seems like she can make them seem real as soon as they are introduced in the narrative. The only snag is I love her protagonist so much I wish she can just get away from this nefarious Doro, who is not only a creep but also doing a very creepy project; but if she does get away early in the book we would not have much of a story left. AnyanwuThe book’s timeline spans over 100 years, from the late 1600s to the 1800s, at a time where slavery is prevalent in the US. Unlike Butler’s Kindred, Wild Seed is not exactly a slave narrative, Anyanwu is enslaved in a manner of speaking, without actually being a slave. The narrative is more concerned with her struggle to free herself from Doro’s project without risking the people she loves (her children and descendants). The sci-fi element of Wild Seed tends to read rather like science fantasy with all the shapeshifting going on, and no technology involved. However, Anyanwu has an ability to synthesize medicines from inside her body with the application of medical science principles. She comes up with a much more humane method of genetic engineering than Doro’s degrading version that treats human beings as seeds and animals. What makes the novel works so well is Butler’s humanity and compassion. Anyanwu is one of sci-fi’s best protagonists who embodies the best characteristics of motherhood, even Doro is a very complex kind of villain with understandable motivations, considering his backstory you can almost forgive his heinous behaviour, but he certainly is an overbearing larger than life character. For me, Wild Seed is one of the all-time greats, and I look forward to finally moving on to the subsequent volumes soon.Notes:• One of the things I love most about Octavia Butler is her love of the sci-fi genre, and how she was happy to embrace it; unlike some literary authors who utilize the genre's tropes but reject the label.• Sadly she is no longer with us, and I am running out of her books to read (｡•́︿•̀｡)Quotes:“Haven’t you seen the men slaves in this country who are used for breeding? They are never permitted to learn what it means to be a man. They are not permitted to care for their children. Among my people, children are wealth, they are better than money, better than anything. But to these men, warped and twisted by their masters, children are almost nothing.” “I kill, Anyanwu. That is how I keep my youth, my strength. I can do only one thing to show you what I am, and that is kill a man and wear his body like a cloth.” He breathed deeply. “This is not the body I was born into. It’s not the tenth I’ve worn, nor the hundredth, nor the thousandth.”He smiled a little, but could not help wondering how hard it might be to tame even partially a wild seed woman who had been helping herself for three hundred years.Wild seed always had to be destroyed eventually. It could never conform as children born among his people conformed. But like no other wild seed, Anyanwu would learn to fear him and bend herself to his will. Nice new cover