Title: Wild Seed
Author: Octavia Butler
Date of First Publication: 1980
Place of First Publication: New York, NY: Doubleday
Bibliographic Reference: isfdb
Type: Novel
Keywords: BYRONIC HERO; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER; POSTHUMAN; RACE and POLITICS; WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS
Critical Summary: Doro and Anyanwu are two immortal beings living in 17th Century Africa with super abilities. Doro is a spirit who kills his human hosts in order to possess their bodies and extend his life. He has lived for thousands of years dating back to the time of Pharaohs in Egypt. Anyanwu is a healer and shape-shifter who can alter the cells of her body into any human or animal and is approximately three hundred years old. Upon meeting each other, Doro quickly makes his ambitions for harvesting her special abilities clear. Doro runs “seed villages” for the purpose of breeding super-humans with specified traits. He chooses humans to breed with ideal powers who can potentially serve as hosts for him. By promising her children, Doro convinces Anyanwu to join him in his breeding mission that he wishes to take to America. However, Anyanwu soon discovers that Doro is a controlling leader who forces her to breed with whomever he selects, and cruelly kills and possess the bodies of his own people whom he has promised to protect. In New England, Doro’s son Isaac is forced upon Anyanwu for marriage and breeding, where she reluctantly complies with Doro’s orders. Doro’s maniacal desire to breed a super-human race and search for new “seeds” takes him on missions away from Anyanwu for hundreds of years at a time. When Anyanwu runs away after Isaac’s death, Doro finds her in Louisiana where she has set up her own village of super-humans. Anyanwu’s community has been flourishing without the oppressive violence of Doro’s control. That harmony ends when Doro colonizes the village by forcibly installing his breeding practices.
In relation to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Doro and Victor Frankenstein recognize the threat Anyanwu and the Creature pose to their authority and as a result deny agency to the bodies they work so hard to create. Anyanwu abilities make her far more powerful than Doro, but she is controlled by Doro’s dominant brutality for hundreds of years. In Frankenstein, The Creature becomes Victor’s nemesis once he recognizes he has the power to challenge his Creator. As the Creature attempts to retreat from society in the North Pole, it is revealed that even Victor’s death cannot bring him solace. The cruelty and pain of his life’s experience cannot be undone. Butler engages with the omnipresence of oppression at the end of Wild Seed, when Anyanwu threatens suicide instead of further subjecting herself to Doro’s violence and forced breeding. Here, the stories diverge. Although Anyanwu and the Creature realize they can never fully escape the influence of their controllers/creators, Doro is moved towards changing his ruthless ways. Afraid that he will lose Anyanwu, Doro vows to no longer kill indiscriminately and to work with her to discover other potential “seeds.” Butler’s Afrofuturistic novel also incorporates Shelly’s themes of forced human evolution. Both novels approach their creation of new super-humans by utilizing the principles of eugenics. Although Victor assembled the Creature from dead bodies rather than breeding, he intentionally sought out the best human and animal parts for his creation. Doro sought to achieve his ideal super-human host by breeding beings with super-abilities that he deemed most desirable. By moving the novel’s setting from Africa to America, Wild Seed also places Shelley’s posthuman framework within a colonial context. Where postcolonial readings of Frankenstein force readers to confront the monstrous actions of imperialist Britain, Butler’s novel places posthumanist colonization in direct conversation with the American slave trade.
Administrative Notes: Sophia Sotelo. CSUF