Overview
Contains the novels Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster.
In her classic Patternist series, multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner Octavia E. Butler established themes of identity and transformation that echo throughout her distinguished career. Now collected for the first time in one volume, these four novels take readers on a wondrous odyssey from a mythic, primordial past to a fantastic far future.
In ancient Africa, a female demigod of nurture and fertility mates with a powerful, destructive male entity. Together they birth a race of madmen, visionaries, and psychics who cling to civilization's margins and back alleys for millennia, coming together in a telepathic Pattern just as Earth is consumed by a cosmic invasion. Now these new beings--no longer merely human--will battle to rule the transfigured world.
In her classic Patternist series, multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner Octavia E. Butler established themes of identity and transformation that echo throughout her distinguished career. Now collected for the first time in one volume, these four novels take readers on a wondrous odyssey from a mythic, primordial past to a fantastic far future.
In ancient Africa, a female demigod of nurture and fertility mates with a powerful, destructive male entity. Together they birth a race of madmen, visionaries, and psychics who cling to civilization's margins and back alleys for millennia, coming together in a telepathic Pattern just as Earth is consumed by a cosmic invasion. Now these new beings--no longer merely human--will battle to rule the transfigured world.
My Review
Octavia Butler is one of my favorite sci-fi authors and the reason I really got into sci-fi. This was one series of her's that I had not read and really wanted to since it contains some of her earliest work. It contains four books: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984) and Patternmaster (1976). The order of the books in the series compared to their publication dates makes the disconnect between the books more understandable.
Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind explain how the Pattern comes about and Doro and Anayanwu are characters that flow through both books. Clay's Ark is the book that just seems like a filler. It's a book to explain the Clayarks that exist in Patternmaster but doesn't do a good job explaining their connection to the first two books. Also the past/present chapter movement made it a hard book to follow at times.
Rating
My overall rating is Good. If Clay's Ark was better connected to the other books, I could give it a higher rating.
This is part of the Diversity on the Shelf Reading Challenge
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