I try to review Octavia Butler

Wild Seed ****
By Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler's books don't fall into neat generic types, and they have plots and characters that are freighted with social baggage. Which, of course, is part of their fascination and what makes them hard to review.

So let's say, for the sake of discussion, that "Wild Seed" is a kind of mythological exploration of what it means to be human across a landscape of race, gender, (pro)creative urges, culture, and the cycle of life and death.

The protagonists, Anyanwu and Doro, are not fully human, though they started life in the usual way.

Anyanwu is a shape-shifting healer who was born into and lived for centuries in an African tribe. Her survival depends on her adaptability--to change age, species, and gender. She can see into the the bodies of creatures with minute clarity, heals herself over and over, and can heal others--but cannot prevent death. She has had many children, many husbands. She has kept them healthy, but watched them all die. She has grown wise but more vulnerable emotionally.

Doro is a shape-stealer, wearing out bodies and need new ones periodically. This, of course, kills the body's original inhabitant. He cannot adapt to his environment, and so tries to dominate it. He is rootless, a man without any kind of religion, ethics, principles, culture, art. He has knowledge but no real wisdom.

Doro is also a slaver. He collects "interesting" people--those with strange powers like telekinesis, telepathy, special strength--and he cross-breeds them, in-breeds them, trying to create a race of super humans. He is charismatic in the way that Jim Jones of the poison Kool-Aid was charismatic, more concerned with power and control than with love and nurturing.

Anyanwu allows herself to become enslaved by Doro through a kind of deal. She has many children who have inherited some of her powers. Doro will leave them alone if she joins his community. For Anyanwu, it's a poor exchange. She is able to buy her African children's freedom, only to make more children, whom she cannot protect, for and with Doro.

Let's say, for further discussion, that "Wild Seed" is a yin/yang myth, in which both Doro and Anyanwu have complementary powers. But their relationship does not develop into anything harmonious. They are bound by an adversarial tension, by Doro's need to control and Anyanwu's need to protect. It is sometimes joyful, but often angry and bloody. It is not always clear who has the upper hand, who is leading, who is following, who is passive, who is active.

Or let's say that "Wild Seed" is a sacrifice-and-redemption myth. Except that the nature of the redemption is only partially transformative, tensions only lessened. The characters, by the end of the book have moved to a new plane, power and needs have shifted, but are things better? And if they are, will they remain so?

Or let's say that "Wild Seed" is a kind of Brechtian exercise in the alienation effect. For all its scope of human drama, Doro and Anyanwu are not real characters but metaphors for the human condition, which Butler dispassionately and very thoroughly dissects. We are allowed to watch as she works to pull out heartstrings, nerves, muscles, and brain matter and see that humanity is always changing but never becoming, always journeying but never arriving, always on the verge of despair but never quite giving up hope.

Or let's say that ... no, let's say you read it and tell me what you see.