"Wild Seed (Patternmaster #1)", Octavia Butler, 1980

"Wild Seed (Patternmaster #1)", Octavia Butler, 1980

Anyanwu and Doro are two immortal beings. Doro is more of a spirit than a man. He lives through millennial by possessing other’s bodies, killing the original owners in the process. Anyanwu is a shape shifter who can constantly rejuvenate her body so that she stays young forever. Doro kills, Anyanwu heals. They are as opposite as they can be, and yet each is the only immortal the other knows. Wild Seed begins with the two coming into contact for the first time, when Doro happens upon the African village where Anyanwu’s living in the late 1600s and shows the relationship between them up until the late 1800s.

Wild Seed is easy to read, but there’s a lot going on underneath the surface. There’s so many different topics at play here – race, slavery, gender, sexuality. Basically, if it’s a topic relating to power structures, Wild Seed deals with it. It doesn’t deal much with LGBTQ themes, but I’m still listing it under the tag since Anyanwu has a wife at one point (happens between chapters) and could probably be considered bisexual.

Wild Seed deals with the difficulties of being immortal and the inherent loneliness of watching everyone you know die. This is the focal point of the relationship between Anyanwu and Doro. Anyanwu may not be able to condone what Doro does, but he’s the only person who will remain constant as the families she builds for herself die around her.

Doro is dislikable, but I think you’re supposed to hate him. He’s spent his extraordinary long life on a eugenics project, creating a race of people with special powers. He’s controlling and manipulative and thinks nothing of killing others. He wants people to be under his control, to respect and obey him in all things. But Anyanwu cannot respect him, and she does not always obey him. She’s wild seed – a talented person born outside his breeding programs.

Book 1 . Covenant 1690:
Anyanwu lives as a god among her power, an immortal shape-shifter whose control over living material allows her to heal others. Doro too is an immortal with a keen interest in people like Anyanwu. In fact he has been collecting people like her – telekinetics, doomed telepaths, and so on - for millennia. Anyanwu is unique in that she is the only other immortal he has ever encountered; when he stumbles over Anyanwu’s existence Doro is eager to add her to his collection. He is seductive enough that Anyanwu agrees to accompany him through the hellscape of an Africa subject to repeated slaver raids and off to the New World, not the most ideal place for an African at this time.

Alas, Doro is an obligate psychic predator forced to hop from body to body to sustain himself and his interest in people with special gifts is because their minds taste best when consumed. He is no Charles Xavier or even Magneto gathering allies but a nomadic herder engaged in an extremely long duration breeding program and any empathy he might seem to have for his food is almost purely an illusion.

After the penny drops, she sticks around because she has fallen in love with Isaac, one of Doro’s subjects. Isaac convinces Anyanwu to stick around with a telling argument that the author carefully keeps hidden from the reader much as I am doing now.

Book II . Lot’s Children 1741:

Anyanwu doesn’t have a lot of cards in her hand when it comes to bargaining with Doro but she has a few (she can, for example, run away in the form of an animal whose mind Doro cannot perceive) but his powers and willingness to use her loved ones as hostages mean that the balance of power is very much on his side. Her love for Isaac is enough that she puts up with Doro’s use of both of them in his breeding programs, and Doro’s casually murderous customs. Her persistence is paid most poorly.

Book III . Canaan 1840
Anyanwu builds a new life for herself, one with a community of gifted who she nurtures rather than exploits. Doro of course ruins all this by tracking her down and while he tries to convince her they can reach a tolerable accommodation, not only do his misjudgments provoke terrible tragedies but he cannot change his predatory ways or his profound empathetic deficits. In the end, Anyanwu comes to the conclusion there are only two paths: submit to Doro in the knowledge that even when he tries very hard to be less than a total monster for the sake of the only person who shares his immortality he will still be a horrible person, or escape into death. Doro is the only one in a position to argue out of this and of course this is one game where he is the one stuck with terrible cards.

My rating: ★★★★★ (5 out of 5 stars) - I loved it!