Octavia E Butler - Clay's Ark
Spoilers – I foolishly didn’t realise that the third Patternmaster tale was actually the fourth.
As this series has gone Timey Wimey I will finish Patternmaster next then go back to the next sequence of books Xenogenesis. Not quite up to any nostalgia sharing this week for personal reasons but will get to 1996 when this came out I’m sure in a future Pratchett.
Published – 1996
A handful of people exposed to a disease of extraterrestrial origin combat their nearly irresistible impulse to infect others, as they struggle to make a life for themselves in self-imposed desert isolation
What makes a series a series? The same characters, the same setting or just perhaps the same tones? Clay’s Ark feels a bit strange after Mind of My Mind we don’t follow the Patternists but meet a new group in a different worryingly familiar version of early twenty first century America. I found it uncomfortable reading – a world deeply divided, diseases that threaten humanity and once again issues of control. However, I don’t feel quite has enough to make this feel it added t the ongoing tale I’d been following so far.
Eli was on a spaceship named Clay’s Ark – the ship gets infected by an alien virus causing death and mayhem and an eventual crash landing on earth. The infected Eli lands ina small desert homestead and infects some for the family he meets. Quick flash forward and we meet Blake a doctor and his two daughters Rane and Keira (the latter suffering from leukaemia). They are kidnapped by Eli and his crew and brought into the Eli’s new infected community and expected to follow suit. Blake tries to escape but against super powered strong and infected humans has he got a chance?
This felt like a standalone episode and I’ll start off by saying I didn’t find this a comfortable read. This reads more like a horror story of the nice family captured b the creepy desert cult. Issues of control and power between men and women come through as we’ve seen in all Butler’s previous books. Blake is uncomfortable being told he must have sexual relationships with an infected woman, while Rane and Keira are also being marked for future breeding of the next generation of human/alien hybrids. This novel resembles the debates being seen in Wild Seed. Powers that see humans as breeders for unknown purposes.
The strange powers of the group are unsettling human but not quite. The community looks continually wired, always sweating, thin, ever hungry and yet powerful, prone to scratching to infect and a tension that with one push this disease goes rampant. Butler creates an air of a country on the edge of a precipice that Blake is aware of - poverty, water shortages, crime are the norms so in some ways this community could be a respite. But as with Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind consent feels problematic and I found those scenes often painful to read and my sympathies with the infected based on their actions were not high.
Overall, this story felt an interlude and realising what happened in publication order also most like a teaser story for a future encounter (and now I understand that other SF favourite a prequel). Not my favourite of Butler’s to date but the writing to make me uncomfortable is of a high standard. Those who enjoy dark tales of SF apocalypses may enjoy this one.
