Wild Seed
by Octavia Butler
Lavender Lit Book Club: September 2022
Lavender Lit Book Club is a monthly book discussion series curated by Women’s Program Curator Suyane Oliveira. Each month, we’ll be reading a new book by a queer woman or non-male-identified author to celebrate queer women and non-men in literature. Click here to learn more.
Book Discussion
September 21 | 6:30p (EST)
All Lavender Lit discussions are held in-person at the Center and virtually via Zoom. Register here to join us (it’s free!).
About the Book
Wild Seed is a science fiction novel written by Octavia Butler in 1980. It is sequentially the first book in a sequence of “Patternist” books written by the same author, though it was the fourth book published in that series. These include Mind of My Mind (1978), Clay’s Ark (1984), Survivor (1977), and Patternmaster (1976). Wild Seed takes place over different centuries and continents, beginning in Africa in 1690 and ending in America just before the beginning of the Civil War. It features two main protagonists, Anyanwu and Doro, who share unnaturally long lives and a propensity for godlike superpowers. The action of the book deals with the ways in which the two interact with others of their own kind. The action foregrounds issues of race, culture, identity, and power.
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About the Author
Octavia Butler (she/her)
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant.
After her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. 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.