Anyone who’s talked books with me for any amount of time knows that Octavia Butler is one of my favorites. I’ve read basically everything I can get my hands on that she wrote, and in fact it’s been a few years since I read a lot of them. In light of that, I’ve started re-reading and to mix things up I’ve been using audiobooks as the format.
Wild Seed is among my favorites of Butler’s less-known works. She gets a lot of (justified) credit for things like Kindred and Parable of the Sower but Wild Seed for me hits on some of my favorite aspects of her earlier work. In it she builds out an alternate universe with strange, even implausible rules and gets us to buy it completely. The story while large in scope hinges on the carefully realized characters. And last but not least, there’s a strong line in it of how social groupings, especially smaller communities, work (or don’t).
The Patternist series that Wild Seed is a part of varies a lot for me, but this is far and away my favorite entry in it, a great place to start reading Butler if you haven’t, and I’m glad I revisited it.