Thoughts on Patternmaster – Octavia E. Butler’s Seed to Harvest

Seed to Harvest is a book combining all 4 novels from Octavia E. Butler’s Patternmaster series. Since I’ve started to read it last week, it was really hard to put down and it made me think about the themes and plots in it a lot. The stories included are very different from each other, and so is the impact they left on me, so I decided I really want to share my thoughts on each of the novels in separate posts and give a wrap-up on the series in the end.

Before I start with Patternmaster, I can already hear a lot of people screaming:
“Why start with Patternmaster?” It’s the last one chronologically!”
That’s true, but it’s the first one published, that’s why I thought starting with this is a good idea.

I noticed a huge debate about what book to start with and most seem to settle for chronological order, especially since this is the order they are in when you read the Seed to Harvest collection. I saw a lot of people write that they think they have done the right thing starting that way, so because I think the same thing about the reading order I’ve picked, I guess you can read this series in every order you want. I think you can even start with each of the books in no particular order and get a lot out of them since they are so different and self-containt.

With that out of the way: What did I think about Patternmaster?

Patternmaster is the story of a young man, Teray, fresh out of school, who, together with his wife, joins the house of a man to become his apprentice. Unfortunately, an old acquaintance of this man takes great interest in him and decides to buy him as a slave. From now on Teray has to fight for his freedom, knowing that his owner sees him as a threat to becoming the new Patternmaster.

All this is set in a future not unlike the one in Frank Herberts’s Dune, a mixture of futuristic and historical elements with some fantasy bits, all evolving around the so-called Pattern. Who controls the Pattern controls the world, basically.
I really liked the setting, the whole world and concept is seriously fascinating. A huge portion of details about it, however, is left vague, so that I could only speculate about how this society works and why it ended up being that way. And it pays so much not knowing, because that’s exactly what the other books in the series will reveal and it feels so good finding out bit by bit.

The setting, however, was the strongest part for me while the story itself kind of reminded me of a modern young adult romantasy, which is absolutely not my go to genre. I know I can’t blame it, since it was written in the 70’s were all of the tropes probably didn’t exist, but that just how it read to me. It was basically a story about freedom and love, what may sound nice for a lot of you, but the execution just didn’t do that much for me.

Don’t get me wrong, the writing was really good and easy to follow, the story was just pretty simple. It is no real spoiler if I say there are attempts to escape and bargains to get out, but I never really felt that invested in them.

And than there’s the love story. To give you the basics of it: Since he’s a slave, he is not allowed sex with his wife anymore, he could talk to her, even lives in the same house with her, just sleeping with her isn’t allowed anymore. That seems to be reason enough that she is basically forgotten for most of the book and he falls deeply in love with someone else real quick. To defend him, the roles of wives are different in this novel than they are in our modern society, but still I felt weird about it.

The upside of it is that his new love interest is maybe the most interesting character in the whole thing, but that’s not saying much. I liked that she, as basically the female lead, was bisexual, what I don’t think happened that often back then. I don’t even notice it happening that often now, to be honest. And it was not just a quirk but really made sense for her character and future plans. The whole book was really sex-positive in general, which makes sense for the time it was written in, but it was still a positive surprise.

While the two of them had some chemistry, I just didn’t buy how fast they claimed they would die for each other. That’s just not for me, I suppose.

Love story aside, there were also hints of some kind of power struggle of who will be the next patternmaster. This worked the least for me, since our protagonist never wanted that power, never even was tempted or thought about it, so the ending was not as satisfying as it could have been. He was not even wise or just kind, so you would think he especially deserved it, he was just too normal for that. I guess there was a lot of potential with this and if the book could just have been a little longer it could have worked much better.

With so much negativity, I must add that it was still a fun read, just nothing special or moving. So you can already guess that the next one must be really good for me to be so exited about this series nonetheless. Spoiler: It is, but that will be the subject for another day.

Read part 2 here