Sunday Morning! Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

Photo by Nikolas Coukouma, CC BY-SA 2.5 , via Wikimedia Commons

It can’t be easy to be a god. Your wonderous strengths put you in a different class than most men, which makes it seem natural that they would worship, or at least obey you; but most of them are obstinate and foolish. Some of them will inevitably defy you, which makes it tempting to simply kill them, control their minds, or otherwise use violence against them. But then, when you do that, the rest of them consider you to be a malevolent god, or even a devil. It’s a lonely life as well, and imagine you try to assauge some of that loneliness by falling in love with a human being; eventually, they will die and you will live on without them. It would be easiest to shun them, enslave them, or kill them. But love is inescapable. So, it’s at least a little understandable why the gods can be unpleasant, why Zeus, for instance, is such a colossal jerk.

Certainly, I found the character Doro in Octavia Butler’s novel Wild Seed to be extremely hard to like. An immortal from Africa, he has already lived for 3,700 years; the catch is he does it by taking the bodies of living people to occupy until he’s worn them out, and then moving on to the next one in a sort of chain of corpses. In other words, he’s a killer and a fairly remorseless one- he has to live, so a great many others have to die. We might imagine that, if we found ourselves in the same situation, we would only take wicked people, but it’s seemingly a bit more urgent than that. Doro instead takes the strongest bodies, and meanwhile selectively breeds people who have special abilities, such as telekenesis, in hopes of creating a line of people who won’t ultimately die like all the others. In other words, he’s been making humans, who submit to him as a god, into his breeding animals. It’s a bit horrific.

And then, he meets Anyanwu, a woman who is in many ways his equal. A healing woman, she is also an apparent immortal, although she surives by shapeshifting, healing her body and transforming it into any sort of person or animal. She also kills humans, but only when she needs to- when they threaten her as a witch or attempt to kill her. Otherwise, she lives with them as if they were her children. Many of them are her children; like Doro, Anyanwu can breed human children with unique abilities, but they have all died thus far. She heals them as best she can; watching them die is always painful, especially when they take their own lives. “Somehow she never got used to losing children.” When the novel begins, in 1690, she has started losing them instead to slavers.

Naturally, Doro tracks down Anyanwu and convinces her to come with him to one of his “seed communities” in the New World; he wants to breed with her, ultimately, but also breed her with his son Isaac, one of his strongest seeds, hoping to create superhuman children. Naturally, she finds this idea repulsive- an “abomination”- but also yearns for children who won’t die. She is strong and willful and deeply resents Doro’s expectation, developed over centuries being worshipped as a god, that he will have essentially patriarchal control over her. And this is the struggle; if he has to use her children to make her obey, he will. “He would be obeyed, or he would make her life and her children’s lives not worth living.” And, finally, if she will not be compliant, he will kill her himself and take her body. She can only escape him by transforming into an animal, but she needs human companionship. The other option, she comes to realize, is to escape Doro by suicide.

So, again, he’s a hard character to like; but, it seems, they’re stuck together.

Wild Seed is often called a science-fiction novel, with the sciences being biology and genetics, and really eugenics, rather than space exploration or time travel. For Doro, selective breeding is a means of gaining power and control over a population of humans; while for Anyanwu, it’s more of an ethical way of improving the human race. When she ultimately creates a pseudo-plantation family, I was reminded of the utopian communities that once popped up like dandelions across North America, while Doro’s attempts at “seed communities” were more reminiscent of slavery. His people obey him knowing that he can kill whichever of them he chooses, and will. Slavery is the background to all of this, but we’re rarely among the white slavers and, when we are, there’s a comfort in knowing our heroes can kill them, and a subtle subtext that enslaving Africans is already killing them. Many of them are sickly drunks.

To be honest, I’m not well-versed in science-fiction or fantasy novels, although I know that Octavia Butler is one of the great writers of the genre. I’ve asked my friend Tim for recommendations because he reads a lot of these books. I had imagined Tim was one of those kids who went around with laser guns and telepods in his head; instead, he told me he came to the genre late as well, mostly because he was tired of reading tedious first-person novels about the writer and their daily struggles. Stephen King makes the distinction that “literary fiction” tends to be about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances, while “genre fiction” is about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. But, Doro and Anyanwu are extraordinary beings in a fairly amazing situation. It was a bit tricky for an ordinary being like myself, leading a boring simple life, to get my hooks into them and relate!

But, it really is a nice relief from novels about middle-class MFA candidates who can’t figure out what to write or how to find love among other bougie MFA candidates! Even better, this is my first reading of Octavia Butler, and it turns out to be the earliest story in the chronology of her Patternist series, which has four other novels! There is really something thrilling about watching a writer who can make her characters do anything, and make it believable and even relatable, that transcends genre. I have no experience turning into a dolphin or living for centuries, alas, but it’s not hard to imagine the pain of watching loved ones grow old and sick and die, the loneliness that would come from losing all of them one after the other, and how painful it might be to find the only being to whom you are suited, who also turns out to be a monster. In the end, this is a story about love and death and redemption, and I found myself moved nearly to tears by the ending reading about these genetic mutants, shapeshifters, and immortals.

Ultimately, of course, the gods are us, and they’re just as screwed up and broken and imperfect as we are, with one foot in the muck and one hand reaching towards the divine.

So, what are YOU reading, watching, pondering, playing, or turning into this weekend?