Mind of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler
192 pages
Published 1977
Read from July 19 to July 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
A master plan for a multivolume sci-fi epic seems like it would be a good idea. You know where you're starting from and where you want to go, and in between you can plot out a mix of what needs to happen and what you want to happen. I've only read two volumes of Butler's Patternist series -- well, technically, I also read Clay's Ark back in 2002 or 2003, but that was so long ago, I thought I remembered reading Parable of the Talents instead, at least until I was several pages into that book a couple months ago. Already it seems to me that Butler wrote these books according to a prearranged plan, decreeing in advance what events were necessary in the several different time periods covered from Doro and Anyanwu's meeting in 1690 all the way up to whatever far-future business we may see in Patternmaster.
This produced an unsatisfying ending for Wild Seed, an unconvincing authorial shove to get the pieces where they needed to be. But at least Seed had been thoroughly enjoyable until that point, exploring an era of history usually forgotten by science fiction and centering on two fascinating, excellently matched characters. Mind of My Mind is unsatisfying from start to finish, existing merely to fill in a necessary but by default open-ended piece of the overall narrative. It's especially confusing given the order of publication: this would have been the reading public's first exposure to Doro and Anyanwu (or Emma, as she's known here), but those two are tossed into the mix as if we were familiar with every incident and nuance of their backstories. Anyanwu/Emma in particular pops up unceremoniously, serves essentially no purpose to the narrative other than a conversational foil to Doro, and (spoilers) is killed off at the end, "off-screen," almost as an afterthought. Which is a damn shame.
Mind also struggles with being just another '70s novel about psionic people in the contemporary world. Some of the snippets of daily life in a new telepathic commune are interesting, but for the most part these are sketches, quick two-page scenes to establish Mary's rapid progress with her Pattern. If the intent was to present a slice of life along the lines of Dying Inside, it needed a whole lot more work. Mind as a whole feels unfinished, more scaffold than story. It makes me wonder if this omnibus edition chopped out pieces of backstory rendered "unnecessary" by the inclusion of Seed in the same volume.
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