#RRSciFiMonth: Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
Sci-Fi November is a month-long blog event hosted by Rinn Reads and Over The Effing Rainbow this year, created to celebrate everything amazing about science fiction! From TV shows to movies, books to comics, and everything else in between, it is intended to help science fiction lovers share their love and passion for this genre and its many, many fandoms.
Genre: Science-Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
Series: Book 1 of the Patternmaster Series
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (April 1, 2001; first published 1980)
Author Information:
Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Narrator: Dion Graham | Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins | Audiobook Publisher: Audible Studios (July 16, 2009) | Whispersync Ready: Yes
Doro, a man who steals the bodies of others and uses the until he must find another or he feels he deserves the body of another person, finds Anyanwu in the African forests living alone on the fringes of a village as a old medicine woman. While searching for one of his lost groups of people, people who were likely taken and sold into slavery, Anyanwu’s power pulls him toward her. This aged woman reveals herself to be a young healer with strength that could crush a grown man who has roamed the world for over 300 years, but her lifetime is still a drop in time compared to his own lifespan.
Anyanwu agrees to leave the safety of her home to help Doro forge a bloodline of children who have special abilities and share their immortality in a world where loneliness and boredom are the enemies of people like them. While her agreement is made in order to save her own bloodline from him, part of her wonders if there could truly be a time when she would no longer have to watch her children die. This book follows Doro and Anyanwu from Africa during the early years of the American slave trades to the end of slavery as love, fight, hate, and dream about everything from the ethical issues of true workings of Doro’s breeding plan to their feelings about each other.
It’s hard to pin this book down to just one thing. It’s science-fiction mixed with historical fantasy add a little romance and a generous helping of social issues (racism, gender issues, ethical issues). Even describing it like that, I don’t think I’ve capture the essence of this book. This books takes so many conventional ideas and presents them in such an unconventional way as Butler uses words to weave this tale that can really take her readers on an emotional roller coaster. I love a good light, quick, fun speculative read, but there’s nothing like speculative fiction that uses the medium to really transcend expectations of the genre. Butler managed that this with book.
Dion Graham was such a powerful, amazing narrator choice for this book. The emotion and voices that he used for the characters captured me as much as the words did themselves. Butler’s characters were already so powerful. I love characters that can really shake me to my core. There was nothing simple about any of them. Even the ones you hated had this part of them that you still recognized as human, and Butler was able to convey so much of their humanity in less words than many author’s use to get you to care about characters in books twice this size. These characters combined with Graham’s narration was fantastic. I’m hoping that he’ll be narrating the other books in this series.
Despite all the ugliness in this book, it was counteracted with so much beauty. I had one minor complaint with a transition later in the book. It seemed a little hurried as Butler tried to wrap up the story, but I did like what it transitioned into.This was my first read by Octavia Butler, and it took me so long to read her because others had told me she could be a heavy read. And while I expected something amazing, something that would probably affect me on a profound level given how many people I know read her books and praise how she touched on issues, I hadn’t expected the incongruous beauty that waited for me or the feelings and thoughts that was this book.
Story: | Performance: | Overall:
Other reviews of this series: Wild Seed (Wendy’s Review), Mind of My Mind (Wendy’s Review), Clay’s Ark (Wendy’s Review)
Hmmm, I cannot say anything else
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I just finished “Dawn” by Octavia Butler. She definitely has a unique style and based on your review I look forward to reading this book.
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Octavia Butler is one of those authors that always come highly recommended and I have yet to read: this sounds like a good starting place – an intriguing, different story that promises to draw you in deeply.
Thanks for sharing!
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I’ve been recommended Octavia Butler many times but haven’t yet got around to reading anything of hers. But, it’s a good sign if your first taste of her has been a good experience, I shall keep this one in mind next time I’m at the bookstore!
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I am so glad you started with this book. It is my favourite of all of them. Such an incredible, stunning love story, that encompasses so much.
As you can see, her work does not follow any kind of typical tropes and it digs into the heavy and the dark, but she is so good at holding up that mirror to our reality and forcing us to see the beauty in the ugliness and vice versa.
I read this after I read Mind of My Mind, which was actually written first — the entire four book series is a rather disjointingly connected and ultimately, Wild Seed is the only one I love, but the others have their merit. Basically, even books by Butler that trouble or disappoint me still overwhelm me with the sheer power of her words.
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Like you, I have heard so much about Octavia Butler. I’ve been a little hesitant to read her books. I even have several of them. Because of your review I’m going to try to get one of the books read this month! Great review!
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I don’t think I did a proper review of this one because there was no way my words could ever fully explain how wonderful it is. Seriously, the characters are just so perfectly crafted and the story just flooooooowwws on.
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Octavia Butler is the BEST! 🙂 I loved this one, the writing style, the plot, the social commentary. Glad to see you loved it, too.
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