Wild Seed (Patternmaster I) by Octavia Butler
One of the strengths of Butler’s writing style is that all of the fantastical and human elements are played completely straight. It takes a great author to write a story about history transcending shapeshifters in such a way that the premise is neither harped on nor glossed over. Butler puts in such a way that once you’re about twenty pages into the book it would never even occur to you that this wild reimagining of our world is anything but something true. Really good, and suffers only from the feeling that this is the first part of a longer series.
