50books_poc | Mind of My Mind, by Octavia Butler (#4)

Mind of My Mind, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)

Mary is a young woman who is part of an... unusual community. Her father is Doro -- sort of; her father is capable of switching bodies at will (and possessing a body kills its original 'inhabitant'), and he was wearing her biological father's body when she was conceived. (He's wearing a different body now, having switched through many in the interim.) Her mother, Rina, is a latent telepath who retreats into drugs and prostitution to deal with the overspill of human emotion she can't block out. Her grandmother slash nanny slash keeper is Emma, who is nearly as powerful in her own way as Doro -- and who doesn't approve of Mary. And Mary is having ever-increasing problems blocking out the emotions of people around her, but clings to Doro's faith in her, that she will be able to come through a true telepath, unlike the hundreds of failed latents that make up most of Doro's scattered 'family.'

Mind of My Mind is about a breeding program to develop people with psi powers, a breeding program run by the enigmatic Doro. And because it's a genuine breeding program, and one that has gone on for countless years, it's not just an experiment but also a family: a sprawling, wildly dysfunctional family. Butler depicts a 'telepathic family' that's about as dysfunctional as you can get: most of the telepaths Doro has been able to create are able to feel the thoughts and emotions of others, but are unable to shield them, making it a torment to live among other humans -- and yet they have also been bred with a desire to find and bond and mate with others like them, which means that they are subject to the hedgehog's dilemma times a thousand. (The Hedgehog's Dilemma: you need to be with others like you to survive and thrive, and yet getting too close to others like you means that you get a painful faceful of sharp spines.) Doro has built a community of people who are extremely powerful and yet deeply unstable and full of pain.

And he's unrepentant: to circumvent the problem that his people can't abide one another for long enough to successfully breed, he simply takes over one half of a pairing for long enough to ensure that the other half becomes pregnant.

And the culmination of his breeding program thus far is Mary, who is extremely special because... because what? Doro isn't saying; Mary doesn't know; and if Emma has an inkling, she also isn't saying.

The books is pretty clearly Mary's story, even though it's told from many points of view, because Butler uses a fascinating POV technique: there are many points of view, but only Mary's is in the first person. Thus Mary's point of view is considerably more intimate, and -- for me -- easier to empathize with. Mary's is the viewpoint that I find myself sympathetic to, if not completely agreeing with, and her own very closely-described confusion and lack of agency regarding her own fate, which is intimately and somewhat terrifyingly described early on, is very compelling.

Having read Patternmaster, it wasn't a shock that Mary was not just a telepath -- and a potent one -- but the first Patternmaster. Indeed, while the other telepaths fought the control that the Pattern had over them, it was kind of a relief to read about: the Pattern allowed them to be able to peacefully interact with their own kind, and to use their powers without necessitating a vampire-like sucking of energy and well-being from others. Doro's breeding program emphasized power foremost, and stability next, but happiness wasn't even on the radar; Mary's Pattern allowed them to actually be happy with what they were, not just competent.

I'd say that the rapidity with which the extremely dysfunctional telepaths become functional upon entering into the Pattern is unbelievable... except that it reminds me so much of the way people behave when they enter, for the first time, a supportive social network. It's not that the dysfunction vanishes overnight; it's that, without the constant reinforcement of the 'bad' past behavior, it's able to taper off. In an environment where they can get the social reinforcement they desperately need without either being swamped by bad mental 'signal' or being tempted by a vampiric desire to feed off others. It's the first genuinely positive social feedback/reinforcement available to them.

...but, naturally, it's not that simple. The Pattern is both a challenge and an insult to Doro. Because people in the Pattern get a benefit from helping one another, rather than hurting one another, they have a reason to prevent Doro from stealing the bodies of telepaths and latents. And... it's implied that Mary's Pattern-wielding self is what Doro would have been if his own personal development wasn't stymied by early death; he wants to see the Pattern broken in part because he's jealous of it. It's what he should have been, and isn't. And in the end, it consumes him... and while it's possible to feel sorry for Doro, having him triumph would have been considerably worse.

(And yet, for all that the Pattern rescues telepaths from the extreme pain of isolation... it also essentially ensures the enslavement of all non-psi-powered humans. Which is definitely a qualified good.)

It's also fascinating to me the way that Doro's own insistence on treating his experiments as a family backfire on him. Because of his body-switching abilities, he can be the grandfather, father, and husband to a woman without biological incest taking place -- and because he's an extremely absentee father/husband, it's questionable whether emotional incest is really a valid term, either (although his relationship with Mary is clearly more emotionally incestuous than it is biologically). But he doesn't seem to realize that, while the familial connections mean that his experiments are tied to him, it also means they're tied to each other... and ultimately, they privilege their connections to each other over their connections to him, to his considerable detriment.

Mind of My Mind is a fascinating science fictional look at the development of a telepathic society -- emphasis on 'society.' It's not a book about independent individualist telepaths: it's about how you have more than one telepath, without them competing each other out of existence. It's about the struggle to have a society of semi-equals... and the way that varying power dynamics complicates that significantly. Recommended. (But again, I do recommend that the Seed to Harvest quartet be read in order.)