Mind of My Mind (Patternist, 2)

This is my favorite Octavia Butler book. My first introduction to Ms. Butler's work was a couple years ago when my book club chose, Kindred, as a selection. I love Kindred, but I do believe I like Mind of my Mind more. Mind of My Mind is so representative of everything Octavia Butler. It's a powerhouse of a book packed into a couple hundred pages. The writing is brilliant, it's wildly imaginative and a truly enjoyable read. I couldn't put it down. The maniacal Dora in this desire to create greatness has mated individuals with supernatural traits or powers. At last creating Mary a telepath with the ability to draw other telepath to her, creating a pattern. With Mary, Doro has gotten more than he bargained for. He may have created a force more powerful than himself.

Will humans ever split into separate species? If so, what will be the cause and how will it happen? Octavia Butler addresses these questions in this fine novel. I was about to say that it was one of her best, but then her books usually divide themselves for me into the excellent and the truly outstanding, and there are more of the latter than the former. The quality of her fiction is better than any scifi writer I have ever read.Her characters, even inhuman mutants, are entirely believable as they embark on the strangest of journeys into the unknown. And it is so well imagined as to be completely believable. Usually, I have to fight to stop thinking, "OK this is someone just thinking this up." Butler puts you into these fantastic worlds. So the heroine of this novel enters into a struggle with Doro, the vampiric mind-entity that has bred humans with purpose for thousands of years. As the culmination of his efforts - a theme in sci fi from Frankenstein but since then never so freshly done as Butler has - she will either grow beyond him or be destroyed. Butler understands power so well, not so much from the point of view of those accustomed to wielding it as from those who must submit or die trying to escape it. Outstanding.

When I began reading this book I didn't know it would be the catalyst of the patternmaster series. Actually, after having read several Butler books and figuring out there were series, I would just read the books according to publications dates.Mind of My Mind is a good book that explores another realm of human development. This time instead of going into extraterrestrial realms, Butler keeps everything "grounded" so-to-speak. The characters, as always, are intertwined in some weird relationship scheme. (Is there something in her life that has her do these polygamistic type relationships?)Buy it, read it and expand your mind.

Doro is immortal, whenever he gets hungry or is killed he eats another persons mind and moves into their body. Telepaths taste better and he has bred them over the years as a hobby and to provide a source of tasty meals.Now though he has produced a new kind of telepath, Mary, who seems to be a little too much like Doro. Mary links a group of telepaths together in a pattern with her in the centre. A struggle takes place between Mary and Doro for Doros wild telepaths who Mary wants to save, and have join the pattern, and who Doro would usually eat.Who will win, 4000 year old Doro, less than 20 year old Mary? Will Doro eat Mary? READ THE BOOK!!!This is the second in the Patternmaster series which include Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster. this one is my favorite.