Wild Seed is about an African woman named Anyanwu who is immortal and has shape changing abilities. I won’t do an overview of the series at this point as I have not read the other books, I will just stick to Wild Seed for now. Wild Seed is the first of the Patternmaster series, some of the later books in the series were written prior to this book, but in term of chronological order this is the first. I have, however, read most of her other novels, and she has never disappointed me. It is strange that I first read Wild Seed in January 2012, I loved it and it made me a lifelong fan of Octavia Butler, but since then I have not read any of the sequels. I have to thank OSC for the above-mentioned article (from 1990) which piqued my interest for reading Octavia Butler. “Recently, however, I began to suspect that calling myself a science fiction critic without having read anything by Octavia Butler bordered on the fraudulent.” Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington state.

Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public and awards judges. She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction. She began writing science fiction as a teenager.

Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Grant.Īfter her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field.

Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler