Bookish Thoughts

Much like the other books in this series, Patternmaster  left me wanting more.  Butler has a lot of ideas that she just sort of hints at rather than expanding fully. And a lot of characters that could be interesting if they were ever developed beyond what was necessary for the plot. Teray was the only character I felt like I got to know properly. Even Coransee, the main antagonist, remained mostly a mystery. This was compounded by the plot that moved at the speed of light. Nothing ever got a chance to breathe before the next thing happened and relationships developed so quickly that I had a hard time believing they were real. I definitely prefer character-driven fiction to plot-driven. If I don't believe in the characters then I'm just never going to care about the story. And that's been my problem with this series. If we're going to be dealing with difficult moral choices, then I need people to be making those choices, not 2-dimensional archetypes.

This book was a bit of a slog. As much as I like Octavia Butler's books, she definitely has some issues. And this one puts them in sharp relief. Butler has great ideas, and she does a great job of using science fiction to comment on society. I usually come out of her books with a lot to think about. That's part of the problem, really. I want more from her. Her books have a tendency to resemble outlines more than stories. There's no connective tissue between the big events. Characters are introduced as plot points and discarded as soon as they're not useful anymore. At the end of Ming of My Mind , I was frustrated that Doro and Anyanwu both died. I had become invested in their relationship over the centuries and in their competing visions for the future. But Mary was interesting enough, and I was looking forward to seeing where her story went. It turns out that it went nowhere. This book deals with an entire different set of characters facing an entirely different ...

Sometimes Octavia Butler's books feel more like outlines than novels. She's all about big ideas, and she gets them across in a really succinct way. Her books are brief, but they haunt me for years afterward, as I continue to turn over the ideas in my head. But sometimes it feels like this comes at the expense of the characters and their relationships with one another. Butler tends to focus in on the major turning points in her characters' lives, filling in the intervening years with a few brief sentences, letting a single scene capture a decade of character growth. She does it well, but I came out of this book wanting more. There are so many characters that we meet so briefly. I wanted more from Jan and Ada, I wanted to know more about what happened to Clay (holy crap, is he the Clay in Clay's Ark?). But this book is about Doro and his protege, Mary. And it's really only about them. Even Emma, née Anwanyu, has been relegated to Doro's sounding board and cons...

I've read enough of Butler's work at this point that I can't help but compare this book to her others. Certain things keeps popping up - long timelines, characters who gradually compromise their morals, and, of course, supernatural powers. From the beginning, Anyanwu reminded me strongly of the Ooloi of the Oankali in Butler's Xenogenesis series. She has the same long life, the same ability to alter her own body which leads to incredible healing abilities. But Anyanwu differs from the Ooloi in that she can only heal herself, and in that she's comparatively reclusive. All she wants is a family. Enter Doro, who inhabits the other qualities of the Ooloi: a fascination with genetics and a tendency to disregard humans as nothing more than breeding stock - pawns in his millenia-long experiments. But what Doro really wants is someone like him, not for companionship so much as the knowledge that he isn't alone in the universe. The book follows the push and pull be...