Patternmaster Book Series

[Eboni Kleifgen]

ThePatternist Series by Octavia Butler has significant differences in the release / internal chronologies - the release order is Patternmaster, Mind of my Mind, Survivor, Wild Seed, Clay's Ark, but the in-universe chronology goes Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, Survivor, Patternmaster.

I usually tend to read things in publication order, because I trust that there are no references I'll miss if I do it that way, since the original readers couldn't very well have expected to read them out of order, but in this case the omnibus edition orders them chronologically (and also skips Survivor, which Butler has disowned). The only reason I would want to read them in in-universe chronological order is if there are significant spoilers inherent in the nature of the books: e.g. if some character is put in mortal danger in Clay's Ark, but they are a main character in Patternmaster then I'd know that any danger to that character is not "real".

So given these concerns, can someone who has read these books suggest an order? I've already read Wild Seed (picked it up years ago at a used book store and didn't know it was part of a series), so in a sense I already have a feel for the universe.

Edit: I've now read all these books, and I'll say that I agree with the accepted answer pretty strongly. There definitely are spoilers if you read it in publication, rather than chronological order. That said, most of the books are largely independent, and I ended up going Wild Seed, Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, Survivor and I didn't feel like it really damaged my enjoyment of the books. I'd still recommend the chronological order.

Octavia Butler re-released her Patternist books in a single edition entitled Seed to Harvest which contains the novels Wild Seed, Mind of my Mind, Clay's Ark and Patternmaster but notably ignored the 1978 novel Survivor which she apparently disliked so much that she asked her publisher not to renew printing.

That said, (and although I've not read them personally) the reviewers on 50Books seem to be very much of a mind that reading them in publication order would be their recommendation due to the improving quality of the later books. There's no mention of spoilers if books are read in the 'incorrect' order.

This is inevitably a matter of opinion, but the first book I read was Mind of My Mind when it was released in the 70s (I think I was about 16) and I really, really loved it. I then read Wild Seed, and I loved this too because it provided a back story for the events in Mind of My Mind. I only read Clay's Ark and Patternmaster fairly recently, and I thought neither were as good as the first two books I read (or maybe I just grew up in between :-).

I think this is a good order for reading the books. I know Patternmaster was the first book, but to me the books feel as if Mind of My Mind was the first and best, and the other books were an exercise in filling in the gaps.

I think in the case of these books, you can probably read them in any order and not have a problem with spoiling or the like. I read Patternmaster first and I just finished reading Mind of my Minds. My only issue is the fact that I forgot most of Patternmaster except for the fact that the non-telepaths were slaves (and pretty disposable), but that was enough to enjoy Mind of My Mind and the way it depicted the creation of the Pattern. It felt a lot like the Planet of the Apes series in that you know what is coming mostly when you read the books that take place before the other ones but you don't know the characters and that makes all the difference.

The Patternist series (also known as the Patternmaster series or Seed to Harvest) is a group of science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler that detail a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes that the themes of the series include "racial and gender-based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people."[1]

Chronologically, the series starts with the fourth novel published, Wild Seed. Set in the 17th and 18th centuries, the story involves the relationship between two immortals - Doro, a man born in Africa thousands of years ago, who survives by transferring his consciousness from one body to another (feeding on each new victim's mental energy in the process), and Anyanwu, a shape-shifting healer with perfect control over her body. They struggle to live together over generations as Doro attempts to create a new race through a selective breeding program.

The series' history continues with Mind of My Mind, in which Doro's breeding program has created a society of networked telepaths that he struggles to control. By the end of the novel Doro's thousands-of-years long breeding program has succeeded, but he is killed in the process, and the first patternmaster takes his place as leader of the patternists, establishing control over the fictional city of Forsyth, California, which is still the seat of their power during the time of Patternmaster.

Clay's Ark, the last book of the series to be published, deals with a colony of people who have been mutated by a disease that astronauts brought back to Earth from outer space. The group struggles to keep itself isolated enough to keep the disease from spreading throughout humanity.

Survivor, the now out-of-print book in the series that Butler later disowned, depicts the Clay's Ark disease ravaging the Earth, and Doro's telepathic descendants asserting control over what remains of humanity. One group of regular humans decides to escape Earth to a new planet, where they struggle to co-exist with the species that already live there.[3]

Patternmaster, the first book to be published but the last in the series' internal chronology, depicts a distant future where the human race has been sharply divided into the dominant Patternists, their enemies the "diseased" and animalistic Clayarks, and the enslaved "mutes", regular humans without any enhanced abilities. The Patternists, bred for intelligence and psychic abilities, are networked telepaths. They are ruled by the most powerful telepath, known as the Patternmaster. Patternmaster tells the coming-of-age story of Teray, a young Patternist who learns he is a son of the Patternmaster. Teray fights for position within Patternist society and eventually for the role of Patternmaster.

Patternmaster explores the creation and maintenance of social and genetic hierarchies. For Gregory Jerome Hampton, Patternmaster "presents several questions about how race works in a social structure and how gender works in the function of race."[7]

Octavia Butler launched her novel writing career in 1976 with Patternmaster, the first of the Patternist series. In doing so, she perfected a strategy a lot of series writers were going for: begin the series with a dramatic moment and then work backward to figure out how we got there.

First editions, first printings, a rare complete set, signed by the author on the title page of Wild Seed and inscribed in Clay's Ark, "To Yvette, Best wishes, Octavia E. Butler". The recipient was Yvette Le Roy, founder of Liberty House in Harlem. Her store sold handcrafts produced by the Mississippi co-operative Poor People's Corporation and hosted poetry readings by Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni.

Including Butler's debut novel Patternmaster, the series charts the ascendance of the paranormal race of patternists, led by the patternmaster, from their origins in ancient times to the far future where they rule over the diseased Clayarks and ordinary humans ("Mutes"). "Much of the power of the sequence derives from the chargedness and cognitive focus occasioned by her background and punishing early experiences in urban California, a confluence of influences and incarcerations [that] seems to have underwritten - as with other writers who were non-white - the tough embodiedness of the characters she created" (SFE).

Butler was the first Black woman to receive both the Nebula and Hugo awards, as well as being the first science fiction author to be granted a MacArthur fellowship. Her work "creates powerful images of black women in a genre in which and from which they have traditionally been marginalized and excluded" (Boutler, p. 170).

Occasional bump, minor rubbing, foxing to endpapers, Patternmaster front inner hinge just starting; jackets unclipped, gentle spine fading, creasing to edges, a couple of short closed tears, presenting well: a near-fine set in very good jackets.

With the exception of framed items*, Peter Harrington offers free delivery on all UK orders of rare books, maps and prints placed through this website. Delivery to USA and the rest of the world is similarly free for orders over 200.

There are general challenges that come with designing any series of books. The goal is to have each title stand on its own, be unique. But only to a point. Because at the same time, you want to establish an overarching look that applies across the full set, tying them together as a whole. There should be similarities across the individual titles that embody a shared visual DNA. But think sisters, not twins.

The Patternist series, also called the Patternmaster series, is a science fiction series written by Octavia Butler. The series spans the appearance and rise of powerful psychics among the human race as well as the invasion of the Clayark aliens.

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