Seed to Harvest: The Complete Patternist Series (Patternist, #1-4)

by Octavia E. Butler

“Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave,” she said softly.

“For my people,” she said, “I respect the gods. I speak as the voice of a god. For myself …In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.”

But once she was isolated in America with an infant to care for, she would learn submissiveness.

“There were things in your hand that should not have been there,” she told him. “Living things too small to see. I have no name for them, but I can feel them and know them when I take them into my body. As soon as I know them, I can kill them within myself. I gave you a little of my body’s weapon against them.”

Personaized medicine FTW.

Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.

What was common in one place could be ridiculous in another and abomination in a third. Ignorance could be costly.

Habits were difficult to break. The habit of living, the habit of fear … even the habit of love.

“Haven’t you seen the men slaves in this country who are used for breeding? They are never permitted to learn what it means to be a man. They are not permitted to care for their children.

Clay was slowly deciding to kill himself. It was slow because, in spite of everything Clay did not want to die. He was just becoming less and less able to tolerate the pain of living.

First Doro, and now Mary, was creating a race that could not tolerate its own young.

Another fear played up by the media and down by everyone in the program was the possibility that faster-than-light travel might have some negative effect on conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. The Dana Drive that powered the Ark involved an exotic combination of particle physics and psionics. Parapsychological mumbo jumbo, it had been called when Clay Dana presented it. Even when he was able to prove everything he said, even when others were able to duplicate his work and his results, there were outspoken skeptics. After years of tedious, uncertain observation of so-called psychic phenomena, after years of trickery by “psychic” charlatans, some scientists in particular found their prejudices too strong to overcome.

Others, including Clay Dana himself, saw it as a way to the stars. Clay Dana and his supporters demanded the stars. They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed. The Dana faction feared humanity would extinguish itself on Earth, the only world in the solar system that could support human life.