'Throughout centuries the immortal telepath Doro has struggled to build a new race, one with powers to match his own. But down all those generations, there has been no one like Mary.Only Mary is able to draw others to her side, into a complex network of global psychic energy that unites them and regenerates them until they are more than the sum of their parts – they become The Pattern. But one man stands in Mary’s way and the prospect of her empire – her father, her lover, her rival – Doro.'Blurb to the Gollancz 1991 paperback edition.Here, Butler tells the tale of how the Pattern, first explored in ‘Patternmaster’ was created, and introduces the characters Doro and Emma whose tales are told in the third ‘prequel’, ‘Wild Seed’. Doro is a disembodied parasitic entity who moves from body to body, devouring the life-force and inhabiting each for a short while before moving on to the next. For four thousand years he has been selectively breeding Humanity to enhance psionic talents – in the main telepathy – but also rare additional talents such as healing, psychometry and psychokinesis. The novel revolves around Mary, one of Doro’s experiments and – common to all Butler’s central figures – a black female. The structure is unusual in that Mary’s first person narrative is interspersed with chapters following other characters in third person. Mary is a pre-transition telepath, in that she is due to experience a harrowing physical and mental metamorphosis which will see her either emerge as a full telepath or remain a disturbed latent – like may of Doro’s failures – driven mad by the random thoughts and emotions of others. Doro, who holds the power of Life and Death over his people, insists that she marry a white male telepath, Karl, believing that he may be able to help her through her transition. The transition is successful, but perhaps too successful, as during the process Mary’s mind latches on to Karl and five other full telepaths and holds them in a mental Pattern, subservient to herself. The telepaths feel compelled to travel and join her are at first angry and afraid at Mary’s inability to release them. Later, Mary discovers that she can push Doro’s latent telepath failures into transition and bind them into her gestalt Pattern, but at a price. Butler avoids falling into the trap of turning her characters into a benign ‘Homo Superior’ cliché. Indeed, none of the telepaths - with the possible exception of Seth, whose involvement in the tale is minimal - are very likeable people. Their actions are often selfish brutal and violent, and there is little compassion shown by any of them. They are, however, products of their environment and to a certain extent Butler is attempting to show what happens when one is endowed with power without the limits of accountability.Mary effectively creates an instant dictatorship, answering only to Doro. Those she has enmeshed in her Pattern answer to her, and in turn they mentally enslave ‘mutes’ – ordinary non-telepathic humans – whose emotions and memories they can adjust as they wish, often relegating them to the status of pets. ‘Karl owned his servants more thoroughly than even Doro usually owned people. Karl owned their minds. They were just ordinary people who had answered an ad in the Los Angeles Times. Karl did no entertaining – was almost a hermit except for the succession of women whom he lured in and kept until they bored him. The servants existed more to look after the house and grounds than to look after Karl himself. Still, he had chosen them less for their professional competence than for the fact they had few if any living relatives. Few people to be pacified if he accidentally got too rough with them. He would not have hurt them deliberately. He had conditioned them, programmed them carefully to do their work and obey him in every way. He had programmed them to be content with their jobs. He even paid them well. But his power made him dangerous to ordinary people – especially those who worked near him every day. In an instant of uncontrolled anger, he could have killed them all.’ (p 37)Mary’s Patternist regime grows until she has fifteen hundred telepaths under her control. They have control of local government and have taken over a school to educate their own kind. Doro, now worried by what he has created, orders Mary to call a halt to the expansion of her Pattern, but she cannot, for, like Doro, she is a mental parasite and needs the Pattern to grow in order to feed on the life-energy of her thralls. It’s a brilliant and immensely readable novel if a little bleak. Butler is not afraid to delve into the dark side of the human psyche and drag its darkest desires into the open air. The motives of most of the characters are at base, selfish, such as those of Rachel, a powerful psychic healer. Before being enmeshed in The Pattern she used her powers as a travelling Faith healer in Christian Churches, but the price the congregation paid for their healing was Rachel’s leeching of their collective life-energy. Initially, being bound with the gestalt turns them into better people as more of the psychotic latent telepaths are brought through transition to become ‘sane’ and responsible members of the Pattern community, but the price to be paid for that is the mass-enslavement of non-telepath humans. Ada, one of the ‘First Family’ of telepaths, in one of the most chilling chapters of the story, talks to a teenage telepath – brought up by mute slaves - who has just realised who and what she is:‘You’ll be the first of their foster children to grow up. They’ll remember you.’‘But… They’re not like you. I can tell that much. I can feel a difference.’‘They’re not telepaths.’‘They’re slaves!’ Her tone was accusing.‘Yes.’Page was silent for a moment, startled by Ada’s willingness to admit such a thing. ‘Just like that? Yes, you make slaves of people? I’m going to be part of a group that makes slaves of people?’‘Page---‘‘Why do you think I tried to die?’‘Because you didn’t understand. You still don’t.’‘I know about being a slave! My parents taught me. My father used to strip me naked, tie me to the bed and beat me, and then----‘‘I know about that, Page.’‘And I know about being a slave.’ The girl’s voice was leaden. ‘I don’t want to be a part of anything that makes people slaves.’‘You have no choice. Neither do we.’ (p 183)The Pattern is an instant society without democratically established codes of Justice or morality. Some rogue telepaths for instance are summarily executed, deemed too dangerous to live. It’s a novel which – something which Butler gets better and better at doing – raises all sorts of questions about the nature of society, of humanity, of relationships and power-structures. It forces us to ask questions of ourselves and perhaps examine our own true motives for what we do and perhaps, more importantly, what we think.
In spite of myself, I've ended up discussing and recommending this book to a few people. There are really fascinating ideas here - Octavia Butler is a champ at slightly extrapolating and skewering present reality and transforming it into a plausible, not so removed future. Here she invents a world of intuits, psychics, telekenetics (?). She attributes much of the chaos and violence in the world to the inability of some psychics to hone their latent abilities. Sometimes this means these psychics have unmediated raw connections to the pain and suffering of the world around them - a painful maddening static in their heads. Sometimes, unaware of their 'gifts', they experience only misunderstanding and alienation from others - which in turn, breeds violence, especially towards those they are most like. As in Parable of the Sower, Butler has a young girl emerge to lead a new hopeful world. This girl, like Olamina, moves with the certainty, selflessness, and faith of someone who - well - must save the world. Butler's young women aren't so heavily burdened by their capabilities and responsibilities - at least, this kind of comic-book hero drama is seriously downplayed. The main drama seems to be how these women do their work in the world. They take the cards they are dealt in life and move. I love that these books are about the work they've been charged to do - as opposed to the messianic agonizing that usually takes up these kind of stories. The work itself is the difficult part. The internal battle to start it, belongs to another, more self-indulgent, more egotistical, more pampered type of hero. One who usually have the luxury of time and excessive self-reflection. Those who are usually wealthy young white men. But temporality is the stength and the weakness of the book. The book moves swiftly, skipping years at one point, and glossing over essential developments in the numerous characters. Sometimes it seems like an extended metaphor - a good idea that was too quickly spun into a book. There are many hazy underdeveloped aspects that beg for more pages. The protagonist is somewhat detached from her reality. Early on, she kills or severly debilitates a drunk, who has barged into her home, looking for her mother, who then tries to rape her. The drama and significance are subdued. This seems partially intentional - a way of demonstrating the premature strength and self-assurance of a young girl who is accostomed to and unmoved by violence. It also seems like a minor device to move the story and larger drama along. You get a bare sense of her in the episode and its aftermath. The book moves with an impatient speed - that forces the reader, like the main character, to learn quickly and move on. Not much later in the book, in an act of consolation, she ends up making love with her body-shifting, all-powerful, imortal father. Power lines are drawn, redrawn, and questioned. Sometimes I kept pace. Sometimes I felt rushed. I was also wary of how this book made the female hero the instinctively nurturing, loving, proactive, motherly figure who draws her strength from developing others. This in contrast to her egotistical, self-serving, singular, and short-sighted male villain/ father-figure. I like female heroes but get bored when it is their 'natural' female life-procuring qualities that save the day (This is V for Vendetta nonsense, Saul Williams, Vandana Shiva, etc etc pro-feminist sexism). These gender conventions are tired. I would gladly read Octavia Butler's scribbled notes on cocktail napkins - I'm an eager forgiving fan. I'm glad she put the work out there she has. She is one of my models for exploring race, gender, class, ability, and power more effectively, in more accessible, transportable ways than most people who attempt it. That said -this book seemed to be a testing grounds for Octavia Butler to develop some concepts. I didn't love this book but am happy to have read it.
Do You like book Mind Of My Mind (1994)?
This is the second book in Octavia Butler's Patternmaster series. In Wild Seed, the reader was introduced to Doro, an immortal who had plans to create a master race. His breeding experiment proves successful when a young telepath named Mary creates the Pattern, which unites all of Doro's "children". Octavia Butler is an absolute master of speculative fiction. She wrote Mind of my Mind prior to writing the first book in the series, Wild Seed. It becomes clear that Butler wanted to delve deeper into the history of the pattern and how it was created. The book's strengths lie in Butler's adeptness at drawing readers into her fantasy world. However, Mind of my Mind is not without flaws. The characters are not as fully developed as other characters in Butler's novels, but the story is fascinating. I do wish the power struggle between Dora and Mary would have played out longer and provided more insight into their motivations and desires. Still, I would highly recommend this book.
—Raemona Little taylor
Review from July 21, 2015I read the first 10% or so of this book to my husband, niece, and daughter and I read the rest to my husband and daughter on our ride home from our vacation. I finally got dh to read (listen to) Octavia E. Butler! I’ve read this three times I think. Doro is a monster, and I prefer Wild Seed, because it has Anyanwu/ Emma – who has a conscience-- to offset Doro. This novel has Emma only incidentally. It introduces another monster Doro has created: Mary. Both Doro and Mary have a similar dream: to have group of telepaths who can live together. Doro’s dream is seven telepaths. Mary links 1,500 adults and 800 children into a Pattern of telepaths. I read this on Kindle, because I either don’t have or couldn’t find my copy of the book. I have just bought a t- shirt with the 1977 cover from Out of Print.Review from 2/29/12I reread this because I wanted to find out more about Anyanwu and Doro, but Butler went on from them, they’re in the background, but this novel is really about Mary, who has created a Pattern of the telepaths who are her cousins. Taking place in the present -- characters drive cars in a Los Angeles suburb and one shoplifts a transistor radio – the Patternists create a scary world.“…Mary thought it safest for them to control key mutes in city hall, in the police department, in—““Mutes!”He looked annoyed, probably with himself. “It’s a convenient term. People without telepathic voices. Ordinary people.”“I know what it means, Doro. I knew the first time I heard Mary use it. It means n*&&^%$!” (395) This is a terrific story, but not a comfortable one.
—Julia
I think that the reason that I like fantasy and science fiction so much is because I am so intrigued by the way the author's mind works. I mean, when I read Neil Gaiman or Sheri S. Tepper, I marvel at the places their imagination takes them. To take our ordinary world and change it into something marvelous/wondrous/horrible/terrifying/magical takes skill. Since so much fantasy and science fiction these days seems targeted at a younger audience, I'm always glad to find mature, thoughtful stories.
—Heather
