Ever since my late cousin told me about Octavia Butler as a suggestion of authors whose books I might like, and I eventually picked up Wild Seed from my local library, I developed a special place in my heart for one of the first black science fiction writers of note. But it wasn’t until I read her Xenogenesis trilogy—of which I have done a prior review—that I fell in love. Since then, I have read all but three books in her bibliography and have found them all spellbinding and often unsettling commentaries on racism, otherness, oppression, and what it means to be human. But until now, one book had eluded me: a curious part of Butler’s works that she herself had surprisingly disowned.

Survivor, originally published in 1978, was a sort of side story in her Patternist series, consisting of (in in-story chronological order) Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, and Patternmaster: altogether a series of connected tales about a race of psionics cultivated through
millennia of selective breeding by an immortal, eventually destined to replace humanity as the dominant species after a plague of alien origin mutates most of humanity into a race of savage quadruped creatures driven to infect or consume uninfected humans. Each work in the series is compelling and disturbing in its own way, but Survivor is something of the odd one out in several ways.

First of all, due to Butler being pressured into finishing this work, she felt that it didn’t develop in a manner that she found satisfactory. Second, Butler is famously quoted as having described Survivor as her “Star Trek book.” These are a couple of reasons that I am aware of why she chose to allow the book to go out of print and never be released again in her lifetime.

I stumbled upon this when looking up Butler’s biographical information on Wikipedia once. Realizing that this book had originally been part of a series that I had read, it piqued my interest. Having found more time for reading, I was perusing my local bookstore’s sci-fi/fantasy section. They always had a couple of Octavia Butler’s works, but upon realizing that they had been stocked out of order, I proceeded to put them in the right place and discovered the impossible. Survivor had been re-released!
I immediately made it my newest purchase and the next book on my reading list. And now, having read the main story (there is a related short story included in this release that I have not yet read), I can now come to my own conclusions about it.

Survivor takes place between the events of Clay’s Ark and Patternmaster, in a tumultuous time on Earth. Most of human civilization has been destroyed by the “Clayarks,” the quadruped savage children of infected humanity with the psionic “People of the Pattern” holding back their depredations. Pure humans either choose to flee Earth for new worlds with the Patternists’ help, or live as virtual slaves under the side effects of the Patternists’ powers over humanity.

Alanna is a wild child. A half African American, half Asian survivor in the ruins of what was the United States, she is found and taken in by a community of Christian missionaries who have chosen to flee Earth in order to preserve “the Image of God.” Jules and Neila Verrick, the
community leader and his wife, become her adoptive parents, shielding her from the prejudices of the other missionaries. After arriving on their new world, they form a friendship with the native Kohn, intelligent beings that look both startlingly human and altogether startlingly alien,
covered in color-shifting hair that reflects their emotions, allows them almost perfect camouflage, and dictates their rank in society.

The Garkohn tribe welcomes the missionaries with open arms, even though many of them see their alien friends as “subhuman.” But it isn’t
until Alanna is captured and taken prisoner by the Tehkohn, a rival tribe, that she sees the truth of her people’s situation: that they are slaves to the Garkohn, who have kept them addicted to the fruit of the meklah trees, from which detox is potentially deadly. But having spent two years
amongst the Tekhohn, learning their ways and bearing the child of their chief has altered Alanna’s perspective of things in such a way that while she must save her people from the covert tyranny of the Garkohn and their ambitious leader, Natahk, she knows that it may well cost her
the family she loves and even her identity as a human.

First of all, with the exception of the admittedly hokey human-alien crossbreeding plot element, Survivor does not come off as a “Star Trek” book, as Butler described it. Rather, to compare it to any popular works of science fiction, it far more resembles James Cameron’s Avatar than anything else.

Rather than this being a story of the protagonist’s going native and overcoming some deep-seated prejudice he or she has had towards the native populace, from the beginning, Alanna is depicted as an outsider in more ways than one, at first merely wearing the guise of a missionary, whose teachings she never truly believes, and some of which she holds in disdain. This outsider perspective, in fact, is part of what allows her to survive amongst the Tehkohn and acclimates to her life with them, and even survive the purging of the meklah toxins from her body. Moreover, it allows her to see the beauty even in the “ugliness,” of Diut, the Tehkohn Hao, or chief, who takes her as his wife. This, however, leads to a brief caveat to the story for any potential readers. Though not a flaw, as there is a purpose in it that both displays culture and behavioral differences between the Kohn and humans, and gives character development, it is nonetheless unpleasant in a way that may turn some readers away. And this is when Diut tries to beat Alanna. It is not an act of cruelty, as among the Kohn, someone of Diut’s rank is given absolute deference, to the point where one will take any beating for social gaffes or failures by one of his position as a natural understanding of his or their own lower rank. But Alanna fights back—a wholly unexpected reaction that at first angers Diut. But then, after taking his share of retaliatory beatings from Alanna, he comes to understand that because she isn’t Kohn, and due to her own violent formative years fighting feral humans, Alanna will never react the way he expects to the violence he visits upon her.

After realizing that such punishments will only end up with him being
hurt just as badly, Diut learns to talk instead of use his fists, leading to a more harmonious relationship between the two. Of course, many readers will not be able to accept this despite the lessons learned and positive outcome, and will choose to give this book a pass, and I feel that there is nothing to blame them for if they make such a decision. The story is told in a somewhat nonlinear fashion, with the main “present” sequence of events interspersed with flashbacks that give a deeper perspective to how things reached the point the story begins at, from Alanna’s childhood surviving among the ruins to her adoption and life among the missionaries, then her kidnapping and life among the Tehkohn. Inch by inch, her growth, from seeing this rival tribe as an enemy to changing her own identity into one of them, then ensuring the freedom of a people who have become alien to her, is evident. And the tightrope of cultural politics she walks in order to obtain that freedom is a narrow one indeed, requiring every bit of the understanding that she has gained of how the Kohn behave and think—something the missionaries’ prejudices have made them dangerously dismissive of. Just getting her adoptive father to see that they have been manipulated by the Garkohn into seeing the Tehkohn as the enemy is a ponderous task in itself. And it does not come without its own set of sacrifices, revealing truths that may alienate her from the only family she has ever known.

Though perhaps not a tale that is as engrossing, lingering, or disturbing as the rest of the Books in Butler’s Patternist series, and only tangentially related to the series proper, for those looking to read the true series in its entirety, Survivor is certainly worth your time. But again, some may be upset by the content. To me, it displayed the strength of Alanna as a character in both will and body, able to tame even a chief who has never had the word “no” uttered to him. But others may see it in a different way. Your mileage may vary, and you were warned. But while any fan of Butler’s work could indeed skip this story and not lose much from the tapestry of the Patternist world, I feel that Butler was being too hard on herself in calling it her “Star Trek book” and that she should have not disavowed it. Rather, it really does fit as a side story; a story of a woman who never truly fit into a group that never completely accepted
her, finding acceptance among an alien people, and yet loving the very people who first took her in, but to whom she has become alien to, enough to save them from slavery, even though they may ultimately reject her. It is a story whose themes are vintage Butler, and still very much worth reading.