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coraaWild Seed
, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)
Wild Seed is the first book in internal chronologically for the quartet, and the last book to be written. It's also the best book of the series, far and away -- not because the others were not good, but because this one blew me out of the water.
It begins in seventeenth-century Africa, and it begins with Doro, who is, by that time, already nearly two thousand years old. Doro is immortal not because he has an immortal body, but because he is a body-thief: when his body nears death (but, also, simply when he wishes it) his consciousness jumps to another human host. His mind displaces the other mind; the other person dies; he lives. And over the course of his thousands of years of life he has found a purpose: collecting people of unusual talent, breeding and protecting them -- and using them.
It also begins with Anyanwu, who is also an immortal, but in a very different way. Anyanwu's control of her body is perfect. She can make herself old or young, repair any wound or illness, change her shape -- to appear as a different woman, or as a man, or as a jaguar, a serpent, an eagle. She is also a healer of others, using what she has learned by her perfect control of her own body to aid her sprawling family and friends.
Doro meets Anyanwu and is quite taken with her, as a woman but also as what he calls a 'wild seed,' a person with incredible potential but who was born outside his personal breeding program, his 'seed villages.' With a combination of threats and promises -- and her own curiosity -- he convinces Anyanwu to come with him. What she does not know is how much of a liar and manipulator he truly is, and how powerful he truly is; what he does not know is how wise and stubborn she is -- and how powerful she is, in a way that he cannot approach.
The book is about a lot of things, but the fascinating heart of it is how they interact with one another over time, as she learns how he runs his little world, as he learns her strengths. The sfnal ideas here are fascinating; I'm very much taken with the way she takes certain sfnal ideas (mental/psychic powers, and the idea that they might pass genetically and turn up in certain bloodlines; human immortality of various kinds; humans treated as gods) and then explores them, examines them, takes the ideas and runs with them -- without flinching away from the terrible parts. And because she's writing about people of various ethnicities (but, in several notable cases, African people and people of African descent) in seventeenth through nineteenth century America, there's a lot of terrible parts even aside from the way Doro treats his people and the way they treat each other.
But while those were really interesting, I didn't love the book because it was great idea fiction (although it was). I loved it because the characters were amazing -- Doro and Anyanwu and vivid and compelling, even when Doro is being quite unsympathetic. They orbit each other, and the way they interact, and the way their interactions affect everyone around them, just dragged me in. I wanted badly to know how things would turn out for Anyanwu and her family; I wanted to know whether Doro would be willing or able to change; I wanted to know whether, and if so how, they would be able to find equilibrium with one another.
The word that keeps coming back to me when I think about the book is isolation -- the way Doro isolates himself even as he collects people around him, and the way that Anyanwu, by contrast, does not. Doro sees himself as outside, not only above his people -- who he breeds and slaughters as indifferently as cattle, with a very few exceptions -- but also essentially different from them. He doesn't live among his people, though he visits them often. Their relationship with him is not one of familiarity but of recognition: when he speaks, whatever body he's wearing, they instantly know who he is, but his face and body are strange to them. (At least they are at the best of times. Sometimes he comes to them wearing the body of someone they knew, and therefore hearing his voice from that mouth means that their friend or family member is dead.) Anyanwu also collects people like herself, but she lives among them. She is not independent of them. And though she can and does change her shape and her form (making herself male for the social access it grants her, making herself older or younger to suit her disguise, even making herself a bird, a dog, a dolphin), she remains with them, and familiar to them, and even the alternate shapes she takes become familiar; they know that the black dog is Anyanwu, not because of some mystical power of the voice but because they have seen her in that shape before, and come to know it, and her.
And of course that's Doro's struggle in the book. Anyanwu, being immortal, is the only person who could be his peer -- though he does seem to care for some among his people (particularly his son Isaac, who he had Anyanwu marry shortly after coming to America), they still have brief mayfly lives compared to him. He lures Anyanwu to America with the promise that he will help her have children she won't need to bury, but in the end it's him who's desperately in need of a companion he won't have to bury. And yet he can't admit that, because genuinely caring for anyone would weaken his power. He has only one threat in his arsenal, but it's a potent one: he can kill with a touch, and even someone who does not fear death may fear the death of their parents, siblings, lovers, children. To care genuinely would be to relinquish some of his power; if he couldn't bring himself to kill someone disobedient, he would lose the ability to control them, and over two thousand years he has come to not just rely on his absolute control of his people but to assume it. He doesn't know how to interact with people who are not either indoctrinated to love him or terrified into submission -- or both.
The title comes from his term for his people -- his "seeds," which he is using to plant a crop of powerful people -- and the fact that someone with strong psychic powers who was not born in one of his controlled villages is a "wild seed." He acknowledges that, for the most part, "wild seeds" must be killed after they've bred a few times and brought their powers into his bloodlines, because they aren't sufficiently obedient, as people raised to see him as a godlike figure are. But therein lies the conflict: Anyanwu is special and important to him because she cannot die -- she could be a persistent companion -- and yet also because she is not unquestioningly in love with him, does not fawn on him, disagrees him, sometimes hates him.
And hates him with good reason: he kills casually. He kills people she cares for, casually, and without regret. He sees their lives as his due. Anyanwu, on the other hand, sees people like herself -- other psychic people -- as family. She is drawn to them, and they to her, and to each other. And they are in pain, often in extreme pain, since many of them cannot adequately control their talents and therefore are assaulted by the pain of others all day. Or else their powers cause others to see them as insane. So where Doro brings them together to breed and use them, Anyanwu brings them together for their own protection, to heal them, to provide solace -- and at the same time to enjoy their companionship; Anyanwu is very fundamentally good, but she is not selfless, and she draws people to her because she needs them nearly as much as they need her. And so Doro's treatment of them is not only repellent for the obvious reasons that casual murder is repellent, but also because he is hurting people deliberately under her protection, in order to hurt her.
And in the end, the only way for her to free herself and win is to die. Which is also, incidentally, the only thing that seems capable of getting through Doro's profound isolation. I found the ending incredibly powerful and even hopeful -- even though, having read Mind of My Mind, I knew that Doro wasn't exactly going to turn into Mr. Nice Guy. (On the other hand, the end of this one, the exhaustion Doro seems to feel for his unendable life -- because he cannot die; jumping bodies is involuntary at the point of the death of his current body -- and Anyanwu's peace with her potential end, also changed my perception of the ending of Mind of My Mind.
(There are about a million other things I could talk about here, too -- gender and sex, and the way that Doro and Anyanwu's shape-changing abilities play into that; slavery, and the comparison between the slave system of the Americas and the bondage of Doro's people; love and marriage, particularly Anyanwu's many marriages, her marriage to Isaac, the marriage in which she was a man; Anyanwu's many animal forms, and the way she uses them both literally and as metaphors -- and on and on. But I'm already rambling enough in this review.)
Anyway. Very powerful book, highly recommended. If you're going to read the entire quartet (which I very much recommend), I suggest you read this one last, as I did. I think if I'd 'met' Doro and Anyanwu first, I would have been disappointed by everyone else, because they're just so vivid. But if you're only going to read one, pick this one. It's just that good.
Running Tally:
Total Books: 17
Fiction: 6
Non-Fiction: 11
POC Author: 6
, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)Wild Seed is the first book in internal chronologically for the quartet, and the last book to be written. It's also the best book of the series, far and away -- not because the others were not good, but because this one blew me out of the water.
It begins in seventeenth-century Africa, and it begins with Doro, who is, by that time, already nearly two thousand years old. Doro is immortal not because he has an immortal body, but because he is a body-thief: when his body nears death (but, also, simply when he wishes it) his consciousness jumps to another human host. His mind displaces the other mind; the other person dies; he lives. And over the course of his thousands of years of life he has found a purpose: collecting people of unusual talent, breeding and protecting them -- and using them.
It also begins with Anyanwu, who is also an immortal, but in a very different way. Anyanwu's control of her body is perfect. She can make herself old or young, repair any wound or illness, change her shape -- to appear as a different woman, or as a man, or as a jaguar, a serpent, an eagle. She is also a healer of others, using what she has learned by her perfect control of her own body to aid her sprawling family and friends.
Doro meets Anyanwu and is quite taken with her, as a woman but also as what he calls a 'wild seed,' a person with incredible potential but who was born outside his personal breeding program, his 'seed villages.' With a combination of threats and promises -- and her own curiosity -- he convinces Anyanwu to come with him. What she does not know is how much of a liar and manipulator he truly is, and how powerful he truly is; what he does not know is how wise and stubborn she is -- and how powerful she is, in a way that he cannot approach.
The book is about a lot of things, but the fascinating heart of it is how they interact with one another over time, as she learns how he runs his little world, as he learns her strengths. The sfnal ideas here are fascinating; I'm very much taken with the way she takes certain sfnal ideas (mental/psychic powers, and the idea that they might pass genetically and turn up in certain bloodlines; human immortality of various kinds; humans treated as gods) and then explores them, examines them, takes the ideas and runs with them -- without flinching away from the terrible parts. And because she's writing about people of various ethnicities (but, in several notable cases, African people and people of African descent) in seventeenth through nineteenth century America, there's a lot of terrible parts even aside from the way Doro treats his people and the way they treat each other.
But while those were really interesting, I didn't love the book because it was great idea fiction (although it was). I loved it because the characters were amazing -- Doro and Anyanwu and vivid and compelling, even when Doro is being quite unsympathetic. They orbit each other, and the way they interact, and the way their interactions affect everyone around them, just dragged me in. I wanted badly to know how things would turn out for Anyanwu and her family; I wanted to know whether Doro would be willing or able to change; I wanted to know whether, and if so how, they would be able to find equilibrium with one another.
The word that keeps coming back to me when I think about the book is isolation -- the way Doro isolates himself even as he collects people around him, and the way that Anyanwu, by contrast, does not. Doro sees himself as outside, not only above his people -- who he breeds and slaughters as indifferently as cattle, with a very few exceptions -- but also essentially different from them. He doesn't live among his people, though he visits them often. Their relationship with him is not one of familiarity but of recognition: when he speaks, whatever body he's wearing, they instantly know who he is, but his face and body are strange to them. (At least they are at the best of times. Sometimes he comes to them wearing the body of someone they knew, and therefore hearing his voice from that mouth means that their friend or family member is dead.) Anyanwu also collects people like herself, but she lives among them. She is not independent of them. And though she can and does change her shape and her form (making herself male for the social access it grants her, making herself older or younger to suit her disguise, even making herself a bird, a dog, a dolphin), she remains with them, and familiar to them, and even the alternate shapes she takes become familiar; they know that the black dog is Anyanwu, not because of some mystical power of the voice but because they have seen her in that shape before, and come to know it, and her.
And of course that's Doro's struggle in the book. Anyanwu, being immortal, is the only person who could be his peer -- though he does seem to care for some among his people (particularly his son Isaac, who he had Anyanwu marry shortly after coming to America), they still have brief mayfly lives compared to him. He lures Anyanwu to America with the promise that he will help her have children she won't need to bury, but in the end it's him who's desperately in need of a companion he won't have to bury. And yet he can't admit that, because genuinely caring for anyone would weaken his power. He has only one threat in his arsenal, but it's a potent one: he can kill with a touch, and even someone who does not fear death may fear the death of their parents, siblings, lovers, children. To care genuinely would be to relinquish some of his power; if he couldn't bring himself to kill someone disobedient, he would lose the ability to control them, and over two thousand years he has come to not just rely on his absolute control of his people but to assume it. He doesn't know how to interact with people who are not either indoctrinated to love him or terrified into submission -- or both.
The title comes from his term for his people -- his "seeds," which he is using to plant a crop of powerful people -- and the fact that someone with strong psychic powers who was not born in one of his controlled villages is a "wild seed." He acknowledges that, for the most part, "wild seeds" must be killed after they've bred a few times and brought their powers into his bloodlines, because they aren't sufficiently obedient, as people raised to see him as a godlike figure are. But therein lies the conflict: Anyanwu is special and important to him because she cannot die -- she could be a persistent companion -- and yet also because she is not unquestioningly in love with him, does not fawn on him, disagrees him, sometimes hates him.
And hates him with good reason: he kills casually. He kills people she cares for, casually, and without regret. He sees their lives as his due. Anyanwu, on the other hand, sees people like herself -- other psychic people -- as family. She is drawn to them, and they to her, and to each other. And they are in pain, often in extreme pain, since many of them cannot adequately control their talents and therefore are assaulted by the pain of others all day. Or else their powers cause others to see them as insane. So where Doro brings them together to breed and use them, Anyanwu brings them together for their own protection, to heal them, to provide solace -- and at the same time to enjoy their companionship; Anyanwu is very fundamentally good, but she is not selfless, and she draws people to her because she needs them nearly as much as they need her. And so Doro's treatment of them is not only repellent for the obvious reasons that casual murder is repellent, but also because he is hurting people deliberately under her protection, in order to hurt her.
And in the end, the only way for her to free herself and win is to die. Which is also, incidentally, the only thing that seems capable of getting through Doro's profound isolation. I found the ending incredibly powerful and even hopeful -- even though, having read Mind of My Mind, I knew that Doro wasn't exactly going to turn into Mr. Nice Guy. (On the other hand, the end of this one, the exhaustion Doro seems to feel for his unendable life -- because he cannot die; jumping bodies is involuntary at the point of the death of his current body -- and Anyanwu's peace with her potential end, also changed my perception of the ending of Mind of My Mind.
(There are about a million other things I could talk about here, too -- gender and sex, and the way that Doro and Anyanwu's shape-changing abilities play into that; slavery, and the comparison between the slave system of the Americas and the bondage of Doro's people; love and marriage, particularly Anyanwu's many marriages, her marriage to Isaac, the marriage in which she was a man; Anyanwu's many animal forms, and the way she uses them both literally and as metaphors -- and on and on. But I'm already rambling enough in this review.)
Anyway. Very powerful book, highly recommended. If you're going to read the entire quartet (which I very much recommend), I suggest you read this one last, as I did. I think if I'd 'met' Doro and Anyanwu first, I would have been disappointed by everyone else, because they're just so vivid. But if you're only going to read one, pick this one. It's just that good.
Running Tally:
Total Books: 17
Fiction: 6
Non-Fiction: 11
POC Author: 6
