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Novel series by Octavia E. Butler

The Patternist series (also known as the Patternmaster series or Seed to Harvest) is a group of science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler that detail a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes that the themes of the series include "racial and gender based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people." Butler's first published novel, 1976's Patternmaster, was the first book in this series to appear. From 1977 until 1984, she published four more Patternist novels: Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980) and Clay's Ark (1984). Until Butler began publishing the Xenogenesis trilogy in 1987, all but one of her published books were Patternist novels (1979's Kindred was the exception). Butler later expressed a dislike for the novel Survivor, and declined to bring it back into print.

Chronologically, the series starts with the fourth novel published, Wild Seed. Set in the 17th and 18th centuries, the story involves the relationship between two immortals Doro, a man born in Africa thousands of years ago, who survives by transferring his consciousness from one body to another (feeding on each new victim's mental energy in the process), and Anyanwu, a shape shifting healer with perfect control over her body. They struggle to live together over generations as Doro attempts to create a new race through a selective breeding program.

The series' history continues with Mind of My Mind, in which Doro's breeding program has created a society of networked telepaths that he struggles to control. By the end of the novel Doro's thousands of years long breeding program has succeeded, but he is killed in the process, and the first patternmaster takes his place as leader of the patternists, establishing control over the fictional city of Forsyth, California, which is still the seat of their power during the time of Patternmaster.

Clay's Ark, the last book of the series to be published, deals with a colony of people who have been mutated by a disease that astronauts brought back to Earth from outer space. The group struggles to keep itself isolated enough to keep the disease from spreading throughout humanity.

“A Necessary Being,” a short story found in Butler's papers written in the early 1970s but posthumously published in her Unexpected Stories collection, deals with the world explored in the repudiated Survivor before the humans arrive from Earth.

Survivor, the now out of print book in the series that Butler later disowned, depicts the Clay's Ark disease ravaging the Earth, and Doro's telepathic descendants asserting control over what remains of humanity. One group of regular humans decides to escape Earth to a new planet, where they struggle to co exist with the species that already live there.

Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster were published in a single volume titled Seed to Harvest in 2007.