Stephen's Reviews > Wild Seed

I’m not sure what Butler intended readers take away from this novel but I found it demeaning toward women and largely abhorrent.

The story focuses on two “people.” Doro is an evil shade thousands of years old who survives by jumping from body to body, killing the host, and absorbing the new body’s energy to survive until jumping to the next host at few week intervals. He has thus killed some hundred thousand people when this book begins.

His entertainment over the millennia is rounding up people with special abilities—mind reading, healing, telekinesis—and breeding them like animals—stranger to stranger, father to daughter, mother to son, sons to daughters—in Joseph Mengele fashion to create offspring with enhanced abilities to no real purpose other than his amusement, and as food. The more powerful the offspring, the more satisfying when he takes their bodies. None with power enough to challenge Doro are allowed to live. He has no empathy. He rules by fear and the seductiveness of the devil.

Anyanwu is also immortal. Born with the ability to manipulate every cell in her body, she has for hundreds of years been a wife, mother and healer to those around her. Doro finds her and desires to breed her as “wild seed” in his breeding colonies.

And my problems and disgust with this novel begin.

Anyanwu initially welcomes Doro to her bed and follows him hoping to protect her extended family from also becoming breeding stock. When it becomes apparent that nothing will stop Doro, she becomes his willingness accomplice and enabler, giving birth to many children by the various incarnations of Doro himself as well as allowing herself to be prostituted to men of Doro’s choosing to beget their children, even after she is married to Doro’s son, who himself is prostituted to many women to impregnate them. All in furtherance of Doro’s breeding experiments. Like a woman with battered wife syndrome, Ananyu knowingly and willing participates as Doro’s destroys the lives of those around her, taking even some of her own children as hosts.

Late in the book Anyanwu escapes and founds her own colony bringing together people of extraordinary abilities like those sought by Doro, but with the purpose of healing their souls to lead normal lives after being ostracized from society, hunted or tortured. Doro of course eventually finds her and her community. And she takes him back like a lover, abetting him to again destroy everything she’s built.

Butler seeks to paint Anyanwu as a Florence Nightengale figure who comforts the damaged in the face of unspeakable horrors. But she is decidedly not. She enables much of the horror by actively supporting Doro’s experiments, excusing her actions as necessary to enable her to heal some of the victims. She is the accomplice who puts a bandage on your arm before allowing the serial killer to eat you.

Actions she could have taken instead: 1) Leave and never again contribute her “seed” to Doro’s experiments; 2) Marshal those outside of Doro’s colonies to act against him; 3) Kill him; 4) Imprison him where he can’t hurt anyone again.

Which brings me to the gaping plot holes in this novel.

1) With Doro’s ability, he could amass a fortune, and through fear and his apparent seductiveness create armies, conquer nations, and pretty much do anything he wants. And all he wants to do is piddle around with small scale animal husbandry that for a millennia has failed to produce any material results? Not very ambitious for a demon as sadistic as Doro.

2) What is the purpose of his experimentation? NO ONE EVER ASKS! It’s THE most obvious question and NO ONE EVER ASKS!

3) For Doro to pass from one body to the next the story suggests he must be either touching or in very close proximity to the victim. If true, there are countless means one might capture or kill him (drug him, sink his ship at sea, blow his head off when few people are around to jump to, bury him in a hole, a cell, or the ocean where he can’t connect to anyone ever again). No one in the roughly 200 years covered in the novel even tries to counter him. They all just roll over.

Finally, I believe Butler intended Wild Seed to be read as a kind of love story between two entities destined to always feel alone because they can’t die. Butler writes several times that they need each other. I call bullshit on this notion. Anyanwu is never alone. She is a mother figure, always connecting to others and birthing descendants. Over and over she speaks of loving those she surrounds herself with through the generations, and of the joy of seeing them grow and develop….And then shacks up repeatedly with the Mengele serial killer showing that she also revels in victimhood, misery and death.

This is the first book I’ve read where I cringed all the way through. It has no redeeming quality. The content far overshadows for me Butler’s writing which has won many awards. Given the book's better than four star rating on GR others clearly read this book differently. I’ll not be continuing this series nor Do I recommend this book to anyone.