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language: English
country: USA
year: 1980
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Patternist, #4
dates read: 20.6.24
I went into Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed — the fourth of the Patternist books — both cautiously optimistic and expecting disappointment. on the one hand, I was curious about Anyanwu after Mind of My Mind, and I thought the sweeping historical scope might have some similarities to Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (it does, to an extent). on the other hand, perhaps even more than Mind of My Mind I knew this was the eugenics book, but I’d seen people on Goodreads talking about Doro and Anyanwu’s relationship as, like, a powerful love story. this, indeed, is how the blurb presents the novel: as the story of “their courtship”. given, you know, the eugenics, this framing worried me.
I’ll start by saying that it’s an extremely compelling read — I enjoyed Patternmaster and Survivor more, but neither of them gripped me the way this one did. in that respect it’s definitely the strongest of the series so far; we’ll see how I feel after Clay’s Ark. Doro, a body-stealing entity born some 3,700 years ago in Nubia, meets Anyanwu, a 150-year-old woman who can heal and change her shape, in 17th-century West Africa, and the two of them become entangled through Doro’s millennia-old project to breed a new kind of human with special abilities: telekinesis, telepathy, and, perhaps, from Anyanwu, shape-changing and healing.
Anyanwu is, in many ways, great. reading it in close proximity to the Xenogenesis trilogy, she’s clearly a prototype for the Oankali, down to biting people to “taste” them and so understand their genetic structure. I would also say — in contrast to my post yesterday — that she’s one of the most fully realized of Butler’s characters: I feel like I could distinguish her, at least to an extent, from Lilith or Mary or Alanna.
unfortunately, there is the eugenics. now, to be fair, the novel — through Anyanwu — is unequivocal that Doro’s particular practices are bad. Anyanwu does, however, “believe” (her word) in Doro’s larger eugenic project, even if she disapproves of his specific methods, and it seems evident from Sandra Y. Govan’s afterword included in the Grand Central edition that at least some readers emerge from the novel failing to grasp that regardless of how “inclusive” or “diverse” Doro’s grand design may be, it still is eugenics, and seeking people with “talent and power” in order to “contribute to the gene pool” is bad even if it’s done with an appreciation of the “inherent value of all life”. especially reading this novel in the context of the larger Patternist series I come away deeply troubled: Anyanwu and (in Mind of My Mind) Mary may be preferable to Doro, but the former only moderates Doro’s project and the latter takes up Doro’s mantle in order to create a new system of mass enslavement.
Wild Seed also has another ambiguous moment where (perhaps) there could be queerness, in Doro and Anyanwu’s conversation about Anyanwu’s wife (dead some time before they meet again). Anyanwu can transform her body and has been both “female” (her original body, to which she habitually reverts, is that of a twenty-something Igbo woman) and “male”; in the early 19th century, she takes the form of a young white man and marries a white woman who gets visions of the past — including Anyanwu’s past. her wife recognizes her as “really” a woman and loves her anyway, especially when she realizes that Anyanwu can still father children; there are perhaps ways to read the possibility of transness or lesbianness here. but it’s still handled in the most heterosexual way, lmao.
the other moment I found striking is near the very end. Doro and Anyanwu have been arguing throughout the book about Doro’s methods and in particular about what Doro is: whether he is a spirit, whether he is still human. Doro ultimately admits that perhaps he is losing his humanity, and asks, “What will I be when there is nothing left but hunger and feeding?”
Anyanwu answers, “Someone will find a way to rid the world of you” — suggesting, perhaps, that her conception of his project has shifted, that maybe the goal is no longer simply to breed a race of immortal companions but to create someone capable of destroying Doro. unfortunately this happens four pages before the end of the book and isn’t followed up on. but the possibility is tantalizing.
moods: dark, reflective