Dana, a contemporary African American woman, finds herself forcibly inserted by Time Travel into the slave state of Maryland in 1815 whenever young Rufus Weylin's life is at risk in that era. While Patternist was in progress, Butler published a singleton, Kindred ( 1979), in which these issues move to the foreground.
#OCTAVIA E. BUTLER HUGO SERIES#
Her work can be seen as a series of earned voyages through this opacity (see Perception Posthuman Transcendence) into some human world deeply transparent to mutual communications. Butler was herself African American, and much of the power of the sequence derives from the chargedness and cognitive focus occasioned by her background and punishing early experiences in urban California, a confluence of influences and incarcerations that she drew on for many tales, and seems to have underwritten – as with other writers who were non-white – the tough embodiedness of the characters she created: as a Black person in a racist culture, she must have expected to have to survive being gazed upon, thickeningly, as Other. The strength of the Patternist books lies not in the somewhat melodramatic action template laid down in this first published volume, but in Butler's capacity to inhabit her venues with characters whose often anguished lives strike the reader as anything but frivolous. Finally, in the first-published Patternmaster, Clayarks and Patternists continue what has become an age-long conflict, now brought to a head by a family dispute as to the proper inheritor of the role of Patternmaster: the one who wins will exercise paranormal control over the entire scene, making a Heaven or a Hell with his or her one voice.
Clay's Ark, set on Earth, depicts a conflict between those humans who have been transfigured by an extraterrestrial virus into intensely aggressive monsters, and those (both Patternist and mute) who have not been infected a powerful sense of the omnivorousness of this Pandemic invests the extraordinarily savage telling of this tale. The novel depicts a conflict between star-travelling "mutes" – normal humans – and the Alien inhabitants of the planet to which, in a kind of missionary endeavour, they have been sent. The next volume in terms of internal chronology, Mind of My Mind, which is set in contemporary California, focuses on the formal founding of the Patternist gestalt community, which begins to articulate itself into the hierarchical social organism of the final (though first-written) tale: Survivor takes place in a moderately distant future when Earth has become dominated by Patternists, whose hierarchies conflate family ties and Psi Powers into a complex whole. Doro and his son both breed with Anyanwu, who also breeds with "wild seeds" uncovered by Doro and found with her a sanctuary first in upstate New York and later in Louisiana, where her Mutant children can grow to adulthood. During this long campaign Doro discovers a second immortal, the Shapeshifter Anyanwu their graphically ambivalent relationship is described in terms which potently evoke reflections on everything from family romance and Sex and Feminism to Slavery itself. The seemingly Immortal 4000-year-old body-snatcher Doro, "the Founder" (see Identity Transfer) has long been engaged on a breeding programme designed to produce a Secret Master cadre of superior humans whose Psi Powers, including Telekinesis and Telepathy, mark the new race (see Eugenics Genetic Engineering). Wild Seed, which begins in 1690, demonstrates the very considerable strength of Butler's imagination in being a prequel manifestly more interesting than much of the material it adumbrates. The order of publication has little to do with internal chronology indeed, the first volume published stands last in a sequence that runs from the late seventeenth century into the Far Future. (1947-2006) US author who began publishing sf with "Crossover" in Clarion (anth 1971) edited by Robin Scott Wilson, but who made no real impact on the sf field until the appearance of the Patternist series: Patternmaster ( 1976), Mind of My Mind ( 1977), Survivor ( 1978), Wild Seed ( 1980) and Clay's Ark ( 1984), all but Survivor assembled as Seed to Harvest (omni 2007).
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