Sometimes you find something amazing in the most random ways. I first discovered Octavia Butler while waiting in a mall. I haven't really been a mall person since I was about 17, but it was Christmastime, and I suppose malls are unavoidable. While listening to a band play holiday tunes in the center of the mall, I noticed a small bookstore I had never noticed before. Well, the band was pretty good, but they had nothing on a store full of books. Walking in, right on the first shelf I saw, was the book Fledgling, which promised me a vampire story. Having barely recovered from my Twilight daze, I eagerly picked it up. Little did I know how different this writer and this story wold be from anything I had ever read before. When I finished Fledgling, I knew that I needed to read more of Octavia Butler's brilliant prose!Wild Seed is the first book in Butler's Patternist series. Well, the first book chronologically in the arc of the story, though not the first to be published. Wild Seed tells the story of Doro and Anyanwu, two immortal beings. Doro is amoral, surviving by casting off and taking new bodies at will. He has traveled the world for thousands of years, finding others with special talents and breeding them to try and create someone like himself. Anyanwu is a shape-changing, self-healing mother who has lived over 300 years as the story begins. Her people revere her as a healer-and fear her as a witch. When Doro senses her while traveling through Africa, he is drawn to her as to no other before her. While Doro wants to use her for his own purposes, and seeks to control her, Anyanwu wants nothing more than to protect her people, her grandchildren and great-grandchilren. From Africa to the American colonies, the story of Doro and Anyanwu is one of lust, power, and destiny.Despite the amoral nature of Doro, one can't help but feel sympathy for a being that has lived for thousands of years, watching everyone he has ever cared about die. One of his sons warns Anyanwu that without a companion Doro will lose everything that makes him human. What is it to a being like Doro to take one life or a hundred, since he has seen thousands come and go like so much smoke in the wind? The irony is that while he feels desperately lonely, he is not really comforted by the people he finds and manipulates. They fear him too much to be true companions for him. Anyanwu, on the other hand, needs to be surrounded by her family, those descendants of her descendants that give her a reason to continue living. As much as she comes to resent Doro, her irony is that he gives her the reason to keep herself young and healthy. When you are the only two immortal people in the world, who else do you have but each other? The issue of race is also present in the book, as it always is in Butler's work. The fact that Anyanwu is a black African brought to America on a ship in the late 1600s is not coincidence, and regardless of her actual legal status as free, she feels the figurative shackles of slavery in the way that Doro is able to manipulate her. Throughout the book, Butler points out the issue of race in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Doro will only take white bodies when traveling through the American south. Anyanwu herself becomes a white male landowner to protect her people, white and black, from suspicion. The fact that Doro uses his talented people as breeding stock much as white slave owners bred their slaves for certain traits is not an accident, I'm sure. This novel is thought-provoking, well-paced, and so intriguing that I plan to read the next book in the series immediately.
Having previously read two of the three Lillith's Brood novels, I must admit I am slightly disappointed in Wild Seed for its conscious effort to maintain a safe distance from the truly strange. This may sound a bit ludicrous, considering the novel's plot: Doro, an immortal spirit originating in Nubian antiquity, is obsessed with genetic engineering of humans, and strives for millenia to "breed" an X-Men type of human society in the hopes of eventually creating other immortals like himself. Just before the end of the 17th century, he meets, befriends, then alienates Anyanwu, an Igbo woman who is herself seemingly immortal. Both Doro and Anyanwu have special relationships with human bodies, or rather, bodies in general. Doro is more spirit than man, and depends on others' bodies to encase his being. Meanwhile, Anyanwu can physically become another human or animal body temporarily, but her true human form remains constant through the centuries. Butler uses brief, telling flashbacks to describe - though not explain - both Doro's and Anyanwu's beginnings. My disappointment came from Butler's refusal to push the boundaries even further than she does. To her credit, she challenges the reader's perceptions about gender -- Anyanwu, born as a female woman, at times changes herself into a male form, even fathering children. Her own realization that she can do this disgusts her at first; it is centuries before she accepts her own ability and the moral implications, if any, in altering her gender and experiencing sex firstly with a woman, and secondly as a male. Even stranger than gender altering is Anyanwu's ability to change into a specimen of an entirely different species -- from leopard, to eagle, to dolphin. However, Butler's exploration of Anyanwu's experiences stops at mere hints. It would have been interesting to witness Anyanwu's sensory experiences as a man, as an animal, her coming to terms with her own strangeness. The only episode in this novel in which Butler's text comes close to sensory exploration of a different body other than Anyanwu's human form is when she becomes a dolphin for the first time and we find out subtle differences and surprising similarities between the human and dolphin species.Having read two of the Lillith's Brood novels, I know Butler does not always shy away from describing strange sensory experiences. In Dawn, we find the minutest details of the taste and texture of alien food, what a sexual experience is like between aliens as well as between a human an alien. In Wild Seed, Butler shies away from really getting the gritty details that make these novels so refreshingly strange.Another disappointment comes out of Butler's approach to slavery as a fact, rather than a condition. When Doro first brings Anyanwu to the American colonies, slavery has already been established. Anyanwu's own people have been captured and enslaved in the New World. Butler touches upon the dismal conditions of slave ships, the dehumanized condition of being bred to breed and being branded like cattle, the backbreaking labor, and rampant violations of slave women and children by traders or masters.
Do You like book Wild Seed (2001)?
This was a terrific, fast read. I was glued to it for a whole day and even when parts were very disturbing, I had to know what happened next. Such a great brain-cleanse after reading Heinlein; this is sci-fi with a decidedly black, feminist, woman-centric bent. If you like the X-Men, or the Bene Gesserit sisterhood in Herbert's Dune, I suspect you will love the ideas behind this novel. The two main characters are so complementary and so tied together by bonds they would like to break - I couldn't look away. There are echoes of African and Native American mythology, tales of skinwalkers and animal-women who can become leopards and snakes. There is a beautiful meditation on loneliness and humanity, and what it means to be different in society. Butler talks about savagery and civilization, the slave trade, race relations, and all examined with a light touch, woven into the fabric of her writing without seeming to proselytize or preach. A brilliant work of fiction. I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending, but I know I loved the ride to get there.
—Moira Fogarty
Most of us don't believe in gods and spirits and devils who must be pleased or feared. We have Doro, and he's enough.What can I say about Wild Seed that could come anywhere close to doing it justice? This is the story of how Doro met Anyanwu, the only living soul on Earth who could possibly match his will; test his patience, endure his passive cruelty, and time and again defy him in ways even she could not possibly understand.And forever is a long time to endure one another when you are two of the only immortal beings on the planet. Theirs is a love story that goes beyond physical desire; Anyanwu needs Doro as much as he needs her, whether either are willing to accept it or not. Doro looked up. He held Isaac's gaze, not questioningly or challengingly, not with any reassurance or compassion. He only looked back. Isaac had seen cats stare at people that way. Cats. That was apt. More and more often, nothing human looked out of Doro's eyes.Doro is both our antihero and villain. An ogbanje -- evil spirit -- as Anyanwu would call him, he is not malicious through any evil intent of his own. He simply is. Much like fire must burn and virus must spread, Doro's nature is simply a part of him he cannot destroy.(view spoiler)[image from DeviantArt (hide spoiler)]
—Amanda
Doro just needed a copy of Sims, but not Sims 4 because it sucks. Then he could breed people, manipulate them all day and have himself a good time without causing suffering and misery to actual people.But, it would have been harder for him to find a body. Somehow he gets drawn to Anyanwu living in some African town in the time of slavery. He ensnares this powerful woman in his web of control, dominance and general assholery as he tries to breed people he can fit in with.And control. Because that's all he knows how to do! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJzjE... listen to how perfect this song is for this book.
—Synesthesia (SPIDERS!)
