From LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Fri Sep 10 19:38:18 1999 Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 20:50:03 -0500 From: "L-Soft list server at University of Illinois at Chicago (1.8c)" To: Laura Quilter Subject: File: "FEMINISTSF-LIT LOG9908A" ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1999 16:10:39 GMT Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Marianne Reddin Aldrich Subject: test, please ignore Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed just haven't gotten anything from the list in a few days. wanted to make sure i'm still subscribed. marianne _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 12:38:10 +1200 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Jenny Rankine Subject: Wild Seed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi all, Since it's August 2 where I am (Aotearoa New Zealand, first to see the sunrise and the new millenium, yadayada), I decided to leap in. I enjoy Octavia Butler's earlier work more than her later writing, and I ate this book in a single sitting which had me up till 4am a few nights ago. I also followed it with Patternmaster. I really enjoy the way she tackles the situation of a woman with less power in confrontation with a man with the power of life and death over her (I know I've said this before). She has written several portrayals of strong women seeking to be autonomous and independent in situations where they were constrained, both by the structures around them and a particular male. The only way at the beginning of WS in which the female protagonist can influence Doro is to make him care for her. This is always a dicey strategy, but sometimes the only option. The heroine has to sexually service a man who has threatened her or has power over her life - I call this rape because it is coerced, since it is her only option. I see these scenarios in Butler's books as metaphors for women's position in heterosexual relationships, and for all women's position at some point in non-sexual situations with more powerful men. The way I see it, Doro rapes the heroine many times - in only a few periods in the book does she actively want him for a lover in an uncoerced way. Later in the book she runs away, surviving for another century, and influences Doro by being the only person who he values who does not die. This is when she is able to negotiate her strongest agreement with him. I don't think Butler ever falls into the trap of portraying women as innately more peaceful or less warlike. I found all her characters well-drawn. One test for this is whether I imagine them reacting to different situations and developments from the book's story after I've finished reading it. Enough for a first comment. Have to go and do some work. Jenny R ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 10:20:54 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Lindy Subject: Re: Wild Seed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="------------EF2FE594681F673C7CB5D86A" --------------EF2FE594681F673C7CB5D86A Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Jenny Rankine wrote: > I enjoy Octavia Butler's earlier work more than her later writing, Just curious. . .which later novels did you enjoy less? > I really enjoy the way she tackles the situation of a woman with less power > in confrontation with a man with the power of life and death over her. snip. This is one of the many aspects I like about Butler's novels and short stories. She is highly imaginative, a great storyteller, and explores the inequity of power in relationships of all kinds. snip. > I see these > scenarios in Butler's books as metaphors for women's position in > heterosexual relationships, and for all women's position at some point in > non-sexual situations with more powerful men. > That seems to be so. I also see these scenarios as depicting the relationships between those enslaved and those who "own" or otherwise have power over them. Doro has control over "his" people. They must have children as he desires, and it is often from this group that he chooses those he consumes and inhabits their bodies. He may leave them alone for years, but they know him when he returns. > The only way at the beginning of WS in which the female protagonist can > influence Doro is to make him care for her. This is always a dicey > strategy, but sometimes the only option. Horrible, isn't it? Butler's characters are survivors. I've forgotten the name of this character, despite her importance is most of the series. > Later in the book she runs away, surviving for another century, and > influences Doro by being the only person who he values who does not die. > This is when she is able to negotiate her strongest agreement with him. If you've read Walker's _The Color Purple_, where near the end, the aging Mister__ and Celie sit together on the porch congenially. . . Butler's situation reminds me of this. Two enemies or combatants, one having disempowered or enslaved the other, finding some comfort together because of shared experience. Friendly enemies, or some such definition. It's very complex. I keep wanting to call the female protagonist "Edna." . . . anyway, she and Doro are unique in that each is the only person from one another's past, shared experiences, and shared memories. She is less lonely than Doro, though, because she has a personal connection to her family. Doro seems to me to be a perpetual adolescent in many ways. For the most part, I disliked him intensely. At times, I felt somewhat sorry for him. The experience of becoming immortal during childhood, and having consumed both parents before he realized what he was doing, then living forever like a vampire of souls, and then coming upon people with abilities he valued. . .I can imagine no other way for him to be. That's part of the genius of Butler's plots and characterization, I think. _Wild Seed_ is a great read. It deals with complex and intense and often horrendous situations which hurt as I read, but it is one I'd read again (unlike _Mission Child_). I'm not certain why I can read and enjoy Butler's work despite the uncomfortable, ambiguous situations of the characters. Personal quirk, perhaps. Take care all, Lindy --------------EF2FE594681F673C7CB5D86A Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Jenny Rankine wrote:
I enjoy Octavia Butler's earlier work more than her later writing,
Just curious. . .which later novels did you enjoy less?
I really enjoy the way she tackles the situation of a woman with less power
in confrontation with a man with the power of life and death over her.
snip.  This is one of the many aspects I like about Butler's novels and short stories.  She is highly imaginative, a great storyteller, and explores the inequity of power in relationships of all kinds.

snip. 

I see these
scenarios in Butler's books as metaphors for women's position in
heterosexual relationships, and for all women's position at some point in
non-sexual situations with more powerful men.
That seems to be so.  I also see these scenarios as depicting the relationships between those enslaved and those who "own" or otherwise have power over them.  Doro has control over "his" people.  They must have children as he desires, and it is often from this group that he chooses those he consumes and inhabits their bodies.  He may leave them alone for years, but they know him when he returns.
The only way at the beginning of WS in which the female protagonist can
influence Doro is to make him care for her.   This is always a dicey
strategy, but sometimes the only option.
Horrible, isn't it?  Butler's characters are survivors.  I've forgotten the name of this character, despite her importance is most of the series.
Later in the book she runs away, surviving for another century, and
influences Doro by being the only person who he values who does not die.
This is when she is able to negotiate her strongest agreement with him.
If you've read Walker's _The Color Purple_, where near the end, the aging Mister__  and Celie sit together on the porch congenially. . . Butler's situation reminds me of this.  Two enemies or combatants, one having disempowered or enslaved the other, finding some comfort together because of shared experience.  Friendly enemies, or some such definition.  It's very complex.

I keep wanting to call the female protagonist "Edna." . . . anyway, she and Doro are unique in that each is the only person from one another's past, shared experiences, and shared memories.  She is less lonely than Doro, though, because she has a personal connection to her family.

Doro seems to me to be a perpetual adolescent in many ways.  For the most part, I disliked him intensely.  At times, I felt somewhat sorry for him.  The experience of becoming immortal during childhood, and having consumed both parents before he realized what he was doing, then living forever like a vampire of souls, and then coming upon people with abilities he valued. . .I can imagine no other way for him to be.

That's part of the genius of Butler's plots and characterization, I think.

_Wild Seed_ is a great read.  It deals with complex and intense and often horrendous situations which hurt as I read, but it is one I'd read again (unlike _Mission Child_).  I'm not certain why I can read and enjoy Butler's work despite the uncomfortable, ambiguous situations of the characters.  Personal quirk, perhaps.

Take care all,

Lindy --------------EF2FE594681F673C7CB5D86A-- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 14:22:46 0100 Reply-To: mayerhofer@usf.uni-kassel.de Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Comments: Sender has elected to use 8-bit data in this message. If problems arise, refer to postmaster at sender's site. From: Petra Mayerhofer Subject: BDG Wild Seed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Summer time. Everybody (?) is on the beach, not sitting in front of the PC writing emails ... This was the fifth book by Butler I've read (after the Xenogenesis trilogy and _Kindred_) and it's the one I'm most uncomfortable with. It's a good book, but I did not quite enjoy it. At the moment I am not motivated to read the other Patternmaster books. I was surprisingly disturbed by the second part of the book, which made me wonder. Of course, it is the hardest time for Anyanwu, she is a slave, degraded and raped (I agree that's the only correct term for it) by Doro directly and indirectly. But, that's not the first book I've read in which rape and violence occurs. I wonder why I react more strongly to it in this instance than e.g. to when Lore prostitutes herself in _Slow River_. It might be because it reminds me of one of the often used Romance plots: independent, strong woman is tamed by dominant man who abuses her and in the end she likes it/is resigned to it. And I hate that storyline. It might also be because there is the potential for love between Anyanwu and Doro and then Doro throws it away and uses her like cattle (I'm ever the romantic, I know). On 2 Aug 99, Jenny Rankine wrote: > I see these > scenarios in Butler's books as metaphors for women's position in > heterosexual relationships, and for all women's position at some point in > non-sexual situations with more powerful men. I completely agree. On 2 Aug 99, Lindy wrote: > Butler's characters are survivors. !!!! The point is not to preserve one's pride, but to survive. And to transform, it possible, the experience to something meaningful. I think for example of the episode in which Doro forces Anyanwu to sleep with Thomas because he wants to punish her. Instead of only feeling humiliated she starts to see it as a task for her as a healer. Only to have Doro hit back in the end by killing Thomas and sleeping with her while 'wearing' his body. I could hardly read this scene, I found it so horrible. Is this episode only a defeat for Anyanwu? IMO it depends on what is seen as important: only the final result or the process as a whole. In any case, it's hard to imagine that anybody forgives something like that, even after 150 years. One thing I am wondering about is how Doro is adored by 'his' people, especially the women, and how they are ready to die for him (most of them, the others die sooner, we never get 'closer' to one of the runaways). Several times it is stated that he protects his people in exchange but they seem to be destroyed and got lost rather regularly. And why is it so very important for Doro to breed people with telepathic or other capabilities? Simply to have better 'food' for himself? I couldn't find any online reviews of _Wild Seed_, probably because it's been published such a long time ago. There are several Butler interviews on the net, but only in one _Wild Seed_ is more than only mentioned. That's in Steven Piziks' interview of Octavia Butler from 1997, published in Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine 37 http://www.mzbfm.com/butler.htm Quote: 'SP: Why did you write the Patternist books backward? PATTERNMASTER takes place last, but your wrote it first, and WILD SEED, which takes place first, was written last. OB: I wrote it that way because that was the way it occurred to me. I had this idea of the Patternists in the distant future and their particular society and their enemies and all that. After a while, I wanted to know more about how they came to be who they were, so I had to invent a past for them. When I created Emma Daniels, who is Anyanwu, I really wanted to do a past for her, but I was a little afraid to. Once I had done that, I had also wanted to do a past for Doro, take him back to his origins, but I've never done that. Norman Mailer came out with a book about a transmigrating Egyptian, and I just figured I didn't really want to follow that. Doro was me giving myself a chance to play God in a whole new way. Think of it ^× here is this character who cannot die. I mean, even the vampires in vampire stories can die. In fact, they work very hard at not dying. Doro could not die and had no choice but to kill, and the people that he most enjoyed being with were the ones he had to regard as food. SP: I want to get a science fiction and fantasy course started at the high school where I teach, and I want to use WILD SEED in the class. OB: One of the things I'm sure you'll end up saying to your students at some point, if you already haven't, is that what you bring to a story is at least as important as what the author brought to it, and interpretation is inevitable. SP: You also did a lot of research into Ibo mythology for WILD SEED. OB: Ibo life, really. Oddly enough, I've done more since, just looking around Yoruban mythology just because I do want to write about Yoruban mythology. I want to make use of it. Everyone makes use of Greek mythology, so I've been fooling around with Yoruban. There's a good reason why my character in Parable of the Sower is named Lauren Oya Olamina. Oya is a rather tempestuous goddess.' _Wild Seed_ was short-listed for the Tiptree Retrospective Award http://www.tiptree.org/retro/short.html Debbie Notkin, one of the jurors, wrote about it: 'Octavia Butler explores continuously _not only_ the boundaries of gender, but of alienness wherever she may find it. In Wild Seed, which may still be her best book to date, she paints the joint canvasses of the horrors of ante- bellum slavery and the mysteries of immortality with the stories of Doro and Anyanwu-an immortal man and an immortal shapechanger with the heart and soul of a woman. Doro starts the book believing that he is a match for anything-but Anyanwu's task is to show him that she is his equal and more.' A very good interview with Octavia Butler is that by Mike McGonigal from 1998 for Indexmagazine http://www.indexmagazine.com/indexm/indexed/butler.htm There is an article by J. Douglas Allen Taylor from 1996 published in Metro (Jan. 4-10). Title: 'Novelist and short- story writer Octavia Butler defies categories' that discusses mostly the collection _Bloodchild_ http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/01.04.96/books- 9601.html Octavia Butler doesn't have a homepage but there are several Butler tribute pages: The Unofficial Octavia Butler Homepage by Laura Quilter http://www.wenet.net/~lquilter/femsf/authors/butler.html lists Butler's works, literary criticism on Octavia Butler, and interviews with Octavia Butler. Furthermore Laura comments Butler's work on the main author's page: http://www.wenet.net/~lquilter/femsf/authorsa.html#butler Octavia Butler Page at the website 'Voices from the Gap - Women Writers of Color' http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/OctaviaButler.html with a biography and a selected bibliography. Octavia Estelle Butler: An Unofficial Web Page by Sela Fenske http://www.towanda.com/sela/octavia.htm with links and resources, including an essay by Sela Fenske on Octavia Butler, done as part of her Women and Their Literature class in 1997. And another short Butler page http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/butler/butler_octavia_bio. html The first chapter of _Wild Seed_ is online by Warner Books http://www.twbookmark.com/books/89/0446606723/chapter _excerpt312.html A (very) short note by Octavia Butler on a Butler infopage by Warner Books http://www.twbookmark.com/authors/85/184/index.html Petra Petra Mayerhofer mailto:mayerhofer@usf.uni-kassel.de -- BDG website http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Comet/1304/ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 13:07:23 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: SMCharnas Subject: Re: BDG Wild Seed Comments: To: mayerhofer@usf.uni-kassel.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >This was the fifth book by Butler I've read (after the >Xenogenesis trilogy and _Kindred_) and it's the one I'm >most uncomfortable with. It's a good book, but I did not quite >enjoy it. At the moment I am not motivated to read the other >Patternmaster books. > >I was surprisingly disturbed by the second part of the book, >which made me wonder. Of course, it is the hardest time >for Anyanwu, she is a slave, degraded and raped Petra, I have to admit that I was put off reading more of Butler's work for years because of this book; I found it horrible to read, for all the reasons you raise -- even though I recognize (or think I do!) that the raped-victim-comes-to-acceptance-of-the-male-abuser plot as coming not from the modern romance novel's putrid version of it, but descending from the realities of social situations of ultimate inequality in history, such as American southern slave-society (I avoid the sex-specific pronoun for the victim because there's an example with a male rape victim in M.J. Engh's ARSLAN, where I found it just as loathsome a story). And I am in a very peculiar position with regard to all this because the same pattern surfaces in various forms in some of my own work. Actually I think it's very hard to avoid it, *in some level of dilution*, in any feminist work that takes a serious look at the ways in which ex- ploited classes of people learn to deal with the exploiting class(es) that cannot be dislodged. It's part of women's history -- when we fought too hard they killed us, and when we "accepted" too much we became collaborators in passing oppression on to our daughters -- so it's pretty hard *not* to address it one way or another. I think most books that take up the situation of the sexes in this respect include examples of members of the victim class finding strength and sometimes solidarity in sheer survival, and some workable peace in acceptance of an unwinable situation as that which you just have to find the strength to endure, or die. Maybe Butler's way of narrowing the focus to this very personal, long- running nexus between Doro and his breeding-slaves and then relentlessly bearing down on it as the core of the book is just too painful for some readers, myself included. I guess we all find our "pain threshhold" for ourselves with work like this. I have to admit that I took up the PARABLE books, recently, with some trepidation because of this; but they are much more "open" in the sense of offering at least the hope of more freedom for characters laboring under the kind of desperate conditions she puts them in, and I enjoyed them more than I had expected to. Suzy Charnas ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 18:13:01 +0200 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Lassnig Subject: Wild Seed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I'm glad the discussion on Wild Seed hasn't become a victim of summer vacations and that the ball is finally set rolling! I found Wild Seed a very well-crafted book, its narration technique is incredibly good and it's certainly a good read. But I also felt uneasy with the motifs Butler raises, such as Petra discussed (thank you, Petra, for all the delightful links you gave us!). As I see it, Butler wanted to show that slavery / oppression / patriarchy is such a pervasive and inescapable mechanism that even strong-minded women like Anyanwu fall prey to it and have to give in to it in some way or another. All she could do really is comply and not risk the life of her children or perish. It's certainly not a radical design Butler develops here, but I think it's a dystopian, pessimistic and therefore realistic picture. I was very uncomfortable with Doro's breeding plan, even more so as the concept of difference (creating superiority in some sort of way - telepathy, telekinese, shape-shifting, all survival skills really!) emerges as one of the pillars in Butler's fiction. I see this most highlighted in the Parable books, which I actually didn't enjoy very much (I didn't like Lauren and the way the Earthseed belief is promoted; and even if these are supposed to be seen critical, I miss a relativizing distane from them). Racial, cultural and any other sort of difference as a valuable contribution to society, tolerated and appreciated - this concept is probably a general principle of liberal fsf, no? But what Butler seems to do (I might be misreading her badly, though) is project a vision where difference may enable their "carriers" to dominate in one way or the other. Or is Butler warning us of precisely this? I'm sorry if my observations are rather confusing but I find most of Butler's stories just as wonderful and fascinating as I find them ambiguous some time. Especially in Wild Seed I couldn't decide whether it is critical of Anyanwu or not (in the end). Petra wrote: >And why is it so very important for Doro to breed people with >telepathic or other capabilities? Simply to have better 'food' for >himself? This touches on exactly what I meant above. It's this idea of breeding a different people to create survivors or dominators (I really haven't figured this out!) Greetings, Ines ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 08:45:06 +1200 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Jenny Rankine Subject: Wild Seed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I Lassnig says of Anyanwu -- >All she could do really is comply and not risk the life of her children or perish. It's certainly not a radical design Butler develops here, but I think it's a dystopian, pessimistic and therefore realistic picture. All one person on their own can do in that kind of circumstance is resist as much as they can without being killed, which means complying most of the time. If Anyanwu had five other allies with the same abilities among Doro's breeding "stock", then she could have organised a resistance movement. Butler seems to me in her early books to be interested in exploring the experience of the lone woman in a situation of slavery or coercion, not how radical movements are built by *groups* of people in that situation. That is what makes some of her novels so bleak. One person on their own can do very little. I was surprised by Lassnig's perception that Butler may have been critical of Anyanwu in Wild Seed. I found the book to be completely sympathetic to her, and very critical of Doro's character and actions. I interpreted the book as a strong warning about the dangers of eugenics (which is what Doro was doing), and of any deliberate biologically-based system of dominance. I was concerned, however, in the Imago trilogy that she seemed to support her aliens' analysis of humans as genetically/biologically programmed for male dominance and the building of destructive hierarchies. Jenny R ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 15:31:35 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Jessie Stickgold-Sarah Subject: Re: BDG Wild Seed In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed This is a book I'm very glad to read "in company", so to speak, because it made me intensely uncomfortable. I think that a great deal of SF leads us to the belief that a solution will always be found--like the mystery novel, which I think is an intensely idealistic form of literature, in which evil is punished and good is triumphant. (Of course, in much of the best work there is always ambiguity. Unsettling but closer to reality.) I had trouble with Wild Seed because it failed to find a true solution, only an uneasy compromise. I really wasn't satisfied with it; it made my head hurt. I appreciated the comment that: >It's part of women's history -- when we fought too hard they killed us, and >when we "accepted" too much we became collaborators in passing oppression >on to our daughters It's such a fine line to walk. On the one hand, we may say (as Anyanwu does at one point) that to submit enough to survive is worse than death. On the other hand, in so many of these situations it's a real triumph just to stay alive through all the horrors that may be inflicted. Where do you draw the line? Perhaps sometimes you can't know until it's too late. And people say science fiction is escapist! Are the later books less grim? What's the "correct" order to read them in? (That is, I suppose, the order in which they will make most sense, since I gather they're written in backwards order.) jessie ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 19:18:22 EDT Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: BDG Wild Seed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I admire Butler's work -- the clarity and lean-ness of her prose, the steady structuring of the book. Wild Seed was uncomfortable for me, too, as several have expressed, but I couldn't put it down. I wanted her to give me a hope, a relief, and then felt guilty for wanting that. It seemed to me an elaborate metaphor for the whole American Slave experience. Perhaps, as Anyanwu, most African-Americans feel they are collaborating in their own oppression. Not just now, but the whole history of it. Is that stretching this book too far? And not just African-Americans, but all of us collaborating, patching over, coping, unable to stop the evils put in motion long ago, and unsure how to proceed. I could stretch this further and say it resonates with the entire Western World domination that destroys as it insinuates itself into cultures everywhere. How far away from breeding for telepathy etc is inserting consumerism into a Third World culture. People who need clean water don't need Coca-Cola or Marlboros. Doro then becomes the symbol of the *make-'em-buy at any cost* trader. I especially liked the layers of *loving.* Some characters bonded, however briefly, and found something like normalcy, even though they knew that was not possible with Doro still able to arrive and annihilate their beings and their souls. I liked the fact these moments of *loving* were unsentimental. They were real, but doomed. Who or what is Doro? Non-human, alien, trapped in his own need to exist. To expand my metaphor above -- Doro = the conundrum. It would seem the only way to get out of his mad design is to kill him. Butler is suggesting that is not easy, or someone -- probably most especially Anyanwu -- would have done so. Somehow his existence is seen as necessary. But is it? Maybe not. By the end, when Anyanwu has her own establishment, she could be the new pioneer. Seemed to me the ending left some room for that. Tantalizing thoughts and problems posed her. best wishes, phoebe Phoebe Wray zozie@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 18:55:52 +0100 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Carol Ann Kerry-Green Subject: Re: BDG Wild Seed In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.19990805125404.00aa8d30@mail1.pa.bell-labs.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Jessie wrote: > > Are the later books less grim? What's the "correct" order to read them in? > (That is, I suppose, the order in which they will make most sense, since I > gather they're written in backwards order.) To me, if anything, Mind of My Mind which follows Wild Seed is more grim. I 'enjoyed' Wild Seed more, maybe because of some of the conundrum's that people have already mentioned, it *made* me think, made me look at the way women have 'collaborated' with men over the centuries and made me question that 'collaboration'. A hard book to read, but 'pleasurable' as well, in that Anyanwu is a shape shifter and it's about telephathy, all themes that I have loved and searched out over the years. As to order, I *think* Wild Seed Mind of My Mind Clays Ark Survivor Patternmaster Though some may argue Clays Ark and Survivor aren't really of the series, but if you read them, they all fit in the sequence - I don't think I've missed anything out. Though Patternmaster is the last in the series, it was written first, and I believe Mind of My Mind was written before Wild Seed. Carol Ann Hull, UK