Survivor

I liked this a lot more than I expected to. Butler disowned the book and it was written early in her career. But it's quite a strong story. The characters are well written, the human conflict is interesting, and it's all a very tidy and compelling plot. Really the only drawback is it wasn't Butlerian enough. There's her trademark dwelling on near-humanity (as alien species) but it's not quite strong or central as her treatment of similar themes in the Xenogenesis trilogy. (This book also has her recurring trope of women loving people who coerce them into sexual relationships; this is so present in all her books I wonder what's going on there.)

It strikes me as sharing an interesting connection with Kindred, which she published just a year later. Both novels are sci-fi rewrites of particular kinds of uniquely American books. Kindred is a slave narrative, only fiction with a little sci-fi. Survivor is a lot like the narratives of white Americans who were raised in Native American tribes and then left / escaped back to the white world. I think it's interesting and smart that Butler would choose to work with that base story and now I wonder what other sci-fi novels have done the same.

It's a little strange to me Butler didn't want the book republished. It's good! She explained that she didn't like that it sounded like a particular type of colonialist sci-fi. But it didn't seem problematic to me! Her alien species are fully formed and not portrayed as weaker natives or anything. The whole point of the novel is how personhood transcends species!

It's also a little weird this is lumped in as one of the Patternist novels. It's not really, other than a few pages of unimportant backstory locating the Missionary colonists as ordinary humans who had fled the world she built for the Patternists.