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Title: Mind of My Mind (Patternmaster Book 2)
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Published: New York: Open Road, 2012 (1977)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 220
Total Page Count: 177,495
Text Number: 520
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: When one of Doro's most careful projects transitions, she instigates the Pattern: a massive, united web of telepaths. With its intriguing high-concept premise explored through an array of unbalanced power dynamics and compelling intimacies, this feels more like Butler's usual fare than Wild Seed, but also less nuanced and focused than that book. It has Butler's compulsive readability which even the frequent point of view and first/third person switches can't slow, but wants for an explicit impoverished point of view to explore from within the faults in the Patternist society. Mind of My Mind suffers from the difference between internal chronology and publication order in the Patternmaster series; the book seems to lack subtlety and Anyanwu in particular feels dismissed. If I could do things over again, I'd rather have read the books in publication order. But even with those caveats, this is what I hope for when I reach for Butler: a thought-experiment which is at once disquieting and impossible to put down.
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Published: New York: Open Road, 2012 (1977)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 220
Total Page Count: 177,495
Text Number: 520
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: When one of Doro's most careful projects transitions, she instigates the Pattern: a massive, united web of telepaths. With its intriguing high-concept premise explored through an array of unbalanced power dynamics and compelling intimacies, this feels more like Butler's usual fare than Wild Seed, but also less nuanced and focused than that book. It has Butler's compulsive readability which even the frequent point of view and first/third person switches can't slow, but wants for an explicit impoverished point of view to explore from within the faults in the Patternist society. Mind of My Mind suffers from the difference between internal chronology and publication order in the Patternmaster series; the book seems to lack subtlety and Anyanwu in particular feels dismissed. If I could do things over again, I'd rather have read the books in publication order. But even with those caveats, this is what I hope for when I reach for Butler: a thought-experiment which is at once disquieting and impossible to put down.
