The Patternist series.: [Patternmaster; Mind of My Mind; Survivor; Wild Seed; Clay's Ark.]

New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,, 1976-84. The full pentalogy including an inscribed association copy First editions, first printings, a rare complete set, signed by the author on the title page of Wild Seed and inscribed in Clay's Ark, "To Yvette, Best wishes, Octavia E. Butler". The recipient was Yvette Le Roy, founder of Liberty House in Harlem. Her store sold handcrafts produced by the Mississippi co-operative Poor People's Corporation and hosted poetry readings by Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni. Including Butler's debut novel Patternmaster, the series charts the ascendance of the paranormal race of patternists, led by the patternmaster, from their origins in ancient times to the far future where they rule over the diseased Clayarks and ordinary humans ("Mutes"). "Much of the power of the sequence derives from the chargedness and cognitive focus occasioned by her background and punishing early experiences in urban California, a confluence of influences and incarcerations [that] seems to have underwritten - as with other writers who were non-white - the tough embodiedness of the characters she created" (SFE). Butler was the first Black woman to receive both the Nebula and Hugo awards, as well as being the first science fiction author to be granted a MacArthur fellowship. Her work "creates powerful images of black women in a genre in which and from which they have traditionally been marginalized and excluded" (Boutler, p. 170). Five works, octavo. Original variously coloured boards lettered on the spines. With dust jackets. Occasional bump, minor rubbing, foxing to endpapers, Patternmaster front inner hinge just starting; jackets unclipped, gentle spine fading, creasing to edges, a couple of short closed tears, presenting well: a near-fine set in very good jackets. Amanda Boulter, "Polymorphous Futures", American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique, 1996.