Wild Seed Summary
Octavia E. Butler

Wild Seed Summary

Regardless of biology, race, caste, and the vicissitudes of fate, liberty of the individual person is the paramount existential need. Ironically, the key virtue needed to secure personal freedom is patience, or endurance, coupled with stamina, both physical and moral.

They are connected. Anyanwu's extraordinary physiology is the basis of her patience and moral independence.

Another theme is that fertility is important to the survival of species at the highest level of intellectual potential.

Superspecies must be able to breed or they are not significant in a biosphere.

Another theme is that religion is conservative and stabilizing, but that the evolution and progress of species requires that blasphemy and even obscenity be just as constantly present, because they are the agents of mutation and essential change which are inexorable in species and culture as the process that insures adaptation and survival. Anyanwu calls Doro an "obscenity"; that is...

(read more from the Short Guide)