784 pages
English language
Published Jan. 5, 2007 by Grand Central Publishing.
The first part: Wild Seed, is among the best histories I have ever read. It is a mythical struggle between two powerful beings. But it is also a believable relationship between man and woman.
It then changes in tone and in style, and while the other parts are not as good as the prequel, they are each good in their own ways.
All four books in this series had quite different feels and it's certainly possible to enjoy the books as standalones. If I were to only read one, it would be Wild Seed.
Wild Seed: Wow! A real interesting power struggle between two supernatural humans who have a complicated and at times abusive relationship. A lot of bad things happen to good people, and Octavia Butler has a real good way of making you feel truly awful when someone you care about is coerced into doing something.
Mind of My Mind: I spent most of this book wishing that the cool characters from Wild Seed would have bigger roles. But the main character in this book was, I thought, somewhat flat - and her conflicts never seemed particularly threatening or interesting. I guess there was a lot of ink from the perspective of someone who wanted to control people and not …
All four books in this series had quite different feels and it's certainly possible to enjoy the books as standalones. If I were to only read one, it would be Wild Seed.
Wild Seed: Wow! A real interesting power struggle between two supernatural humans who have a complicated and at times abusive relationship. A lot of bad things happen to good people, and Octavia Butler has a real good way of making you feel truly awful when someone you care about is coerced into doing something.
Mind of My Mind: I spent most of this book wishing that the cool characters from Wild Seed would have bigger roles. But the main character in this book was, I thought, somewhat flat - and her conflicts never seemed particularly threatening or interesting. I guess there was a lot of ink from the perspective of someone who wanted to control people and not a lot from other perspectives so the book just felt somewhat one-dimensional. Quick read, though, and sets up the Pattern for Patternmaster.
Clay's Ark: here we get a pretty interesting escape story. You got your standard post-water California setting, and some people who got captured by wackos on the highway, and you have a backstory for these wackos which explains their group motivations pretty well. However I felt like the individual motivations were occasionally a bit lacking. Sometimes people would do things and it just didn't jive with how they had been characterized to that point. It felt pretty detached from the previous books - I guess it's the first one that launches into sci-fi territory, and also there's no mention of the Pattern or related phenomena beyond the passing mention of how Clay's Ark worked.
Patternmaster: This was a good end to the series, I think. It brought the Clayarks and Patternists together, examines what each have lost from their original humanity, and is a fun romp with plenty of intrigue, action, and truly heinous villains brought to justice. The three other books occur in the distant past of this one, and so the world has a feeling of deep history to it that it wouldn't have had as a standalone book.
I love the way Butler explores power dynamics - especially the way "good" decisions in one context cause incredible harm in another.
