Over the next four hundred years, Doro tries to control, manipulate and break Anyanwu, whilst Anyanwu tries to resist, break his control over her descendants and escape. Yet even as she begins to become an essential part of this community, Anyanwu discovers the true extent of Doro’s monstrousness – he is a manipulative monster who consumes people’s souls and wears their bodies. Doro’s people have a range of superhuman and psychic abilities, but none of them have anything as powerful as Anyanwu’s shapeshifting and healing abilities, or her unnaturally long life. Leaving behind her home in Africa, she finds herself brought across the Atlantic on a slave ship to one of Doro’s secluded colonies of people with extraordinary abilities in upstate New York. Seduced by Doro’s charms and frightened that he might prey on her children, Anyanwu agrees to go with him. Doro sees Anyanwu as a wild seed, a genetic source of new and exciting abilities to bring to his people. She is discovered by Doro, an ancient bodyswapping being who has been carefully breeding people with special abilities for thousands of years.
Wild Seed is the story of Anyanwu, an immortal African woman who can change shape and heal herself and others. Wonderfully imagined, epic in scope, and featuring some of Butler’s most indelible characters, Wild Seed is both a highlight of Butler’s own backlist and of the speculative fiction genre as a whole. These are themes close to Butler’s heart, that she would return to in her Xenogenesis books, and Wild Seed also paves the way for some of the more radical explorations of sex and gender that drive that later trilogy as well. Coming out a year after Butler had released the standalone novel Kindred (1979), a powerful work which sends modern day African American woman Dana back in time to a pre-Civil War plantation where she experiences the horrors of slavery first-hand, Wild Seed further explores slavery, power dynamics and what kinds of relationships can exist between the two.
In a rare case of the prequel being better than the original, Wild Seed is the high point of the Patternist series and one of Butler’s finest achievements. She wrote the book second to last, after already having written Patternmaster (1976), Mind Of My Mind (1977) and Survivor (1978). Butler’s Patternist series, according to internal chronology. Wild Seed (1980) is the first book in Octavia E. She could break free of him only by dying and sacrificing her children and leaving him loose upon the world to become even more of an animal.” Doro’s mark had been on her from the day they met. In her pride, she had denied that she was a slave. She knew now how the slaves had felt as they lay chained on the bench, the slaver’s hot iron burning into their flesh.
0 kommentar(er)
