(Image: fizkes/Shutterstock) Mary’s Telepathy The second book of the Patternist series introduces us to Mary, a young woman who develops a powerful telepathic ability. Learn more about hybridity and utopia in Butler’s works. It’s a world that has substantial utopian elements under the right leader. People have enough to eat, they live in functional communities, they have deep communion with their fellow Patternists. The flip side of this is that all healers have the potential to be killers, who can stop the heart through telepathy alone.ĭespite these dangers, the Patternist world is actually quite stable. In the novels, telepathy also has a strong medical application since a telepathic healer can go into another person’s mind and diagnose an illness, making repairs without surgical intervention.

Also, the Clayark minds are so different the Patternists can’t read them, but they can still use the Pattern as advanced communications technology. The Clayarks are just as different from the humans of today in their bodies as the Patternists are in their minds. There are the military applications since the Patternists are involved in a war against the Clayarks, who walk on all fours and eat raw meat, sometimes eating the Patternists. Throughout the series, we see the applications of the telepathy. This is a transcript from the video series Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature.

In Patternist, we see a dying leader and two powerful young telepaths fighting for future control of the Pattern, leaving the reader to wonder if the new Patternmaster will eventually become as corrupted by power as was the old. The novel plays out a kind of dark future. And the Pattern gives them a great advantage in the ongoing war against the Clayarks, a different mutation of humans. Those belonging to the Pattern-the telepaths-basically enslave the ‘mutes’, who are without this sense. The first book Patternist takes us to a distant future, probably on Earth, in which millions of people are connected together through telepathic links in a Pattern, run by the Patternmaster. (Image: metamorworks/Shutterstock) Patternist In the Patternist series, human telepathy in the future is the setting for exploring possibilities of utopia or dystopia. Octavia Butler employs multiple narrative perspectives to fully explore the nuances of a society that begins as a utopian dream but ends up leading to dark-although always somewhat hopeful-outcomes.

, University of Connecticut The Patternist series, published in the ’70s and ’80s, consists of five novels set in a world in which human telepathy is common.

Octavia butler collection