Wild Seed.

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1980. First edition of the fourth book in the Patternist series. Octavo, original boards. Boldly signed by Octavia E. Butler on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket illustration by John Cayea. Jacket Typography by Dennis McClellan. An exceptional example. The fourth book in Butler's Patternist series, Wild Seed chronicles the origin of the Patternist world. The novel received many positive reviews, especially for its style, with the Washington Post's Elizabeth A. Lynn praising Butler's writing as "spare and sure, and even in moments of great tension she never loses control over her pacing or over her sense of story." In his survey of Butler's work, critic Burton Raffel singles out Wild Seed as an example of Butler's "major fictive talent", calling the book's prose "precise and tautly cadence," "forceful because it is focused" and "fictively superbly effective because it is in each and every detail true to the character's lives." In his 2001 book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, famed science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card used passages from Wild Seed's opening paragraphs to illustrate principles of good fiction writing (e.g. how to properly name characters, how to keep the reader intrigued) as well as of good speculative writing (how abeyance, implication, and literalism may work together to produce fantastical realities that are nevertheless believable).