Octavia E. Butler’s Seed to Harvest – Book Series Wrap-up

Even though it had it’s ups and downs, I thoroughly enjoyed the Patternmaster Series.
There are a few finals words left to say about it before I end this experiment of posting daily and go back into my normal rhythm of one or two posts a week. Make sure to check out the individual reviews of part 1, 2, 3 and 4 so you understand the context of this better.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Butler is wonderful at creating emotional response, pictures in her reader’s mind and realistic characters. Even though these books were written about 40 years ago, they still feel fresh and modern. Every book is self-contained and does not need the others to work, but together they create a world that makes you feel glad you’ve read them all.
However, they are not consistently good and if books and fiction in general do not tend to create emotions in you, even the strong ones might work less on you than they worked on me.

Main Themes

The Patternmaster Series has many themes that are consistently dealt with over all of the books, often handled in a different way in each of them. Most of this I have already mentioned in the individual reviews, but I still want to emphasize on the importance of them in the whole series.

• Family:
  No matter if it’s about breeding, belonging or sibling rivalry, family always plays a part in some way. The different ways of what family can be and what part you take in it are addressed and sometimes even directly discussed.
• Slavery:
  Depending on what time the story is set, being enslaved has different causes and effects on the characters. It is more than just the human trade as we know it from history, but can also manifest itself in other dependencies.
• Power:
  Power Struggles, for the own freedom or the power over others, are part of the main conflicts depicted in these books. While it makes some characters stronger, it can also be a weakness for others, if they go to far.
• Race:
  In all of the books the protagonist is always of color. This has more or less influence on the story or the surroundings depending on the time period. With the author herself being black, I think this creates great representation without feeling forced in any way.
• Being Different:
  Some are blessed or cursed with powers, some are immortal, have a disease or a not yet that much accepted sexuality: a lot of characters in these novels are different in some way. Seeing how they adapt or are treated because of that in an interesting part of the stories.

Favourite Books

Due to how different these books were from each other, it is hard to compare them in a way. However, since I did enjoy some more than others, it isn’t really hard for me to rank them:

• Mind of my Mind was the strongest book for me personally. It drew me in emotionally, portrayed interesting characters and great dynamics between them and just had an overall intriguing plot.
• Wild Seed was a little more quiet and I felt more distant from what was happening, but apart from that it was just as strong. Very descriptive, emotional and believable.
• Clay’s Ark had its problem and felt detached from the series in some way, but the good parts were great and the not so good parts still gained a reaction from me.
• Patternmaster is a little bit more simple and reminds of a lot of other dystopian novels of that kind. I wasn’t really invested in the story as much as in the others, but it’s still written well and connects all the other books in a wonderful way.