Beyond Reality discussion

Wrapping up the series with Patternmaster! Let us know what you thought - spoilers allowed here!

8/10
This was a much quicker and easier read than the others in the Patternist series, maybe because it was the first she wrote (even though chronologically it’s the last). The story is told from Teray’s POV; he’s young & inexperienced but strong & bright. There is the obvious contrast between Terry & Coransee, but also between Iray & Amber.

Butler’s recurring theme of dominance/subservience (whether master/enslaved person, husband/wife, or Patternist/apprentice/outsider/mute) certainly is the main thread running through the story, but she also touches on what it means to trust another person and what it means to be human (a Patternist, mute, or Clayark). As usual, she doesn’t give the reader answers, leaving one to grapple with the questions long after closing the book.

Great observations Kathi. I liked how everything tied up but also stayed completely open. Butler has such an interesting style of prose.

Just finished. This entry did have a different feel than the others. I also like Teray as a character.

I'm curious: do you think leaving the ideas for the reader to wonder about is more or less effective than having characters wrestle with them?

Do you think there was a reason the books were ordered the way they were? I'm not sure why the order is significant.

By order do you mean by internal chronology rather than by publication order? I think there is always a debate about whether to read a series by internal chronology or by publication order. The Vorkosigan Saga is a great example of that. The Practical Magic series is another.

I don’t think you get anything extra either way except sometimes it’s easier to put the whole story together in your head if you read it by internal chronology, at least it is for me. But for this series, sure, I think reading it in publication order would be fine too. I think reading it that way you see more clearly the author’s progression in writing about the story as a whole ie you see where their mind opened up and went as a result of what they wrote previously.

It’s hard for me to imagine reading these books in publication order. My linear brain…. I’ve been able to do it with some series where the publication order didn’t match the internal chronology but it’s a challenge.

Natalie wrote: "I'm curious: do you think leaving the ideas for the reader to wonder about is more or less effective than having characters wrestle with them?"

I think it depends. Sometimes when an author has the characters wrestle with big questions, it reveals the author’s leanings, which can be appropriate in some cases but maybe not in others. Is the author trying to share what they think & why (via the characters’ thoughts/words) or is the author trying to get the reader to examine their (the reader’s) thoughts & reasoning?

I didn't have a strong sense of an internal chronology. Maybe I missed some details.

That's a good point Kathi: character vs author viewpoint can be easy to confuse!

This was a quick read, I didn't realize how short it would be! I liked Teray as a character, I liked Amber even more.

It is strange to me that this is the book that was written first. I wonder how much of the backstory Butler had thought through before writing this - it's a complex world, with the three factions of the Patternists, the mutes, and the clayarks and their complicated relationships. Had she already imagined the history and planned on writing it down someday? I suppose the book would stand alone, but I think it's richer for knowing the history of the society.

Shel wrote: "I wonder how much of the backstory Butler had thought through before writing this"

I wondered this as well.

Natalie wrote: "I didn't have a strong sense of an internal chronology."

Less chronology of the story but more the development of how the Patternists came to be, and more specifics of the development of the Clay’s Ark disease.

Re how Butler thought of the larger backstory prior to writing this, I think she wrote this with a general but unformed sense of the larger backstory. There’s no hint of Doro and his whole breeding program. Also, one small point she seems to have decided to change in a prequel is that in Patternmaster there is mention that the clayark disease was caused as a result of a mute invention. In Clay’s Ark we find out no, the necessary ship drive was invented by a Patternist (Clay) and could only be piloted by a sensitive.

So I think she was telling a story about how civilization fell after being divided, with two branches of humanity now with different strengths competing for resources. Then later she delved into the larger question about how that situation came about. But that is just my sense of things.

Re: Butler's process and how she wrote the books, I have a collection of interviews called "Conversations with Octavia Butler," which I read most of a few years ago, and I can share a few choice quotes! The first few are all from a long, 1988 interview.

"I started writing SF when I was twelve. I was already reading SF, but I hadn’t thought of writing it—I was writing fantasy and romance, both of which you know a lot about at ten or eleven, right? What happened to me sounds like a cliche but it’s true: I was watching a movie on television, Devil Girl from Mars, and I thought, I can write a better story than that. So I turned off the TV and started writing what was actually an early version of one of my Patternist stories. The short stories I submitted for publication when I was thirteen had nothing to do with anything I cared about. I wrote the kind of thing I saw being published—stories about thirty-year-old white men who drank and smoked too much. They were pretty awful" . . . " Since I didn’t know what else to do, in those early Patternist stories I more or less copied the boys’ books. I eventually got very comfortable with that approach, but there are stories that were written in the mid-1970s where the strain really shows."

Personally, I consider the following quote the key to understanding the Patternist series. In my view, what makes it so odd and fascinating is that one the one hand, you have an adult Octavia Butler working at some very difficult themes. But at the same time, in the DNA of the stories you have teenage Octavia Butler, who's just obsessed with sex and power and eugenics:

"When I was in my teens, a group of us used to talk about our hopes and dreams, and someone would always ask, “If you could do anything you wanted to do, no holds barred, what would you do?” I’d answer that I wanted to live forever and breed people—which didn’t go over all that well with my friends. In a sense, that desire is what drives Doro in Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind. At least I made him a bad guy!"

LM: What was your original conception for the Patternist series? I know, for example, that they weren’t published in the order in which you wrote them. Did you have an outline for the whole series?

OEB: No, they were in my head for so many years that I didn’t need an outline. I conceived of the first three books dealing with three different eras: Mind of My Mind takes place in the present, Patternmaster is set on Earth in the distant future, and Survivor, which occurs in the nearer future, deals with those who got away but who didn’t fare well because they were so strong in their religion that they couldn’t consider self-preservation. “Bloodchild” is also a survivor story, though the characters react differently: they survive as a species, but not unchanged. This idea of change seems to me to be one of the biggest challenges I face as a writer—and the inability to face this is a big problem in a lot of SF. Some kind of important change is pretty much what SF is about.

LM: You seemed to have developed a fairly elaborate overall concept before you completed the first book.
OEB: I enjoy working with the effects of difficult human situations. The complexity of the Patternist series resulted from the fact that I’d been in that universe, in my mind, for so long. At the time I was writing Wild Seed, for example, all I had to do was see that the numbers and dates were accurate—to make sure that Anyanwu and Doro weren’t the wrong ages, that sort of thing. I felt I could do almost anything because I was so comfortable in that realm. But I had problems in the Xenogenesis universe because I hadn’t inhabited that world, imaginatively, long enough. I had to look back to see what I had said and to make sure everything held together and wasn’t contradictory.

JM: Kindred seems like a very conscious break from what you were doing in the Patternist series.
OEB: Actually, Kindred was supposed to be part of the series but it didn’t seem to fit, probably because I wanted to be more realistic than I had been in the earlier books. . . .

This next section is from the intro to an interview from 1993 in Publishers Weekly, but it explains a lot about how the books were actually written:

"To support herself, she took menial jobs: washing dishes, sweeping floors, doing warehouse inventory, sorting potato chips, all the while getting up at two or three in the morning to write. When she was laid off from a telephone solicitation job two weeks before Christmas, 1974, she decided it was time to fish or cut bait.

"Earlier attempts to write a novel had been frustrated because Butler had been intimidated by the length. Determined now to look at each chapter as a short story, and finding inspiration in her earliest stories, she was able to produce Patternmaster in a matter of months. The book chronicles a future where humanity is divided into “Patternists,” the ruling class who are joined together through telepathy, mute humans who serve the Patternists, and “Clayarks,” mutant human/griffin creatures who’ve been contaminated by a disease brought back from outer space.

"With information gleaned from Writer’s Market, Butler mailed her manuscript to Doubleday. By return mail, Doubleday editor Sharon Jarvis voiced her interest in buying the novel, albeit with the changes she outlined in a three-page, single-spaced letter. Elated, Butler complied, and she continued writing; by the end of the year, she had written Mind of My Mind and more than half of Survivor. Beginning in 1976, Doubleday began releasing the first four books in the Patternmaster series. (In 1984, St. Martin’s published a fifth, Clay’s Ark.)

"Midway through the series, Butler realized she had the need to write another kind of book. It was Kindred, in which an African American woman is transported from Southern California back through time to the antebellum South and the plantation of the man who is her ancestor. Doubleday published it as mainstream fiction in 1979; Butler herself calls it 'a grim fantasy.'"

BJ, thank you!
I had read a few of those quotes before, but you provided a much more complete picture of how these books came to be.

Thank you! I love hearing from authors about how their books can to be. She was such a fascinating woman.

Yes thanks so much for taking the time to post that.

Also, generally a big thanks to everyone who took the time to read and post so extensively their thoughts on these books. I really enjoyed it!