Clay's Ark

💬: "He wiped everything he had typed and began again on a clean form, “YOU MUST ESCAPE! THERE’S AN EPIDEMIC BREWING HERE! WE MUST GIVE WARNING, GET TREATMENT!” She was shaking her head again.

Butler, Octavia E.. Clay's Ark (The Patternist Series Book 3) (p. 57). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

📖Genres: adult, science fiction, speculative fiction, thriller, dystopian

📚Page Count: 214

🎧Audiobook Length: 07h 22min

👩🏾‍🏫My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5

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TW - <spoiler>Death, Death of parent, Incest, Sexual assault, Gore, Sexual violence, Gun violence, Murder, Adult/minor relationship, Blood, Rape, Cancer, Car accident, and Abandonment</spoiler>

This is my second time reading Clay's Ark by Octavia E Butler but this is my first time writing a review for it. The first time around I gave it 4 stars, I loved the suspense and the thriller elements of this book so much. This time around I'm keeping my rating the same at 4 stars. I'm not giving this 5 stars though because of the gratuitous sexual violence in the book.

Definitely the least interesting Butler book I've read so far. Very violent and not as sophisticated as her future works.

I think as compared to [b:Mind of My Mind 116254 Mind of My Mind (Patternmaster, #2) Octavia E. Butler https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389676159s/116254.jpg 111957], this novel felt a little out of left field. I think I can see where the series is headed, but to have a nominal sequel feature an entirely new cast and mechanic was jarring. I also felt that the action takes place over a strangely limited time span and area, but then I have always been a sucker for expansiveness. I think what I'm getting at with that last point though, is that the characters in [b:Wild Seed 52318 Wild Seed (Patternmaster, #1) Octavia E. Butler https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388462753s/52318.jpg 1330000] and [b:Mind of My Mind 116254 Mind of My Mind (Patternmaster, #2) Octavia E. Butler https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389676159s/116254.jpg 111957] change a ton because they are given the time to develop themselves. Here, it feels like in the span of a day or two Rane and Keira go from being naive and shy/foolhardy girls (despite their experience they still grew up walled and Blake says so, with the possible excuse that he would be overprotective) to managing rapid and brutal escapes from their captors. Perhaps this is me just underestimating either female characters or the ability of the alien microbe to rapidly change its hosts. Nevertheless, I think something was missing that prevented me from really getting into this one. Still a great read though, and has its moments.

I didn't see how this fit into the Patternmaster series much at all until I finished the fourth book, but damn did Octavia Butler know how to write aliens. The invading species hybrid with humanity is eerie and very clearly foreign, yet it assimilates so completely with humans that even the reader ends up on its side some of the time. Some of it. Which is exactly how the kidnapped family feels, I imagine. Making the two daughters bi-racial is a brilliant move too, emphasizing the two worlds the characters already inhabit. This book asks us to look a humanity and what its survival really means.

Short Review: This is a one off book from the series. It feels different from the rest (but I guess all the book in this series feel different from the rest). It is a meditation on slavery like all others, but this time it is an alien control story where the alien is a microbe and we become enslaved to our changed biology. Of the books that I have read by Butler, this is the closest to a horror story, although it is not quite that. It feels a bit like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but with a bit more hope. Once I read the fourth book in the series I understood how this one fit into the series, but mostly it feels like a stand alone novel.


The full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/clays-ark/

reviews.metaphorosis.com

3 stars

The sole survivor of a scouting trip returning from a far star, Eli, host to a powerful and contagious alien symbiont, tries to satisfy its demands without infecting the rest of the Earth.

It's finally clear to me that this is a ‘series' in the sense of shared universe, not a continuing plot line. (I guess I might have been served better by a little research, rather than plunging in blindly. It seems Ms. Butler started with the fifth book and added the others somewhat randomly.) In any case, this third story in the series has only the faintest relation to the preceding two.

Because of the lack of connection, this book functioned largely as a standalone novel. As such it was interesting, but not particularly enthralling. Butler gives her lead characters much fuller internal lives than those in the previous books had. They're not always very credible, though. Characters are attracted to and stick to each other with less interplay than in a Harlequin novel. While Butler does good work with the result, the initial interactions are basic at best.

Some of the interpersonal attraction is explained (vaguely) by the action of the symbiont, though how this works is unclear at best, highly unlikely at worst. In fact, even allowing for this as social SF, the symbiont is a weak construct. It has either no or a fatal effect on non-humans, yet is so attuned to humans that it can sense fairly subtle thoughts and prevent related actions. That's a pretty narrow focus for an organism from a planet light-years away, and there's no attempt to explain it away.

While the setup is interesting, this feels more like the (overly detailed) middle third of a novel than a book in itself. Perhaps Butler was leaving a gap for another novel to fill later - the story of the scouting trip might have been interesting. The ending leaves a lot implied, and suggests that Butler was most interested in the hard choices that Eli faces. Unfortunately she skims through them in the book itself, and he doesn't really struggle that hard. In fact, some of these choices practically beg for examination, but don't get it.

All in all, mildly interesting, but largely a disappointment following the first two books, that while emotionally distant, had more complexity to go with them.

Read this because I want to finish the whole Patternist series.
It's the worst installment so far and barely related to the series as a whole.

2 stars is a bit harsh for Octavia Butler because her other books are so terrific but this one was a stinker.