Lyn's Reviews > Wild Seed

Dear Goodreads friends,

If you like to read science fiction / fantasy you should get to know Octavia Butler.

Love,

Lyn

Butler’s 1980 novel Wild Seed is the first chronological book in her Patternmaster series. This details the beginnings of the sub-race of humans that will, in Patternmaster, be set in the far future. Butler begins her narrative in 1390, in West Africa, where her protagonist Anyanwu meets a strange young man named Doro.

So begins a centuries old relationship, often rocky, between two immortals. Anyanwu is a healer and a shape shifter and seems to remain at about 20 years of age though she can take the shape (and apparently the DNA makeup) of other people and even animals. Doro, on the other hand, turns out to be much older and is a kind of spiritual vampire, taking the bodies of his victims and “wearing” them for a while.

The central conflict of the story is the dynamic opposition between Anyanwu and Doro in regard to Doro’s millennia project of breeding a super race. Doro, who is more spirit than man, has been gathering people with unusual talents and getting them together so that their talents may be made more usable and more apparent in the offspring. Anyanwu vehemently opposes his methods and his dehumanization of the subjects.

As interesting as this story is, and it is quintessential Butler, the magnetic tension between Doro and Anyanwu is the gripping central focus of the book. And like Milton’s Satan, Butler’s Doro is a fascinatingly complex and intriguing antagonist who displays both god-like power and transcendent ennui. Anyanwu’s humanism, and her female relational practicality and leadership offer a vital juxtaposition to Doro’s attentive but disassociated deity.

On the checklist for SF/F books that should be read and a must read for Butler fans.