LINKS SCIENCE FICTION "DIRECTLY TO THE BLACK AMERICAN SLAVERY EXPERIENCE": FIRST EDITION OF WILD SEED, INSCRIBED BY OCTAVIA BUTLER
BUTLER, Octavia. Wild Seed. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1980. Octavo, original maroon paper boards, original dust jacket.
First edition of a signal work in the Patternist series by award-winning African American author Octavia Butler, boldly inscribed by her, "To M—A—Best wishes Octavia E. Butler."
Wild Seed, chronologically the first book in Butler's groundbreaking Patternist series, begins in Africa where it introduces two godlike shapeshifters, Doro and Anyanwu, who give birth to the telepathic offspring of the series that also contains (in order of publication): Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978) and Clay's Ark (1984). Here Butler links science fiction "directly to the Black American slavery experience… a fundamental departure for science fiction as a genre" (Govan, "Homage to Tradition," 79). With Anyanwu "we discover the inspiring force for all of Butler's heroines." Butler's novel emerges in the turmoil of the Middle Passage as Anyanwu "is transported on a slave ship to colonial America" and, as a telepath, "senses the horror of slavery well before she actually witnesses its real-life horrors… Butler's concern with racism and sexism is a conscious part of her vision… Confronting this problem head on, Butler placed her heroines in worlds filled with racial and sexual obstacles, forcing her characters to survive and eventually overcome these societal barriers" (Salvaggio, Octavia Butler, 78).
"Butler's work "pushes the genre to speak to our deepest, culturally burdened horrors as well as to our transcendent hopes" (Kilgore & Samantraim, Memorial, 353). Wild Seed received the prestigious James Tiptree Jr. Award (aka Otherwise Award). In 2019 actress Viola Davis and her production company began developing a television series based on it.. Davis said the book "shifted her life. It is as epic, as game-changing, as moving and brilliant as any science fiction novel ever written… Octavia Butler was a visionary" (Los Angeles Times). First edition, first printing: with "First Edition" stated on copyright page. In Butler's Patternist series, Wild Seed was issued following Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), and before Clay's Ark (1984), yet is first in the series' internal chronology of: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, Survivor and Patternmaster. Barron, Anatomy of Wonder II:200.
Book fine; only lightest edge-wear to lovely about-fine dust jacket.