Review: Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

[megwrites]

Title: Wild Seed (Patternmaster Series, Book 4)
Author: Octavia Butler
Genre: Science Fiction
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Aspect Fiction





Basic Plotline: In the final book of the Patternmaster series, Butler tells the "prequel" story, of Anyanwu and Doro. Anyanwu is an Igbo woman who is unaging and able to transform herself and heal others. When Doro, a spirit who leaps from host to host, comes upon her, he lures her from her village to his community in the New World. As Doro tries ever harder to control Anyanwu and kills those around her, threatening to harm her children and descendants if she does not obey, she struggles to escape. Wild Seed is the story of their relationship - contentious, passionate, hateful, loving, balanced and unbalanced across three different centuries.

The Positives: It is my contention that there is no such thing as reading an Octavia Butler book. In a way, the book reads you (insert your own "in Soviet Russia joke" here). It wraps around you and suddenly you are in her world completely.

Butler is one of those authors who can talk about race and gender and many other things in her novels without repeating herself or getting trite. While Kindred was a deeply personal study of systemic oppression and slavery, this is a somewhat objective study in personal oppression. Themes of abuse, dominance and submission, love, sex, and freedom are all studied as we take the journey of Anyanwu and Doro's epic, complex journey. I hesitate to call it a love story, because it does not take on traditional ideals of a romantic love story - but it is a story about love in it's own way.

The settings in this novel are one of it's best features, next to the main characters. Going from an Igbo village in what is now Nigeria to early colonial New York to a Louisiana plantation in the height of slavery, representing of some of the important points along the African diaspora who became African-Americans. There is so much about heritage and history to be found both metaphorically and literally in this book. There are at least a hundred doctoral theses one could get from it. Yet, there is something fantastic in each of these settings, however common they are - they transgress their own place in the world.

The village where Anyanwu lives is both home and not home, it is hers and not hers, and though Wheatley sounds so classically colonial, it is both the perfect representation and the perfect opposite of America's melding of peoples. It is a free place for those who are completely not free. Twenty years (and change) before the Emancipation Proclamation, Anyanwu has constructed a plantation that is in defiance of all the racist ideals of the time. On her plantation, refugees of America's racial bigotry and even some whites, find themselves living together, hiding in plain sight.

The constant tension between Anyanwu and Doro does not become tiring or overplayed, an impressive move. I tend to grow tired of love/hate relationships quickly, but this one stayed the distance for me. Butler does a good job of casting Doro as an ambiguous hero and villain in his own right, but never purely one or the other.

There were times in the novel I wanted to become disappointed with Anyanwu, wanted to see her launch some clever attack and completely destroy Doro. Sometimes to see her continued submission rather than fighting saddened me, but as I read on, sometimes mourning that Anyanwu might lose her agency, I came to understand that submission is as complex as dominance. I came to understand that submission in action is not necessarily a sign of weakness, but sometimes of necessity.

Again, there are a wealth of essays and theses and explorations to be done on the subject through this text.


The Negatives: On a surface level, there were moments when Anyanwu's easy use of her powers sometimes stretched my credulity. It seemed as if she'd say, "Oh, I have a power for that, I can do that". I would have liked to examine her experimentation with her powers a bit more. As an SF/F reader, it does tend to get to me a little when someone has omni-useful powers that seems to get them out of every scrape and situation. Not that this is entirely the case here, and Anyanwu's abilities have their limits. She can't make others immortal, and even her powers can't keep her from Doro forever.

Also, she understands her body and her powers in a way that sounds like science for someone who isn't using scientific vocabulary, and there were times when I didn't quite buy it, because - for instance - some of the concepts she describes near medically are concepts that even with our modern science there is some confusion about.

It is also mentioned that when she needs money, she goes searching for the treasures from shipwrecks and that seems too easy and convenient for me.

These things did not hamper my enjoyment of the book one bit, however. They did give me pause, but not a very long pause.

CoC Score - 10. For all the obvious reasons, but also for being able to write a book that focuses on a lot of interactions between differing races, for being able to discuss and show all that without centering the white gaze or whiteness itself. Even when Anyanwu must employ her white children to help her blend in or to give camouflage to her community, there is not a sense that somehow they are more important for this facet, only more useful in an instance.

Gender Score - 10. This book is filled with women who have loads of agency.

GLBT Score - 10. Gender swapping is a theme in this book, because both Anyanwu and Doro can take bodies of any genders. They identify female and male respectively, but both take wives and husbands, male and female lovers. Anyanwu even marries a woman who knows that she is actually a black woman though she wears a white man's body and they have a very happy marriage and Anyanwu loves her quite dearly. She is deceased of old age by the time we catch up to Anyanwu in 1840, though.

Ablism Score - 4. Unfortunately, there is background ablism of the kind that crops up when the idea of breeding and superabled people comes into play. It is mentioned that any defective children are done away with, and in one scene, Anyanwu says she had to be careful when giving her wife children because if she had made a mistake at the cellular level, she would have created "monstrosities". That bothered me, and there's probably more I'm missing as an able person. So I can definitely see that this might be something that bothers some readers.