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[25 June 2011]

Mind of My mind by Octavia Butler

Introduction

In this research paper, I am going to analys “Mind of Mind” by butler. Mind of My Mind, that Butler establishes Patternist society. Here she establishes the reason why patternists are arranged into houses and, in describing the tendencies of so-called immature latents to inadvertently kill or maim inferiors, anticipates her later creation of “mutes,” or nontelepaths, as servants and of the code preventing their mistreatment. Rachel's faith healing in Mind of My Mind presages Amber's regenerative abilities in Patternmaster.

Butler's science fiction novels include the Patternist series: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind(1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay's Ark (1984). These works, and the Xenogenesis trilogy of Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989), explore the complex power relationships between human beings and extraterrestrials and feature such science-fiction themes as genetic engineering and human/alien sexual encounters. Kindred (1979) projects a twentieth century African American woman into the past as a free black woman in the nineteenth century slaveholding South.

Thesis Statement:

In this novel the author explores the complex power relationships between human beings and extraterrestrials and feature such science-fiction themes as genetic engineering and human/alien sexual encounters.

Minds of Mind analysis

In, “Minds of Mind” Octavia E. Butler presents an image of humanity as congenitally flawed species, perhaps doomed to destroy itself by virtue of the misapplicationof it domestic intelligence, especially in the construction of dysfunctional hierarchies. The various and highly diverse societies featured in her novels are controlled by harsh realities: exacting competition for survival and intense struggles for power, usually culminating in the domination of the weak by the strong and more unusually, and highly characteristic of her work exotic patterns of literal and metaphorical parasitism.

Within this rather desolate comprehensive framework, there is scope for hope, idealism, love, bravery, and compassion as well as pain and desperation. Butleralways looks to courageous outsiders to challenge the systems that oppress them, and they sometimes defeat tyrants to win power for themselves, but such victories are never easy and often costly. She does not deal in straightforwardly happy endings, but in ambiguous conclusions in which although her protagonists have done their heroic best to improve matters for themselves and others their environments remain essentially imperfect and perhaps essentially irredeemable(Anderson 35-50).

In intellectually elaborated but often vividly descriptive prose, Butler routinely tells her stories from the viewpoints of characters who are initially impotent but are forced by circumstances to attempt meaningful action. Her protagonists are usually, though not invariably, black women placed in outlandish situations and subjected to unforgettable experiences often so extraordinary as to seem not merely grotesque but repulsive. What begins as an act of desperate courage, however, is usually transformed into an experience of love however commingled with other emotions and that experience is always crucial to the understanding that provides the story arc's crucial epiphany. The essence of modern science fiction is that such understanding is reached through a process of “conceptual breakthrough,” and Butler's great strength as a writer ...