Seed to Harvest

This is my second time reading Wild Seed, and I'm enjoying it much more this time around, mostly because I know how it ends, I think. Can't wait to see what the other two stories have in store.

Each of the books that make up this volume stands alone just fine, they read as complete works. The part that left me a little dissatisfied was that often the characters that carried over from a prior book, who may have been main characters that whole time, in the next were snuffed out in a few words. This is probably because the books were not written (or at least not published, but I would guess also written) in the order they're presented here, which is chronological to the story. So it was probably more that one book was written, then Butler took the thread of a side character and traced it back, writing a prequel about them. So reading them in this order, you've developed an attachment to a main character from book one, and that character appears a handful of times in book two and then gets a one sentence end to their story as an aside in the epilogue. It didn't ruin the stories or anything, but it made it a little strange to jump from one book to the next. I'm not sure if I would advise someone starting this book to read them in the order they were written instead of how they are presented here, or to do as I did, it may or may not make much difference.

The four books also have fairly different themes and pacing. You're following one basic thread of happening through a long period of time, but the kinds of characters imagined and the kinds of events in each are quite different from each other. It's a nice breadth, but when reading the whole thing in one go, it can be a little jarring.