Seed to Harvest - Octavia E. Butler
I had abandoned this blog after a brief fit of posting in 2012. I'm restarting now, as somewhere to collect my thoughts on sci-fi novels.
Seed to Harvest is a collection of four stories by Octavia E. Butler. It is a jarring opus, profoundly uncomfortable at points, and mildly uncomfortable the rest of the time. The writing is prosaic and often blunt. The plotline in each novel reminds me of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with endlessly building tension culminating in a vicious and curt finale in the last few pages. It is the responsibility of the reader to decompress, to digest, to discover how the book has left you feeling.
The collection reminds me strongly of Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World and City of Illusions, which also deal with telepathy, mental control, and the consequent difficult encounters between different peoples. Both authors mingle sci-fi with fantasy in a pleasant stew of interpersonal conflict and necessitated adventure. Both also make nearly all the characters people of color, and it's damn nice for me to feel included in a predominantly white genre.
However, where Le Guin's work is bright and hopeful, Butler's is dark and infuriating, leaving the reader feeling as helpless as the beleaguered main character to the onslaught of the antagonist. Where Le Guin uses skin color and differences in culture to highlight how we are all, really, the same, Butler instead places the reader into social structures prejudiced by race and gender to build discomfort, and thereby encourage empathy for the "other."
The first theme of these books is the use and abuse of power in interpersonal relationships to make the reader understand, through discomfort, how catastrophic slavery is to the psyche of a person and of a society. This is conveyed through brutal social structures that sling characters through a variety of consensual and non-consensual sexual encounters. These encounters started to wear on me halfway through the first book; I can only take so much talk of selectively breeding humans.
One key consequence of the first theme is a focus on heterosexual relationships. Given just how much sex is in these books, it's jarring that there are nearly no other types of relationships, but this may be a consequence of these novels being written in the 70s and 80s.
The second theme of these books is the slow, painful, but inevitable defeat of powerful, abusive men. This theme comes as a teasing trickle, but does make up somewhat for the discomfort induced by the first theme.
Wild Seed
This was my favorite novel of the collection. It follows a pair of immortals as they navigate a world of malleable humans, and thereby establishes the first theme mentioned above. The book really puts the reader in the (tired) shoes of immortal beings, similar to the passages about the Tiste Andii in the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Mind of My Mind
More abrupt than Wild Seed, this novel puts the reader squarely in the vicious pseudo-puberty and adulthood that Butler's telepathically-active characters endure. Through the main character, the reader can experience something akin to the stress of becoming a queen bee.
Clay's Ark
This is the first novel in the series to be more sci-fi than fantasy, and deals with an unconventional extraterrestrial invader. Butler casts the reader into a post-apocalyptic California that is terrifying because of how close it feels to our current reality. The characters are, overwhelmingly, stuck with their lot in life, and driven helplessly against their wills. In terms of sexual encounters and altered humans, this is to me the most uncomfortable book in the collection.
Patternmaster
Hundreds of years after Clay's Ark, we find the alien invasion fighting against the telepathic society of Mind of My Mind. Similar to Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea, we follow a naive but powerful young man navigating a world that oscillates suddenly between pleasure and persecution. We also encounter a delightfully infuriating antagonist, a sort of telepathic Moriarty. It is the only book in the series that deals with non-heterosexual relationships, which are cast in a positive and encouraging light. More than the rest of the series, Patternmaster throws the reader into an unfamiliar world with unfamiliar rules, and expects you to figure it out - a feature I relish in good sci-fi.
Seed to Harvest is a collection of four stories by Octavia E. Butler. It is a jarring opus, profoundly uncomfortable at points, and mildly uncomfortable the rest of the time. The writing is prosaic and often blunt. The plotline in each novel reminds me of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with endlessly building tension culminating in a vicious and curt finale in the last few pages. It is the responsibility of the reader to decompress, to digest, to discover how the book has left you feeling.
The collection reminds me strongly of Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World and City of Illusions, which also deal with telepathy, mental control, and the consequent difficult encounters between different peoples. Both authors mingle sci-fi with fantasy in a pleasant stew of interpersonal conflict and necessitated adventure. Both also make nearly all the characters people of color, and it's damn nice for me to feel included in a predominantly white genre.
However, where Le Guin's work is bright and hopeful, Butler's is dark and infuriating, leaving the reader feeling as helpless as the beleaguered main character to the onslaught of the antagonist. Where Le Guin uses skin color and differences in culture to highlight how we are all, really, the same, Butler instead places the reader into social structures prejudiced by race and gender to build discomfort, and thereby encourage empathy for the "other."
The first theme of these books is the use and abuse of power in interpersonal relationships to make the reader understand, through discomfort, how catastrophic slavery is to the psyche of a person and of a society. This is conveyed through brutal social structures that sling characters through a variety of consensual and non-consensual sexual encounters. These encounters started to wear on me halfway through the first book; I can only take so much talk of selectively breeding humans.
One key consequence of the first theme is a focus on heterosexual relationships. Given just how much sex is in these books, it's jarring that there are nearly no other types of relationships, but this may be a consequence of these novels being written in the 70s and 80s.
The second theme of these books is the slow, painful, but inevitable defeat of powerful, abusive men. This theme comes as a teasing trickle, but does make up somewhat for the discomfort induced by the first theme.
Wild Seed
This was my favorite novel of the collection. It follows a pair of immortals as they navigate a world of malleable humans, and thereby establishes the first theme mentioned above. The book really puts the reader in the (tired) shoes of immortal beings, similar to the passages about the Tiste Andii in the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Mind of My Mind
More abrupt than Wild Seed, this novel puts the reader squarely in the vicious pseudo-puberty and adulthood that Butler's telepathically-active characters endure. Through the main character, the reader can experience something akin to the stress of becoming a queen bee.
Clay's Ark
This is the first novel in the series to be more sci-fi than fantasy, and deals with an unconventional extraterrestrial invader. Butler casts the reader into a post-apocalyptic California that is terrifying because of how close it feels to our current reality. The characters are, overwhelmingly, stuck with their lot in life, and driven helplessly against their wills. In terms of sexual encounters and altered humans, this is to me the most uncomfortable book in the collection.
Patternmaster
Hundreds of years after Clay's Ark, we find the alien invasion fighting against the telepathic society of Mind of My Mind. Similar to Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea, we follow a naive but powerful young man navigating a world that oscillates suddenly between pleasure and persecution. We also encounter a delightfully infuriating antagonist, a sort of telepathic Moriarty. It is the only book in the series that deals with non-heterosexual relationships, which are cast in a positive and encouraging light. More than the rest of the series, Patternmaster throws the reader into an unfamiliar world with unfamiliar rules, and expects you to figure it out - a feature I relish in good sci-fi.
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