Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/LaGuardia Community College/ENG103 Octavia Butler's Wild Seed (Fall 2015)/week 09 team3

Reception

Wild Seed received many positive reviews, especially for its style, with the Washington Post’s Elizabeth A. Lynn praising Butler's writing as “spare and sure, and even in moments of great tension she never loses control over her pacing or over her sense of story.” In his survey of Butler’s work, critic Burton Raffel singles out Wild Seed as an example of Butler’s “major fictive talent,” calling the book’s prose “precise and tautly cadence,” “forceful because it is focused” and “fictively superbly effective because it is in each and every detail true to the character’s lives.” In his 2001 book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, famed science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card used passages from Wild Seed’s opening paragraphs to illustrate principles of good fiction writing (e.g. how to properly name characters, how to keep the reader intrigued) as well as of good speculative writing (how abeyance, implication, and literalism may work together to produce fantastical realities that are nevertheless believable).

Several reviewers also praised Butler’s expertise at conflating fantasy and realism, with Analog’s Tom Easton declaring that “Butler’s story, for all that it is fiction, rings true as only the best novels can.“ Noting that “the story itself is eerily fascinating, and well-wrought,” Michael Bishop pinpointed that Butler’s greatest achievement was her creation of two immortal characters that are nevertheless completely believable as humans, making Wild Seed “one of the oddest love stories you are ever likely to read.” Lynn also remarked that “[Butler’s] use of history as a backdrop to the struggles of her immortal protagonists provides a texture of realism that an imagined future, no matter how plausible, would have difficulty achieving.” John Pfeiffer called it “probably Butler’s best novel…a combination of Butler’s brilliant fable and real history” and described Doro and Anyanwu as both “epic and authentic, engaging the reader’s awe or admiration or sympathy.”

Commentary on New World slavery

Wild Seed represents and comments on the history of plantation slavery in the United States. Scenes in the novel depict the capture and sale of Africans; the character of European slave traders; the Middle Passage; and plantation life in the Americas. Doro also resembles a slave master in that his program of forced reproduction aims to produce individuals who are exceptional at the cost of degrading the humanity of its participants.

Additionally, the relation between the novel's two main characters, Anyanwu and Doro, may be said to comment on aspects of the slave trade. Anyanwu is coerced out of her home and transported to the Americas to breed offspring on Doro's behalf. Thus, Doro has been interpreted as symbolizing the control exercised over place and sexuality in the slave trade and Anyanwu as symbolizing the colonized and dominated native populations. Anyanwu's conflicts with Doro also illustrate the emotional and psychological consequences of slavery and the possibilities of slave agency in Anyanwu's resistance to Doro's control. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lau.marulo (talk • contribs) 18:39, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Eugenics

In spite of its classification as fantasy fiction, Wild Seed has been considered as a major exponent of Butler’s interest in eugenics as a means to further human evolution. Butler herself characterized the novel as “more science fiction than most people realize” because Anyanwu’s shapeshifting and healing powers make her a medical expert.

Maria Aline Ferreira goes further, describing both Doro and Anyanwu as “protogenetic engineers” whose deep understanding of how the human body functions help them remake themselves and transform others.

For Andrew Schapper, Wild Seed is an entry point to the “ethics of controlled evolution” that permeate Butler’s novels, most obviously in the Xenogenesis trilogy. As an early novel on the subject, Wild Seed betrays Butler’s anxiety that eugenic manipulation and selective breeding could lead to an unethical abuse of power and thus she counters it with a “Judeo-Christian ethical approach to the sanctity of human life” represented by the character of Anyanwu.

Gerry Canavan argues that Wild Seed challenges conventional fantasies of race by having Doro’s eugenics project supersede that of Europe’s by millenia. In this “alternate history,” “America itself--now transformed into a blip between the secret history of Doro's experiments and the brutal aftermath of their horrible success--becomes retold here as an African story, in an Africanist recentering of history that serves as a strongly anti-colonialist provocation, even if the results are mostly anti-utopian.” Still, while Doros’ eugenic project turns out a “superpowered blackness” that negates notions of white supremacy, his exploitation of his people as mere genetic experiments echoes the breeding methods of New World slave owners, thus replicating the actual history of racial slavery practiced by the Western world.