Wild Seed is founded on the existing histories of the West African slave trade, the Middle Passage, and slavery in the Americas. Relating to a second source for Wild Seed, Butler seems to perceive Judeo-Christian theology and morality with cool objectivity. There is no direct endorsement of it as such in any of her stories. Even so her stories are shot through with names, quotations, and allusions to the Bible — noting for example the section titles of Wild Seed mentioned above. Other literary precedents beyond Butler's other works in the Patternist series for which Wild Seed is a prequel, are in two categories. First are those that deal with parapsychological powers. They include Zenna Henderson's Pilgrimage (1961) and The People: No Different Flesh (1966) which treat Henderson's supercharacters as people in a state of cultural siege, having problems similar to humans of minority racial or ethnic identity...