Like Doro, they ensure the future of their descendants by moving from body to body, invading bodies close to their host bodies, often mutating in the process. By nature, viruses too are parasitic, since they must have a host organism to live.
Īs I reflected upon Doro's obsessive control over his community deriving from his biological insecurity, strangely enough, I began to see connections with the COVID-19 virus. He struggles with Anyanwu throughout the centuries of their relationship because she has a very different ethical viewpoint on how to live, preferring instead to exist freely instead of under his control. He maintains a strong hold on those in this "Pattern" (the superhuman community he builds in Wheatley, Massachusetts) and will kill, lie, manipulate, and psychologically control his people to achieve his ends. Because of this, Doro is obsessed with obtaining strong, long-lasting bodies, and he creates a eugenics project to interbreed both his children and outsiders with unique supernatural abilities to create more and more powerful descendants. To survive, Doro has to change bodies whenever the one he currently inhabits is threatened with death. No one is immune to the possibility of his taking over their body, not even the equally powerful Anyanwu. When he jumps to a new body, he kills the existing spirit within it. Instead, he is a spirit who must successively inhabit one host body after the other to live. Doro is a parasite who does not have his own body. Particularly fascinating to me about Wild Seed are the medical and scientific analogies between Butler's characterizations of Doro and Anyanwu and the spread of the coronavirus. Through her depiction of the contentious relationship between the main characters Doro and Anyanwu, Butler gives voice in the novel to questions and thoughts I have been having for over a year of quarantine and restricted movement prompted by the pandemic.
Though the plot of Wild Seed is fantastical and occurs over four hundred years in the past, the themes and issues Butler explores are still applicable to today's global crises and controversies.
A few months ago, I reread one of my favorite novels, Octavia Butler's Wild Seed, relishing the thought-provoking story that depicts the beginnings of the Pattern, a group of interconnected magical superbeings with powers such as telepathy, extrasensory perception, mind control, and supernatural healing that is featured in Butler's first novel series. T hroughout the global coronavirus pandemic, like many people I have sought escape from my fears and anxieties about the spreading virus through literature.
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