Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Fraught, Fantastic Love Story Octavia Butler's Wild Seed (1980) is a compelling love story between seemingly the only two immortal beings in the world, one essentially but not exclusively male called Doro and one essentially but not exclusively female called Anyanwu. While Doro kills people to wear their bodies and sees them only as stock to breed, Anyanwu heals people and sees them as potential family members. She is also able to change her shape and to completely become different animals or people, down to the cellular level. All this enables Butler to powerfully explore gender and race, slavery and eugenics, community and control, power and independence, love and loss, humanity and identity. As with her other novels like Kindred, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower, in this one Butler imagines believable, human characters and convincing and thematically relevant fantastic elements, puts different kinds of people together to see how they succeed (or fail) at making communities, and writes straightforward and potent prose. For those reasons, she makes us care about her characters so much that what happens to them is a matter of great interest and suspense. Can Doro and Anyanwu ever build a relationship based on mutual understanding, respect, and love? They are different in every way but being immortal, and Doro's 3,700 years of life working on his project to create other "gifted" immortals by putting his descendents with special abilities like telepathy or telekinesis in scattered settlements and breeding them with each other and with randomly found "wild seed" like Anyanwu has been steadily rendering him less capable of human feelings like empathy. Anyanwu's 300 years of life in Africa free from other people's control has made it difficult for her to accept being Doro's breeding animal. This all makes their fraught relationship fascinating (often morbidly) to watch. Butler sets the novel at first in Africa in the 17th century and then moves it to North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. This displacement of her story from the present into the historical past enriches the saga of Doro and Anyanwu with the American experience of slavery, as well as making it easier to conceive of pocket communities of super ability people living outside the notice of normal societies. The ending feels somewhat abrupt, as though Butler was preparing for sequels, or rather, because she wrote this "prequel" after writing the other novels in her Patterner series, as though she was fitting the book into already written sequels. Anyway, her unadorned, imaginative, and vivid writing becomes luminous in its power during scenes like when Anyanwu becomes a dolphin for the first time, or when one of her daughters has a particularly horrifying transition into her super ability, or when Doro remembers his own transition when he was 13 nearly 4,000 years ago. Dion Grahame gives a perfect reading of the novel, convincingly speaking for whites and blacks, men and women, boys and girls, Americans and Africans, etc. He enhances the emotional power of Butler's novel. People who like well-written and thematically serious stories about people with special abilities living among us should like this novel. View all my reviews
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