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The Patternmaster novels began with Wild Seed and ends with Mind of My Mind. In them, Butler takes the ostensibly gruesome arid brutal subject matter of plague and resultant mutation, as well as eugenics, and fashion a coplex inquiry in issues of power and domination, utopia and anti -utopia.

Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. Ed. Richard Bleiler. 2nd ed. New

York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999. 147­158. [covers Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Wild Seed,  Survivor, and Clay’s Ark]

The third book of the series, Survivor, was published in 1978. The titular survivor is Alanna, the adopted child of the Missionaries, fundamentalist Christians who have traveled to another planet to escape Patternist control and Clayark infection. Captured by a local tribe called the Tehkohn, Alanna learns their language and adopts their customs, knowledge which she then uses to help the Missionaries avoid bondage and assimilation to a rival tribe opposing the Tehkohn.[15][24]

After Survivor, Butler took a break from the Patternist series to write what would become her best-selling novel, Kindred (1979) as well as the short story "Near of Kin" (1979).[15] kindred Butler said, was intended as a Patternmaster story, but its writing demanded a realism she had suspended for the other books, so it stands alone. In Kindred, Dana, an African American woman, is transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early nineteenth century Maryland. She meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, a black freewoman forced into slavery later in life. In "Near of Kin" the protagonist discovers a taboo relationship in her family as she goes through her mother's things after her death.[15]

In 1980, Butler published the fourth book of the Patternist series, Wild Seed, whose narrative became the series' origin story. Set in Africa and America during the seventeenth century, Wild Seed traces the struggle between the four-thousand-year-old parapsychological vampire Doro and his "wild" child and bride, the three-hundred-year-old shapeshifter and healer Anyanwu. Doro, who has bred psionic children for centuries, deceives Anyanwu into becoming one of his breeders, but she eventually escapes and uses her gifts to create communities that rival Doro's. When Doro finally tracks her down, Anyanwu, tired by decades of escaping or fighting Doro, decides to commit suicide, forcing him to admit his need for her.[4][7][15]