African American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s fiction has been one of my research interests since the mid-1990s, and I have taught a variety of her short stories and novels over the last two decades. Her dystopian short story “Speech Sounds” (1983) has served as an excellent first literature text for first-term students, as it deals with the loss of language and communication and is an exemplary short story. In co-taught thematic M.A. courses, I have used Parable of the Sower (1993) in the Dystopia and Apocalypse course and “Amnesty” (2003), “Bloodchild” (1984), and Dawn (1987) in the SF and Intercultural Encounters course. 

In this paper, I will focus on Butler’s novel Wild Seed (1980), partly in the context of an M.A. course on African American women’s novels from Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) to Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), which I have taught in the spring terms of 2019 and 2020. Wild Seed is a kind of neo-slave narrative and deals, albeit in speculative fashion, with American history. I chose it both for the course and this paper, rather than Butler’s neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979), for several reasons: its immortal protagonist’s and antagonist’s perspectives are wide-ranging both in terms of time and geography; while Kindred and the Parable novels have been the focus of an avalanche of scholarly articles in the twenty-first century, Wild Seed is still a relatively under-researched novel that deserves more attention; and the student engagement with this novel is current. In this paper, I will briefly touch on how Wild Seed deals with the transatlantic slave trade and American slavery, before moving on to how Butler’s depiction of sexuality in this novel appears to be even more disturbing today, after #MeToo, than it was in the historical context when it was first published.