Patternmaster

What a remarkable first novel! Confident, full of complex ideas and personal relationships. And already Butler's trademark themes.. Transhumanity with a creepy edge. Coercion of people via mental connections, including sexual coercion. Strong female character (and bisexual, at that!). I can only imagine how fresh this novel must have felt in 1976 when it was published.

The story feels very well polished, tight. Just enough characters to make it interesting. And some hints of a larger world outside but not too much to disrupt the almost claustrophobic band of telepaths at the center of the story.

It's remarkable reading this book as the fourth in a series while knowing it was actually written and published first. It follows so naturally from the books she wrote a decade later! From what I've read she had the broad world building outlined from the beginning, all well planned out. That's a pretty remarkable achievement.

All that said the Patternmaster books fall a little flat to me as a whole. I think precisely because they are so small in a way, focussed on just a few characters. I would have loved to read some grand space opera from Butler. But she didn't write that. I think her other novels have more though: Xenogenesis has some space operatic scope and the Parables books feel like they are about all of America, not just a group of weird telepaths or infected.

I'm going to read Survivor next, Butler's disavowed fifth Patternist novel.