Wild Seed

"The Patternist sequence is a very long-ranging, inter-generational saga in a period of science fiction when we talked about something we called psionics. This was a sort of pseudo-rational label for mental powers such as telepathy and telekinesis, and at the time the US and the USSR were engaged in serious research on the topic, so it had that sort of cachet. The Patternist series goes from the intentional breeding programs that are covered in Wild Seed through interstellar empires of telepaths. The books were achronological, or published out of order. “She needs to be famous throughout the globe, in the same fashion that you can go to Nepal and people know who Mickey Mouse is” I picked Wild Seed in particular, because that is one of the other portals that people have to Butler’s work. Kindred is often assigned reading in college classes, sometimes even the later years of high school in the US. So people come across that as part of a curriculum. But Wild Seed is something that people find on their own, generally. The people that I know that have read Wild Seed first came across it as if it was a sudden secret revealed to them on the racks of the store, in the book section. And it works as an introduction. Not just because, although it’s the fourth book published in the series, it’s earliest in the timeline. It works because people I think, really identify with Anyanwu. The story is that of an African woman, Anyanwu, who is immortal in her own body and can also jump from body to body—put her consciousness into other beings, a dolphin, for instance. But she encounters someone who is similar in power to her but not as benevolent, Doro. And Doro is immortal because he leaps from body to body, and when he leaves a body, it dies. And when he goes into a new body, the original consciousness is ejected and dies. So he’s a serial murder who lives immortally, and he has breeding programs to try and uplift other creatures, other humans. Anyanwu becomes an unwilling participant. I’ll just leave it there. It’s perhaps a little more nuanced than that because Doro sometimes takes over female bodies. So, although identifying as male, he’s not 100% male. There’s also the idea, not just of nurturing, but interconnection, which I think Anyanwu personifies. It’s not just that she’s caring for herself and her children, she’s caring for and reaching out to and being cared for by the community."