Narrative Frequencies

Managing Constraint, Not Eliminating It In Clay’s Ark, Butler once again grapples with the ways that motivation, circumstances, personality, and purpose can change how certain actions get viewed. By any logical standard, kidnapping people and infecting them with an alien virus is ethically dubious, and yet the novel encourages us to empathize with Eli and his clan as people trying to do right—to resist the biological imperative to become like the “car families” or bike gangs and fully give in to a hedonistic lifestyle. The virus impels humans toward full hedonism, pushing them to abandon thought and ethics entirely and...

On Creating Without Taking It’s impossible to create without taking, on some level. This is present throughout the novel. Even when thinking about cults or intentional communities, the idea of self-sufficiency and separateness is not actually real. What is possible is to counter existing forms of dominion with gentler forms of domination that work with people’s natural tendencies. The Pattern isn’t an alternative to domination—it’s a different kind of control technology. It’s clear what’s happening: it’s cultivating and nurturing people into their best selves rather than following a breeding logic that treats individual subjects as something for consumption or some...

Gods and Scale Beyond Human Wild Seed is fundamentally about gods—or rather, about what happens when beings transcend human limitations and operate at scales beyond human concern. Butler explores what becomes possible when you can treat humanity as a project to be managed toward certain results. There’s an uncomfortable parallel here to today’s tech billionaires, who similarly operate at god-scale, seeing themselves as grand figures in history while becoming disconnected from human life in fundamental ways. Anything that gets in the way of the project or plan for a greater world becomes irrelevant. The extraordinarily wealthy exist in a different...