Collection of all four books in the masterful Patternist series by bestselling author Octavia Butler. Wild Seed Doro knows no higher authority than himself. An ancient spirit with boundless powers, he possesses humans, killing without remorse as he jumps from body to body to sustain his own life. He fears no one—until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is an entity like Doro and yet different. She can heal with a bite and transform her own body, mending injuries and reversing aging. No one poses a true threat to Anyanwu—until she meets Doro. Mind of My Mind For thousands of years, Doro has pursued perfection, experimenting with humanity and seeking out rare - and powerful - talents. His finest creation is Mary, a young black woman who grows up on the rough outskirts of Los Angeles. Doro knows he must handle Mary carefully or risk her ending like his previous experiments - dead, either by her own hand or his. What he doesn't suspect is that Mary is beginning to learn just how much power she wields. Clay’s Ark In an alternate America marked by volatile class warfare, Blake Maslin is traveling with his teenage twin daughters when their car is ambushed. Their attackers appear sickly yet possess inhuman strength, and they transport Blake's family to an isolated compound. There, the three captives discover that the compound's residents have a highly contagious alien disease that has mutated their DNA to make them powerful, dangerous, and compelled to infect others. Patternmaster In the far future, the human race is divided into two groups striving for power. The Patternmaster rules over all. The only threat to his power are the Clayarks, mutant humans created by an alien pandemic, who now live either enslaved by the Patternists or in the wild. Coransee, son of the ruling Patternmaster, wants the throne and will stop at nothing to get it.
Author
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. After her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction. She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public and awards judges. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington state. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library.
