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Patternist #3
Clay's Ark
An innocent familiy, carjacked on a desolate highway, is abducted to a bizarre new world. A world being born in the Californian desert.
They discover Earth has been invaded by an alien microorganism. The deadly entity attacks like a virus, but survivors of the disease genetically bond with it, developing amazing powers, near-immortality, unnatural desires - and a need to spread the contagion and create a secret colony of the transformed. Now the meaning of "survival" changes. For the babies born in the colony are clearly, undeniably, not human...
They discover Earth has been invaded by an alien microorganism. The deadly entity attacks like a virus, but survivors of the disease genetically bond with it, developing amazing powers, near-immortality, unnatural desires - and a need to spread the contagion and create a secret colony of the transformed. Now the meaning of "survival" changes. For the babies born in the colony are clearly, undeniably, not human...
213 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published March 1, 1984
538 people are currently reading
14604 people want to read
About the author
Octavia E. Butler
105 books22.3k followersOctavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.
After her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction.
She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public and awards judges. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington state. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library.
After her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction.
She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public and awards judges. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington state. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,181 reviews
December 3, 2024
I’ve now read all of Octavia Butler’s published fiction. She is one of the few authors I’ve read in full. Clay’s Ark is certainly the work of a writer at the top of her game—fast moving, thoughtful, morally complex, and absolutely brutal, even by Butler’s violently pessimistic standards.
Like all five Patternist novels, Clay’s Arc is, fundamentally, a story about people building or gathering “families,” groups of followers who are at once in thrall to the power, charisma, and magnetism of a leader; held captive by threats and acts of violence, but also by love or something akin to love; and genuinely dependent on each other to survive. And as in the other Patternist novels, Butler herself seems to be in the thrall of her creations—she gives characters immense power not only to condemn them for it, but also, I think, to live it vicariously.
“When I was in my teens, a group of us used to talk about our hopes and dreams,” Octavia Butler told an interviewer in 1988, “and someone would always ask, ‘If you could do anything you wanted to do, no holds barred, what would you do?’ I’d answer that I wanted to live forever and breed people—which didn’t go over all that well with my friends. In a sense, that desire is what drives Doro in Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind. At least I made him a bad guy!” (Conversations with Octavia Butler, 18). Octavia Butler began obsessively developing and telling stories within her Patternist universe as a teen, and I think a certain early adolescent obsession with power, violence, and sexuality is a huge part of what makes her books so compelling and so disturbing.
The Clayark virus makes a mockery of human taboos; reveals the utter inadequacy of conscious decisions, ideas, values, of consent and non-consent, to understanding why people act the way they act, how social power shapes the terms of relationships between people, how biology shapes thought itself. It reveals human thought and will and decision as partial, compromised, illusory. But Butler is not exactly opposed to the virus. Arguably, the moral center of Clay’s Arc, if the novel has one at all, is Kiera—the sister who accepts most easily that what it means to be human is going to change in ways both fundamental and horrifying, who most easily embraces the “monstrous.” And this, I think, is why the extreme violence of the denouement is so necessary to the novel’s architecture. Precisely because the Clayark disease’s effect on peoples’ minds and bodies is so disturbing, Butler remind us, forcefully, that humans need no help from an extraterrestrial virus to be unspeakably horrible to each other.
The more time I spend thinking about the Patternist novels as a whole and in comparison to each other, the more brilliant they look, the more complex Butler’s ideas, the more contradictory and fascinating the themes—the obsessions—that reverberate through all five novels.
Like all five Patternist novels, Clay’s Arc is, fundamentally, a story about people building or gathering “families,” groups of followers who are at once in thrall to the power, charisma, and magnetism of a leader; held captive by threats and acts of violence, but also by love or something akin to love; and genuinely dependent on each other to survive. And as in the other Patternist novels, Butler herself seems to be in the thrall of her creations—she gives characters immense power not only to condemn them for it, but also, I think, to live it vicariously.
“When I was in my teens, a group of us used to talk about our hopes and dreams,” Octavia Butler told an interviewer in 1988, “and someone would always ask, ‘If you could do anything you wanted to do, no holds barred, what would you do?’ I’d answer that I wanted to live forever and breed people—which didn’t go over all that well with my friends. In a sense, that desire is what drives Doro in Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind. At least I made him a bad guy!” (Conversations with Octavia Butler, 18). Octavia Butler began obsessively developing and telling stories within her Patternist universe as a teen, and I think a certain early adolescent obsession with power, violence, and sexuality is a huge part of what makes her books so compelling and so disturbing.
The Clayark virus makes a mockery of human taboos; reveals the utter inadequacy of conscious decisions, ideas, values, of consent and non-consent, to understanding why people act the way they act, how social power shapes the terms of relationships between people, how biology shapes thought itself. It reveals human thought and will and decision as partial, compromised, illusory. But Butler is not exactly opposed to the virus. Arguably, the moral center of Clay’s Arc, if the novel has one at all, is Kiera—the sister who accepts most easily that what it means to be human is going to change in ways both fundamental and horrifying, who most easily embraces the “monstrous.” And this, I think, is why the extreme violence of the denouement is so necessary to the novel’s architecture. Precisely because the Clayark disease’s effect on peoples’ minds and bodies is so disturbing, Butler remind us, forcefully, that humans need no help from an extraterrestrial virus to be unspeakably horrible to each other.
The more time I spend thinking about the Patternist novels as a whole and in comparison to each other, the more brilliant they look, the more complex Butler’s ideas, the more contradictory and fascinating the themes—the obsessions—that reverberate through all five novels.
March 8, 2021
"You’re bright,” Lupe said to her softly. “Very bright, but stubborn. You think you can choose your realities. You can’t."
The near future American dystopia in Octavia Butler's Clay's Ark is recognizable, but more from Butler's Earthseed Series than from anything in the first two installments of the Patternmaster Series. Society has broken down and people have settled into enclaves for the protection that government can no longer provide. And like Butler's Xenogenesis Series, there is an exploration of humans losing their humanity. This is something Butler does in very compelling and innovative ways in Xenogenesis. However, it is only given very brief attention here, more as a horror for the would-be parents than a true exploration. Still, the direction Butler charts for humanity is chilling. 3.75 stars
The near future American dystopia in Octavia Butler's Clay's Ark is recognizable, but more from Butler's Earthseed Series than from anything in the first two installments of the Patternmaster Series. Society has broken down and people have settled into enclaves for the protection that government can no longer provide. And like Butler's Xenogenesis Series, there is an exploration of humans losing their humanity. This is something Butler does in very compelling and innovative ways in Xenogenesis. However, it is only given very brief attention here, more as a horror for the would-be parents than a true exploration. Still, the direction Butler charts for humanity is chilling. 3.75 stars
August 11, 2016
This was the most disturbing book by Octavia E. Butler that I have read yet, further inspiring my desire to have a conversation with her to find out just how that brain worked. Her concepts are fascinating, even when as disturbing as this one.
Perhaps it was the violence against young children that has me troubled. The ending, certainly, is not for the faint of heart. However, I did not dislike this book because of this. My dislike comes, perhaps from a bias regarding its place as part of the Seed to Harvest collection.
Clay's Ark carries the similar theme of a community of humans, mutated both physically and psychologically, who must fight against outward and inward forces to maintain their humanity -- a theme that dominates just about every book I've read from this author. Beyond that and the name, there is very little that relates it to the Patternists created by Mary in Mind of My Mind or the superhumans created by Doro, beginning in Wild Seed. In fact, Clay Dana's involvement is not mentioned until more than half way through the book.
I took a quick peek at the first few pages of Patternmaster and I see the results of Clay's Ark may play a part in that story, but for now, it is an odd addition to the series that perhaps was not intended to be part of the series at all (considering it was created several years after Patternmaster.)
Perhaps it was the violence against young children that has me troubled. The ending, certainly, is not for the faint of heart. However, I did not dislike this book because of this. My dislike comes, perhaps from a bias regarding its place as part of the Seed to Harvest collection.
Clay's Ark carries the similar theme of a community of humans, mutated both physically and psychologically, who must fight against outward and inward forces to maintain their humanity -- a theme that dominates just about every book I've read from this author. Beyond that and the name, there is very little that relates it to the Patternists created by Mary in Mind of My Mind or the superhumans created by Doro, beginning in Wild Seed. In fact, Clay Dana's involvement is not mentioned until more than half way through the book.
I took a quick peek at the first few pages of Patternmaster and I see the results of Clay's Ark may play a part in that story, but for now, it is an odd addition to the series that perhaps was not intended to be part of the series at all (considering it was created several years after Patternmaster.)
July 24, 2021
4.5 Stars Rounded up.
Alright. I am three books down of Octavia Butler’s now. And I am enthralled with her writing! I am also three books into this series now - and I absolutely love it!
Bleak, desperate, depressing but so utterly UTTERLY readable! Clay’s Ark is the third installment in the Patternist series, This read is not for the faint-hearted. It starts off being compelling, but by the end – it is violent, aggressive, and had some events that if I had known about it before I started reading – would have turned me completely off reading the book. But Butler was a master at her craft. She made the cringe-worthy topics totally, captivatingly part of the story. They weren’t in there just to shock, although they did shock. She reached a line that she never quite crossed and showcased her brilliant storytelling.
An alien invasion. In the not-so-distant future, a family is abducted from a stretch of highway and taken to an isolated community. The people are acting really strangely, they seem to have super-human strength and abilities, and their children are far from human.
I listened to the audio version of this and he was a fantastic narrator. While the first two books of this series (chronologically, not in publication order) dealt with female protagonists, this one was a mix.
I just could not turn this one-off. From the first chapter, you get taken away into the story and its interesting characters, with a bit of horror-filled tension slowly allowing the story to unravel and the truth to be revealed.
I don’t want to go much further into analysing this one. I liked it a lot more than the second one, Mind of My Mind, but I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as I did Wild Seed.
Overall though, a fantastic series so far. I can’t wait to see what the last one is like!
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Alright. I am three books down of Octavia Butler’s now. And I am enthralled with her writing! I am also three books into this series now - and I absolutely love it!
Bleak, desperate, depressing but so utterly UTTERLY readable! Clay’s Ark is the third installment in the Patternist series, This read is not for the faint-hearted. It starts off being compelling, but by the end – it is violent, aggressive, and had some events that if I had known about it before I started reading – would have turned me completely off reading the book. But Butler was a master at her craft. She made the cringe-worthy topics totally, captivatingly part of the story. They weren’t in there just to shock, although they did shock. She reached a line that she never quite crossed and showcased her brilliant storytelling.
An alien invasion. In the not-so-distant future, a family is abducted from a stretch of highway and taken to an isolated community. The people are acting really strangely, they seem to have super-human strength and abilities, and their children are far from human.
I listened to the audio version of this and he was a fantastic narrator. While the first two books of this series (chronologically, not in publication order) dealt with female protagonists, this one was a mix.
I just could not turn this one-off. From the first chapter, you get taken away into the story and its interesting characters, with a bit of horror-filled tension slowly allowing the story to unravel and the truth to be revealed.
I don’t want to go much further into analysing this one. I liked it a lot more than the second one, Mind of My Mind, but I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as I did Wild Seed.
Overall though, a fantastic series so far. I can’t wait to see what the last one is like!
For more reviews check out my:
YouTube
Blog
May 11, 2013
I enjoyed the purity of this science fiction tale on the theme of alien possession. In this short novel of less than 200 pages, we are subjected to an intense story of survival of a single family with the fate of the human race at stake. The terrible choices they must make put it over the line into the territory of psychological horror. What makes this book stand out is its use of the story as a doorway to larger themes of what it means to be human and to be part of a community.
Written in 1984, the tale is set in the California Mojave Desert in 2021, close to our present, but 40 years from then. The projection is of a dystopic future in which civilization is on the bleeding edge. The haves live in gated compounds and the have nots live in “sewers”, vast regions dominated by lawless gangs. A doctor and his two 16 year old daughters end up being kidnapped by a community of people infected by microscopic organisms brought back by an astronaut returning from Alpha Centauri. For the subset of humans who survive the infection, the alien invaders act symbiotically to change the host in certain ways to enhance their survival and the hosts.
I can’t spoil the story with any details, but I can share that it puts the family in the position of having to choose whether to resign themselves to living with the altered human enclave or to escape and risk creating an uncontrollable epidemic.
The book is the last in the set of four books (and second in chronology) termed the Patternist series, which started with The Patternmaster in 1976. The others (of which I have read one) deal in various ways with alien-modified humans trying to take over Earth. Whereas these others deal with the threat of beings with telepathic powers, here the threat is closer to home in that the organisms seem in a sense to be bringing the conflict down to an individual’s limbic system versus higher brain systems. The book seems to question whether our humanity lies more with our emotional or out rational selves. I was impressed with this icing on the cake of a thriller yarn.
Written in 1984, the tale is set in the California Mojave Desert in 2021, close to our present, but 40 years from then. The projection is of a dystopic future in which civilization is on the bleeding edge. The haves live in gated compounds and the have nots live in “sewers”, vast regions dominated by lawless gangs. A doctor and his two 16 year old daughters end up being kidnapped by a community of people infected by microscopic organisms brought back by an astronaut returning from Alpha Centauri. For the subset of humans who survive the infection, the alien invaders act symbiotically to change the host in certain ways to enhance their survival and the hosts.
I can’t spoil the story with any details, but I can share that it puts the family in the position of having to choose whether to resign themselves to living with the altered human enclave or to escape and risk creating an uncontrollable epidemic.
The book is the last in the set of four books (and second in chronology) termed the Patternist series, which started with The Patternmaster in 1976. The others (of which I have read one) deal in various ways with alien-modified humans trying to take over Earth. Whereas these others deal with the threat of beings with telepathic powers, here the threat is closer to home in that the organisms seem in a sense to be bringing the conflict down to an individual’s limbic system versus higher brain systems. The book seems to question whether our humanity lies more with our emotional or out rational selves. I was impressed with this icing on the cake of a thriller yarn.
December 2, 2019
Alright. This is the third or fourth Patternmaster book I’m reading (depending on which order you read), and by now they all seem to be the same plot but with different characters. A group of people or individuals have to have sex to survive. This one went from Butler’s usual dub-con and sexual coersion straight into incestuous rape attempt, and I think I’ve had my share of that theme now. Every conversation is about rape, wondering about rape, fearing rape, asking about rape, being empowered through rape, being killed by rape, all the sorts I ever didn’t want to imagine. I need a break, okay?
July 26, 2024
4/5 stars
Holy shit...
Quick reminder: There are two ways to read Octavia E. Butler's Patternist series: the order in which it was published--Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978, disowned and never put back into publication), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay's Ark (1984); or the chronological order of the in-universe story--Wild Seed (set in the 1600s and 1700s), Mind of My Mind (set in the 70s, contemporary for when Butler wrote it), Clay's Ark (set in a futuristic dystopia of...2021), Survivor (set in space and on another planet), and Patternmaster (very far future where humanity is divided). I have chosen to read it in the chronological order at the advice of a friend and because I prefer to read it that way.
Decades after the events of Mind of My Mind, Blake Maslin, a White doctor and widower, is driving through the California desert with his mixed-raced daughters, Rane and the sickly Kiera. The world has gone to near ruin, cities are still around but there's lawlessness on the highways. Soon, Blake and his daughters are captured and taken by Eli's people, a community of sickly-looking but physically aggressive people who were infected by an extraterrestrial organism that Elie brought back from space years ago. Now, Eli wants to infect Blake and the girls, and to have his people breed with them to both satiate the organism's drives it inflicts on people and to contain the disease it is spreading. But Blake, Rane, and Keira don't want this life...or do they?
This has to be the bleakest installment of the Patternist series I've ever read. Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind had some dark moments, but nothing in them comes close to the climax in Clay's Ark.
Off the bat, you may be asking, "Do we see the psychic Patternists in this book too?" And the answer is, only briefly in a sort of flashback seen. Clay's Ark is divided between the present experiences of Blake, Rane, and Kiera (mostly Blake for the first half), but also the past which shows Eli immediately after he's returned from space with the organism and his initial meeting with the community he would found. In the past perspective, it is mentioned, before he went to space, that Eli and his late wife Disa worked on the ship that would take them to space, the titular Clay's Ark, and the psionic drive used to power it and connect with its crew. Clay Dana, one the latent psychics from Mind of My Mind was the creator of the ship and its psionic drive. And that's the only appearance/mention of the Patternists. However, the name "Clay's Ark" will be eventually corrupted into clayarks, the name of the mutating people and their descendants.
Clay's Ark is a very odd book when you consider its placement in the series and the events that happen in the prior books, regardless of what order you read them in. For one, Doro is long gone, but obviously not his psychic descendants. However, Eli makes an interesting juxtaposition to Doro. He isn't as malicious as Doro, but like him, he too is "planning" his family and descendants, but he doesn't want power like Doro. He is genuinely trying to contain the organism he brought back while also satisfying its hunger and the ones it inflicts on him and the rest of his community. When infected by the organism via inoculation of some kind, the organism reproduces and replaces certain cells within the hosts' bodies, but in doing so makes their body suffer some kind of fever and then gives them ravenous appetites and desire for sexual intercourse. Still, in both the past and present sections we see Eli trying to convince others to partake in the infection and join the community. It isn't a cult per se, although Eli was once a preacherboy and the community stands on the old land of a now defunct Christian sect--there is perhaps some double meaning here.
Blake is inoculated by Meda, the matriarch (of sorts) of the infected community and Eli's chief "wife." Eli tries to set Rane up with Stephen Kaneshiro, a Japanese (and possibly half-Black based on the descriptions of his skin color) member of the community, to produce actual children. Once again we see the more greyer parts of Eli's morality here and a callback to what Doro did with his own children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. Eli and Meda have a son named Jacob, who has an almost feline like body and heightened senses. Another woman named Lupe has a daughter who is the same, but I forget who the father is (it was either a man they attempted to assimilate to the community or Eli again). Jacob and the little girl are the final product of the interbreeding between those with the organism and are the further mutated/evolved forms of the clayarks. Jacob was a very cute, enduring, but also naïve member of the mutated cast and I loved his interactions with Keira. Rane is never inoculated by Stephen but she feels drawn to him for some reason, as does Blake to Meda after his inoculation. Keira believes that she won't be infected by the community because of her sickly state, but that changes in an unsettling way, but sadly not the most unsettling way in the entire book.
Most of the first half of the book is Blake and Eli's conflicting feelings while the organism germinates within them. Blake is trying to deal with the initial fever and then the unwanted desires it demands he act out. Eli in the past does the same thing, but more so tries to study the organism's affects after infection. Eventually, the organism takes a heavy toll on Blake after he, Rane, and Keira flee in the community in the night. They are caught by a highway gang and after he wakes up from a concussion, Blake learns he tried to rape Keira...and that Keira tried to give in.
This is where things get messed up.
We see not only Blake's perspective on the night of the escape, but also Rane and Keira's. In Keira's, she has sex with Eli, and she's still a teenager. She is infected. After her and her family are captured by the highway gang, she tries to fight her desires as well. Blake's fight gives him an interest introspection. We learn that he rarely had to fight for anything in life, unlike his late Black wife, and that he really did not comprehend the true horror of the decaying world until after Jorah's death. He had to step up and take care of his daughters in a brutal landscape, something he wasn't prepared for. This gives him interesting juxtaposition to Eli, a Black man who is trying to live in a sort of symbiosis (a theme that Octavia Butler explored throughout her literary works) with the infecting organism and had a lot more responsibility even prior to returning to Earth. Butler isn't saying that Blake is or was lazy, but she is showing that how even in a literal, collapsing setting with things beyond anyone's control, Black people still have more of a burden. This also gives Blake juxtaposition to Doro as well; both fathers, like Eli, one seeking protection of his family, the other control of it, and both succumbing to horrific desires and impulses.
Rane remains mostly away from all the horrific impulses, however, after the capture by the highway gang, horrific stuff happens to her. She overhears the gang torturing and raping several of their captives, including young children. Eventually, the same fate befalls her. It is not a graphic scene by any means, but it was still greatly uncomfortable. She isn't just raped once...God, it was stomach churning. She does break free and fights her way out, but....
Keira's experience with the infection after the capture is the most interesting. We later learn that the organism was slowly eating away her leukemia and replacing her once dead cells and other internal body parts (forgive me, I don't remember what exactly gets destroyed with leukemia). However, she nearly succumbs to the desires as well, yet she conquers them. Keira witnesses the climax of everything and she--and us--is rattled to the core. As I said, the climax of this book is absolutely brutal and its ending feels...foreboding, for the lack of a better word. Painful could even describe it, but not all of it. Remember, that Clay's Ark was the last book published in the series and people had already read Patternmaster at this point and knew the fate of the world afterward. Butler ends the series in a dark yet poignant place. Whether it be the remnants of a godlike being or the failures of science to understand and defend against a new disease, the world is forever changed and its out of humanity's control. And given the constant return to focus on Black, Brown, and and mixed-raced women, it may be showing just how much such women have to endure and suffer.
Plot and themes aside, the book excels in other areas such a Blake, Eli, and Keira's introspection and arcs. They are all three interesting characters and their thoughts and experiences up until the end are captivating, aggravating, and heartbreaking. Rane was interesting too, but her fate just left me demoralized. There were other perspectives that I wish Butler would've included too, like Meda and Jacob. Additionally, there is some telling rather than showing going on here. I believe I mentioned that about the other books too.
This was such a bleak book that it left me raw and demoralized. Perhaps that was Butler's point.
Holy shit...
Quick reminder: There are two ways to read Octavia E. Butler's Patternist series: the order in which it was published--Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978, disowned and never put back into publication), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay's Ark (1984); or the chronological order of the in-universe story--Wild Seed (set in the 1600s and 1700s), Mind of My Mind (set in the 70s, contemporary for when Butler wrote it), Clay's Ark (set in a futuristic dystopia of...2021), Survivor (set in space and on another planet), and Patternmaster (very far future where humanity is divided). I have chosen to read it in the chronological order at the advice of a friend and because I prefer to read it that way.
Decades after the events of Mind of My Mind, Blake Maslin, a White doctor and widower, is driving through the California desert with his mixed-raced daughters, Rane and the sickly Kiera. The world has gone to near ruin, cities are still around but there's lawlessness on the highways. Soon, Blake and his daughters are captured and taken by Eli's people, a community of sickly-looking but physically aggressive people who were infected by an extraterrestrial organism that Elie brought back from space years ago. Now, Eli wants to infect Blake and the girls, and to have his people breed with them to both satiate the organism's drives it inflicts on people and to contain the disease it is spreading. But Blake, Rane, and Keira don't want this life...or do they?
This has to be the bleakest installment of the Patternist series I've ever read. Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind had some dark moments, but nothing in them comes close to the climax in Clay's Ark.
Off the bat, you may be asking, "Do we see the psychic Patternists in this book too?" And the answer is, only briefly in a sort of flashback seen. Clay's Ark is divided between the present experiences of Blake, Rane, and Kiera (mostly Blake for the first half), but also the past which shows Eli immediately after he's returned from space with the organism and his initial meeting with the community he would found. In the past perspective, it is mentioned, before he went to space, that Eli and his late wife Disa worked on the ship that would take them to space, the titular Clay's Ark, and the psionic drive used to power it and connect with its crew. Clay Dana, one the latent psychics from Mind of My Mind was the creator of the ship and its psionic drive. And that's the only appearance/mention of the Patternists. However, the name "Clay's Ark" will be eventually corrupted into clayarks, the name of the mutating people and their descendants.
Clay's Ark is a very odd book when you consider its placement in the series and the events that happen in the prior books, regardless of what order you read them in. For one, Doro is long gone, but obviously not his psychic descendants. However, Eli makes an interesting juxtaposition to Doro. He isn't as malicious as Doro, but like him, he too is "planning" his family and descendants, but he doesn't want power like Doro. He is genuinely trying to contain the organism he brought back while also satisfying its hunger and the ones it inflicts on him and the rest of his community. When infected by the organism via inoculation of some kind, the organism reproduces and replaces certain cells within the hosts' bodies, but in doing so makes their body suffer some kind of fever and then gives them ravenous appetites and desire for sexual intercourse. Still, in both the past and present sections we see Eli trying to convince others to partake in the infection and join the community. It isn't a cult per se, although Eli was once a preacherboy and the community stands on the old land of a now defunct Christian sect--there is perhaps some double meaning here.
Blake is inoculated by Meda, the matriarch (of sorts) of the infected community and Eli's chief "wife." Eli tries to set Rane up with Stephen Kaneshiro, a Japanese (and possibly half-Black based on the descriptions of his skin color) member of the community, to produce actual children. Once again we see the more greyer parts of Eli's morality here and a callback to what Doro did with his own children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. Eli and Meda have a son named Jacob, who has an almost feline like body and heightened senses. Another woman named Lupe has a daughter who is the same, but I forget who the father is (it was either a man they attempted to assimilate to the community or Eli again). Jacob and the little girl are the final product of the interbreeding between those with the organism and are the further mutated/evolved forms of the clayarks. Jacob was a very cute, enduring, but also naïve member of the mutated cast and I loved his interactions with Keira. Rane is never inoculated by Stephen but she feels drawn to him for some reason, as does Blake to Meda after his inoculation. Keira believes that she won't be infected by the community because of her sickly state, but that changes in an unsettling way, but sadly not the most unsettling way in the entire book.
Most of the first half of the book is Blake and Eli's conflicting feelings while the organism germinates within them. Blake is trying to deal with the initial fever and then the unwanted desires it demands he act out. Eli in the past does the same thing, but more so tries to study the organism's affects after infection. Eventually, the organism takes a heavy toll on Blake after he, Rane, and Keira flee in the community in the night. They are caught by a highway gang and after he wakes up from a concussion, Blake learns he tried to rape Keira...and that Keira tried to give in.
This is where things get messed up.
We see not only Blake's perspective on the night of the escape, but also Rane and Keira's. In Keira's, she has sex with Eli, and she's still a teenager. She is infected. After her and her family are captured by the highway gang, she tries to fight her desires as well. Blake's fight gives him an interest introspection. We learn that he rarely had to fight for anything in life, unlike his late Black wife, and that he really did not comprehend the true horror of the decaying world until after Jorah's death. He had to step up and take care of his daughters in a brutal landscape, something he wasn't prepared for. This gives him interesting juxtaposition to Eli, a Black man who is trying to live in a sort of symbiosis (a theme that Octavia Butler explored throughout her literary works) with the infecting organism and had a lot more responsibility even prior to returning to Earth. Butler isn't saying that Blake is or was lazy, but she is showing that how even in a literal, collapsing setting with things beyond anyone's control, Black people still have more of a burden. This also gives Blake juxtaposition to Doro as well; both fathers, like Eli, one seeking protection of his family, the other control of it, and both succumbing to horrific desires and impulses.
Rane remains mostly away from all the horrific impulses, however, after the capture by the highway gang, horrific stuff happens to her. She overhears the gang torturing and raping several of their captives, including young children. Eventually, the same fate befalls her. It is not a graphic scene by any means, but it was still greatly uncomfortable. She isn't just raped once...God, it was stomach churning. She does break free and fights her way out, but....
Keira's experience with the infection after the capture is the most interesting. We later learn that the organism was slowly eating away her leukemia and replacing her once dead cells and other internal body parts (forgive me, I don't remember what exactly gets destroyed with leukemia). However, she nearly succumbs to the desires as well, yet she conquers them. Keira witnesses the climax of everything and she--and us--is rattled to the core. As I said, the climax of this book is absolutely brutal and its ending feels...foreboding, for the lack of a better word. Painful could even describe it, but not all of it. Remember, that Clay's Ark was the last book published in the series and people had already read Patternmaster at this point and knew the fate of the world afterward. Butler ends the series in a dark yet poignant place. Whether it be the remnants of a godlike being or the failures of science to understand and defend against a new disease, the world is forever changed and its out of humanity's control. And given the constant return to focus on Black, Brown, and and mixed-raced women, it may be showing just how much such women have to endure and suffer.
Plot and themes aside, the book excels in other areas such a Blake, Eli, and Keira's introspection and arcs. They are all three interesting characters and their thoughts and experiences up until the end are captivating, aggravating, and heartbreaking. Rane was interesting too, but her fate just left me demoralized. There were other perspectives that I wish Butler would've included too, like Meda and Jacob. Additionally, there is some telling rather than showing going on here. I believe I mentioned that about the other books too.
This was such a bleak book that it left me raw and demoralized. Perhaps that was Butler's point.
March 5, 2016
Clay's Ark: An alien disease transforms a portion of humanity
Originally published at Fantasy Literature
Clay’s Ark (1984) was written last in Octavia Butler’s 4-book PATTERNIST series, but comes third in chronology. It takes place after Wild Seed (1980) and Mind of My Mind (1977), in the post-apocalyptic California desert. Society has collapsed into armed enclaves, marauding ‘car families’, organ hunters, and isolated towns. It’s along the lines of Mad Max, with fuel sources depleted and social infrastructure nonexistent, violent death lurking at any moment, and little room for anything more than survival.
This world is gradually revealed via two storylines, one set in the past and the other in the present. The past story arc is centered on an astronaut named Eli, the only survivor of a spaceship called Clay’s Ark that went on an exploratory mission to Proxima Centauri. The mission encountered an alien microbe that affected and transformed their DNA for it’s own purposes. Eli survives the return to Earth, but is infected with this microbe, which imparts on its host increased strength, endurance, healing ability, and appetite.
However, it also enslaves humans by forcing them to spread the disease. Namely, the men feel an overwhelming urge to infect unaffected females and mate with them, and infected women also feel the same compulsion. Infected men also feel intense aggression towards other males, which leads to a lion’s pride type social structure, with the strongest males taking as many females as possible and fighting off competing males. The most disturbing aspect of this book is that infected people are fully aware of these compulsions and rebel against them, but cannot resist. So they are both slaves and puppets to this alien microbe that drives them to animal-like behavior.
In the current timeline we meet Blake, a physician who still remembers pre-collapse society, and his twin daughters Rane and Keira. Rane is healthy and confident, while Keira suffers from an incurable form of leukemia. The story wastes no time in throwing them into trouble, as their car is stopped by two men who force them at gunpoint to return with them to a remote enclave in the desert.
As the story progresses, we learn that this community is led by former astronaut Eli and consists of people infected by the sinister alien microbe brought back from Proxima Centauri.
They are no longer in control of their actions, as the disease transforms both their bodies and social relations. The classic Butler themes of domination, enslavement, power, and strange sexual relations are on full display here. It’s not an easy reading experience, and I’m sure that’s one reason that Butler’s books are not more widely read, but they are certainly challenging and force the reader outside their comfort zone. We have no choice but to go along with the difficult decisions the characters face in whether to submit to an alien virus that will transform them.
Butler seems fixated on the idea of humans being transformed into something alien, both more and less than human. The process of transformation is always difficult, painful and invasive, and people often don’t survive. Butler seems to revel in throwing readers and her characters into uncomfortable situations. This was also the case in the previous books Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, though the transformation was psychic in nature. So thematically Clay’s Ark delves into the same territory, but does not feature any of the telepaths from the previous books.
It’s an interesting choice to group this book into the PATTERNIST series, but if we consider the order of publication then the reasons are clear. Patternmaster was Butler’s first book written in 1976, and features both Patternists and Clayarks in a far-future society, so she was been filling in the backstory of that initial book over the next 8 years. With the exception of Kindred in 1979, all of Butler’s earlier books are set in the PATTERNIST universe. Her subsequent major series were the XENOGENESIS trilogy and Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (Parable of the Trickster was never finished), and I think her writing met with greater critical acclaim as her ideas gained in sophistication. Her untimely death was a great loss to the SF community.
Clay’s Ark is narrated by Neal Ghant, and I liked his strong voice and spare style. This is a harsh story and his delivery is equally harsh. He imbues the characters with the appropriate level of desperation as they face death and fight for survival in this unforgiving world. In particular, he does a good job of depicting the struggle against the Clayark disease, and the horror of being compelled by an alien microbe. This book would make an intense if bleak post-apocalyptic action film, and Denzel Washington would make a great leading man...hold on, that was already done by the Hughes Brothers in Book of Eli~
Originally published at Fantasy Literature
Clay’s Ark (1984) was written last in Octavia Butler’s 4-book PATTERNIST series, but comes third in chronology. It takes place after Wild Seed (1980) and Mind of My Mind (1977), in the post-apocalyptic California desert. Society has collapsed into armed enclaves, marauding ‘car families’, organ hunters, and isolated towns. It’s along the lines of Mad Max, with fuel sources depleted and social infrastructure nonexistent, violent death lurking at any moment, and little room for anything more than survival.
This world is gradually revealed via two storylines, one set in the past and the other in the present. The past story arc is centered on an astronaut named Eli, the only survivor of a spaceship called Clay’s Ark that went on an exploratory mission to Proxima Centauri. The mission encountered an alien microbe that affected and transformed their DNA for it’s own purposes. Eli survives the return to Earth, but is infected with this microbe, which imparts on its host increased strength, endurance, healing ability, and appetite.
However, it also enslaves humans by forcing them to spread the disease. Namely, the men feel an overwhelming urge to infect unaffected females and mate with them, and infected women also feel the same compulsion. Infected men also feel intense aggression towards other males, which leads to a lion’s pride type social structure, with the strongest males taking as many females as possible and fighting off competing males. The most disturbing aspect of this book is that infected people are fully aware of these compulsions and rebel against them, but cannot resist. So they are both slaves and puppets to this alien microbe that drives them to animal-like behavior.
In the current timeline we meet Blake, a physician who still remembers pre-collapse society, and his twin daughters Rane and Keira. Rane is healthy and confident, while Keira suffers from an incurable form of leukemia. The story wastes no time in throwing them into trouble, as their car is stopped by two men who force them at gunpoint to return with them to a remote enclave in the desert.
As the story progresses, we learn that this community is led by former astronaut Eli and consists of people infected by the sinister alien microbe brought back from Proxima Centauri.
They are no longer in control of their actions, as the disease transforms both their bodies and social relations. The classic Butler themes of domination, enslavement, power, and strange sexual relations are on full display here. It’s not an easy reading experience, and I’m sure that’s one reason that Butler’s books are not more widely read, but they are certainly challenging and force the reader outside their comfort zone. We have no choice but to go along with the difficult decisions the characters face in whether to submit to an alien virus that will transform them.
Butler seems fixated on the idea of humans being transformed into something alien, both more and less than human. The process of transformation is always difficult, painful and invasive, and people often don’t survive. Butler seems to revel in throwing readers and her characters into uncomfortable situations. This was also the case in the previous books Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, though the transformation was psychic in nature. So thematically Clay’s Ark delves into the same territory, but does not feature any of the telepaths from the previous books.
It’s an interesting choice to group this book into the PATTERNIST series, but if we consider the order of publication then the reasons are clear. Patternmaster was Butler’s first book written in 1976, and features both Patternists and Clayarks in a far-future society, so she was been filling in the backstory of that initial book over the next 8 years. With the exception of Kindred in 1979, all of Butler’s earlier books are set in the PATTERNIST universe. Her subsequent major series were the XENOGENESIS trilogy and Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (Parable of the Trickster was never finished), and I think her writing met with greater critical acclaim as her ideas gained in sophistication. Her untimely death was a great loss to the SF community.
Clay’s Ark is narrated by Neal Ghant, and I liked his strong voice and spare style. This is a harsh story and his delivery is equally harsh. He imbues the characters with the appropriate level of desperation as they face death and fight for survival in this unforgiving world. In particular, he does a good job of depicting the struggle against the Clayark disease, and the horror of being compelled by an alien microbe. This book would make an intense if bleak post-apocalyptic action film, and Denzel Washington would make a great leading man...hold on, that was already done by the Hughes Brothers in Book of Eli~
August 6, 2019
“He had started what could become an epidemic. Now, if he were going to be able to live with himself at all, he had to contain it.”
That sounds like a good tagline for an ad poster for this book. However, as it was published in 1984 I doubt such a poster exists…
Octavia Butler is one of my all-time favorite authors, my reviews of her books tend to be somewhat fanboyish, short on objectivity, and of course completely unprofessional (this not being my profession). Still, I find it quite pleasant to enthuse about her to anyone who would listen (and also those who would not).
Clay’s Ark is ostensibly part of Ms. Butler’s Patternmaster Series. However, it reads entirely like a standalone. I have read the two previous volumes Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind and I cannot find any connection to this book. I have heard that there is a connection somewhere on one page but it must have slipped under my radar. Perhaps it is better this way so that anyone can just pick up and read this book without worrying about transpires in previous volumes.
Clay’s Ark is set in a near-future dystopia where people live walled up communities called “enclaves” to protect themselves from marauding outlaws. Eli Doyle, is a former astronaut, the lone surviving crew member of the “Clay's Ark” spaceship which crash-landed in a Mojave desert. The entire crew of this ship has been infected by an alien “virus-sized microbe” that give them enhanced strength and agility, in exchange for considerable loss of humanity and agency. The microbe creates a compulsion for the host to spread its disease. Doyle does not remember why he is the only surviving crew member, he does not want to spread the disease, he knows it will spell the end of the human race as we know it, but he has to, the microbe will not be denied.
The theme of parasitic symbiosis is one which Butler has returned to a few times in her body of work, particularly Bloodchild and Lilith's Brood. In all these works she explores the human condition that we take for granted and the effect of the loss or involuntary modification of humanity. Clay’s Ark presents the reader with the moral dilemma of the people who have contracted the “Clay’s Ark disease”. They do their best to isolate themselves from the human population in order to avoid creating an unstoppable global epidemic and mutations, yet the microbe compels them to find new carriers for the disease, two conflicting goals with a foreseeable outcome. In this novel, the good guys are bad guys who want to be good.
Clay’s Ark, like all Octavia Butler books that I have read, is very well written with complex characters, cool SFnal concepts and ideas worth pondering, all wrapped up in a fast-paced and compelling narrative.
That sounds like a good tagline for an ad poster for this book. However, as it was published in 1984 I doubt such a poster exists…
Octavia Butler is one of my all-time favorite authors, my reviews of her books tend to be somewhat fanboyish, short on objectivity, and of course completely unprofessional (this not being my profession). Still, I find it quite pleasant to enthuse about her to anyone who would listen (and also those who would not).
Clay’s Ark is ostensibly part of Ms. Butler’s Patternmaster Series. However, it reads entirely like a standalone. I have read the two previous volumes Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind and I cannot find any connection to this book. I have heard that there is a connection somewhere on one page but it must have slipped under my radar. Perhaps it is better this way so that anyone can just pick up and read this book without worrying about transpires in previous volumes.
Clay’s Ark is set in a near-future dystopia where people live walled up communities called “enclaves” to protect themselves from marauding outlaws. Eli Doyle, is a former astronaut, the lone surviving crew member of the “Clay's Ark” spaceship which crash-landed in a Mojave desert. The entire crew of this ship has been infected by an alien “virus-sized microbe” that give them enhanced strength and agility, in exchange for considerable loss of humanity and agency. The microbe creates a compulsion for the host to spread its disease. Doyle does not remember why he is the only surviving crew member, he does not want to spread the disease, he knows it will spell the end of the human race as we know it, but he has to, the microbe will not be denied.
The theme of parasitic symbiosis is one which Butler has returned to a few times in her body of work, particularly Bloodchild and Lilith's Brood. In all these works she explores the human condition that we take for granted and the effect of the loss or involuntary modification of humanity. Clay’s Ark presents the reader with the moral dilemma of the people who have contracted the “Clay’s Ark disease”. They do their best to isolate themselves from the human population in order to avoid creating an unstoppable global epidemic and mutations, yet the microbe compels them to find new carriers for the disease, two conflicting goals with a foreseeable outcome. In this novel, the good guys are bad guys who want to be good.
Clay’s Ark, like all Octavia Butler books that I have read, is very well written with complex characters, cool SFnal concepts and ideas worth pondering, all wrapped up in a fast-paced and compelling narrative.
January 14, 2025
This was not what I was expecting! It pivots to follow an entirely different group of people being colonized by an alien lifeform that lives parasitically inside people and wants to reproduce. Butler often explores themes of consent and lack of consent and what those things might mean in different contexts, which is reproduced here. What does it mean if your body is not quite under your control and wants things your mind does not? Or forces you do commit atrocities? What about power dynamics in a sexual relationship? What does jealousy look like when monogamy is not the norm? Not my favorite of the series but as always interesting and compelling.
February 26, 2025
Not my favorite Octavia Butler, but still a pretty good exploration of her classic themes - power dynamics. It's kinda funny how I usually balk at grimdark narratives but hers just work for me because the subtext level is always so incredibly rich and provocative.
I think the level Butler operates at is still unparalleled for me. It's all about fucked up power dynamics showing up in all relationships and making consent murky because of imbalances. I think OEB can sometimes be fundamentally misunderstood because the devices she uses in her books to explore said dynamics are biological, but her interests are always in the cultural and societal.
Take this book for instance: this is about a community held together because of an alien virus (?) thing that gets the humans to do stuff they otherwise wouldn't do. But this is not human biological determinism. This is a thing that's 'xeno', foreign, that we engaged with because of science - through building a spaceship, through constantly improving our natures thanks to science & technology. And through building these things we become something else, harder, faster, stronger and we become the people (?) created by this technology and who create more technology.
I think there's a lot here about that. As per usual, I also think Butler is not so much about showing us how to get out of the coercive systems and societies we're in, but she's always trying to show us the coercive things in our societies we don't see. Actually, arguably, now that I only have one book of hers to read, I would say that Fledgling is maybe the most optimistic that gives you a bit of prescription for how to deal with power dynamics. But just a little bit! Because her whoooooooole thing is that every relationship has different power dynamics and so navigating them will be personal and it's something every reader should work on. That's my take, at least!
And for the final note, this might be strange to say / write, but I find great comfort in Butler's writing. Especially with how the world is going right now. She will not really write about highly ethical, highly political / informed people. She writes about normal / normative people in such an interesting way that I always empathize with them, even if they frustrate me to no end and I would absolutely not make the same choices. I have to think about this some more though to be able to explain. I think I've said this before, but I have all my life to think about all of these OEB books and that makes me feel happy.
I think the level Butler operates at is still unparalleled for me. It's all about fucked up power dynamics showing up in all relationships and making consent murky because of imbalances. I think OEB can sometimes be fundamentally misunderstood because the devices she uses in her books to explore said dynamics are biological, but her interests are always in the cultural and societal.
Take this book for instance: this is about a community held together because of an alien virus (?) thing that gets the humans to do stuff they otherwise wouldn't do. But this is not human biological determinism. This is a thing that's 'xeno', foreign, that we engaged with because of science - through building a spaceship, through constantly improving our natures thanks to science & technology. And through building these things we become something else, harder, faster, stronger and we become the people (?) created by this technology and who create more technology.
I think there's a lot here about that. As per usual, I also think Butler is not so much about showing us how to get out of the coercive systems and societies we're in, but she's always trying to show us the coercive things in our societies we don't see. Actually, arguably, now that I only have one book of hers to read, I would say that Fledgling is maybe the most optimistic that gives you a bit of prescription for how to deal with power dynamics. But just a little bit! Because her whoooooooole thing is that every relationship has different power dynamics and so navigating them will be personal and it's something every reader should work on. That's my take, at least!
And for the final note, this might be strange to say / write, but I find great comfort in Butler's writing. Especially with how the world is going right now. She will not really write about highly ethical, highly political / informed people. She writes about normal / normative people in such an interesting way that I always empathize with them, even if they frustrate me to no end and I would absolutely not make the same choices. I have to think about this some more though to be able to explain. I think I've said this before, but I have all my life to think about all of these OEB books and that makes me feel happy.
February 24, 2017
Nasty, short, brutish. The weakest and most unpleasant I've read by Butler so far, particularly in that the intensely uncomfortable elements (graphic violence, rape, infectious Stockholm Syndrome) do not seem worth it for the plot.
September 23, 2023
Great premise, little plot
I'm a fan of Butler and have enjoyed the prior books in this series. They're weird and full of interesting and often brutal characters. This third in the Pattermaster series dives into deeper of the prior themes of eugenics, power hierarchy, secret societies told over interesting fantasy and sci fi elements. But this time around I think this book suffers simply from poor story telling. There isn't much plot here that expands on the premise and so much of this book is about power relationships with a small cult of people, like the prior books, but it just turned into such a boring slog for me that I got lost trying to find the point. This is a humorless, unenjoyable book and I'm sure it has some social commentary there to explore but I got too burned out to find out. I will still read the fourth book in the series.
I'm a fan of Butler and have enjoyed the prior books in this series. They're weird and full of interesting and often brutal characters. This third in the Pattermaster series dives into deeper of the prior themes of eugenics, power hierarchy, secret societies told over interesting fantasy and sci fi elements. But this time around I think this book suffers simply from poor story telling. There isn't much plot here that expands on the premise and so much of this book is about power relationships with a small cult of people, like the prior books, but it just turned into such a boring slog for me that I got lost trying to find the point. This is a humorless, unenjoyable book and I'm sure it has some social commentary there to explore but I got too burned out to find out. I will still read the fourth book in the series.
November 30, 2025
This turned out to be a superfast read. I had read it before, not knowing it was part of Butler's Patternmaster series. Having read the preceding book in the series ( "Mind of my Mind"), I was rereading it to see if this story had any connection to the preceding one in the series. It didn't.
It takes place in 2021 and an astronaut infected by a disease contracted while in space has returned to Earth. He doesn't want to kill himself to save the human race from the space plague. So he forms his own infected community in a remote area of the American Southwest. But how long can he keep his group--and the disease--isolated?
I would assume that Butler tied up the story of "Clay's Ark" with preceding stories in some kind of conclusion in the final book of her series, "Patternmaster."
It takes place in 2021 and an astronaut infected by a disease contracted while in space has returned to Earth. He doesn't want to kill himself to save the human race from the space plague. So he forms his own infected community in a remote area of the American Southwest. But how long can he keep his group--and the disease--isolated?
I would assume that Butler tied up the story of "Clay's Ark" with preceding stories in some kind of conclusion in the final book of her series, "Patternmaster."
December 2, 2007
Where Butler gets it right—always gets it right—is in the fascinating premises she builds her novels on. Where she occasionally gets it wrong is in the development.
Butler published Patternmaster in 1974, and then spent the next eight years filling in the history of the far-future world she had created. This produced Wild Seed, which became one of her best novels, but it also produced Survivor, which she later disowned, and Clay's Ark.
Clay's Ark has the usual Butlerian sexual, racial and xenophobic tensions, and is fairly gripping as far as the pacing goes. Unfortunately, it never rises above its status as a prequel—there is no clear reason why this story needed to be told, out of all the stories Butler could have written, except that the Clayarks of Patternmaster needed to be explained. And, as Hollywood has proved on multiple occasions, an explanation does not a good story make.
Butler published Patternmaster in 1974, and then spent the next eight years filling in the history of the far-future world she had created. This produced Wild Seed, which became one of her best novels, but it also produced Survivor, which she later disowned, and Clay's Ark.
Clay's Ark has the usual Butlerian sexual, racial and xenophobic tensions, and is fairly gripping as far as the pacing goes. Unfortunately, it never rises above its status as a prequel—there is no clear reason why this story needed to be told, out of all the stories Butler could have written, except that the Clayarks of Patternmaster needed to be explained. And, as Hollywood has proved on multiple occasions, an explanation does not a good story make.
October 9, 2012
At first I expected Clay's Ark to have more ... human interest? for me than Mind of My Mind.
Both novels concern a sort of new development for humanity -- Mind of My Mind has people with psychic abilities who are gaining power by working as a group, and Clay's Ark has an isolated set of people infected by an alien disease which changes them completely. All of the major characters in Mind of My Mind were part of the in-group of psychics; there was no real voice for the ordinary humans whom the psychics were able to use and prey on. I think this had a purpose in the novel, but one of the effects was to make it cold -- the psychic characters are difficult to sympathize with.
More than half of Clay's Ark is told from the perspective of three people who are kidnapped by the disease carriers. The disease, like a souped-up Selfish Gene, changes its victims' behavior and thoughts, driving them to infect other people so that the disease can survive and spread. The carriers remain in some control of themselves, able to choose to stay in an isolated ranch instead of going into a city and infecting a vast population, but most of their decisions do revolve around the propagation of the disease, making them selfish in ways similar to the psychics of Mind of My Mind. So, the three kidnapped people, not yet changed by the disease, are able to struggle against it and speak loudly about the problems it will cause for humanity.
I thought that these viewpoint characters would give the book a warmer, easier feeling -- a heartier and more obvious sense of moral indignation, maybe. But they don't. Perhaps because it's so clear that they cannot avoid being infected and eventually becoming just like the other carriers of the disease -- since this is certain, their goal of escaping is foolish, because it will be almost impossible to do so without acting as vectors. I can't really root for them; it's too frustrating.
There's a temptation to root for the disease. It makes its carriers (the ones who survive) stronger, faster, more perceptive, immune to most other illnesses. As with the psi powers of Doro's children, it suggests "The next stage in human evolution!!" (warning: TV tropes link, don't get sucked in), a concept with all kinds of problematic baggage. Clay's Ark offers much to feed curiosity about a humanity changed by the disease, but even the confirmed carriers who are driven to spread it -- even when actually acknowledging, "We are the future" -- do so with a sense of grim inevitability instead of hope.
Another unpleasant thing about Clay's Ark is that the disease can be spread sexually, and it strengthens the (heterosexual) sex drive. Carriers feel driven to have heterosexual intercourse with uninfected people. (I think the reasoning is that the disease is affecting reproductive mechanisms in order to produce offspring who are carriers, because anyone can catch it through just a scratch. Still, there are no test cases of strictly homosexual or asexual people, prepubescent children, or postmenopausal women. I wouldn't want to inflict this situation on more characters, but the result is a bit sloppily heterosexist.) Some of these characters fear they may be driven to rape. Butler carefully avoids having any of the carriers rape with physical force, but given that none of them would be having sex without the disease, it's not exactly consensual at best.
The sexual spread of the disease in Clay's Ark compares with the development of populations with psi abilities in Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind. Those abilities are strictly genetic, but again, their transmission is forced; Doro breeds his people like pedigree animals. People with strong psi abilities repel each other, so Doro resorts to murderous measures to coerce them into reproducing. This masterminded eugenics is just as much rape as the uncontrollable sex drive produced by the disease. They're two sides of the same coin that pays for The Next Stage in Human Evolution -- which is one of several good reasons to find it too expensive.
Both novels concern a sort of new development for humanity -- Mind of My Mind has people with psychic abilities who are gaining power by working as a group, and Clay's Ark has an isolated set of people infected by an alien disease which changes them completely. All of the major characters in Mind of My Mind were part of the in-group of psychics; there was no real voice for the ordinary humans whom the psychics were able to use and prey on. I think this had a purpose in the novel, but one of the effects was to make it cold -- the psychic characters are difficult to sympathize with.
More than half of Clay's Ark is told from the perspective of three people who are kidnapped by the disease carriers. The disease, like a souped-up Selfish Gene, changes its victims' behavior and thoughts, driving them to infect other people so that the disease can survive and spread. The carriers remain in some control of themselves, able to choose to stay in an isolated ranch instead of going into a city and infecting a vast population, but most of their decisions do revolve around the propagation of the disease, making them selfish in ways similar to the psychics of Mind of My Mind. So, the three kidnapped people, not yet changed by the disease, are able to struggle against it and speak loudly about the problems it will cause for humanity.
I thought that these viewpoint characters would give the book a warmer, easier feeling -- a heartier and more obvious sense of moral indignation, maybe. But they don't. Perhaps because it's so clear that they cannot avoid being infected and eventually becoming just like the other carriers of the disease -- since this is certain, their goal of escaping is foolish, because it will be almost impossible to do so without acting as vectors. I can't really root for them; it's too frustrating.
There's a temptation to root for the disease. It makes its carriers (the ones who survive) stronger, faster, more perceptive, immune to most other illnesses. As with the psi powers of Doro's children, it suggests "The next stage in human evolution!!" (warning: TV tropes link, don't get sucked in), a concept with all kinds of problematic baggage. Clay's Ark offers much to feed curiosity about a humanity changed by the disease, but even the confirmed carriers who are driven to spread it -- even when actually acknowledging, "We are the future" -- do so with a sense of grim inevitability instead of hope.
Another unpleasant thing about Clay's Ark is that the disease can be spread sexually, and it strengthens the (heterosexual) sex drive. Carriers feel driven to have heterosexual intercourse with uninfected people. (I think the reasoning is that the disease is affecting reproductive mechanisms in order to produce offspring who are carriers, because anyone can catch it through just a scratch. Still, there are no test cases of strictly homosexual or asexual people, prepubescent children, or postmenopausal women. I wouldn't want to inflict this situation on more characters, but the result is a bit sloppily heterosexist.) Some of these characters fear they may be driven to rape. Butler carefully avoids having any of the carriers rape with physical force, but given that none of them would be having sex without the disease, it's not exactly consensual at best.
The sexual spread of the disease in Clay's Ark compares with the development of populations with psi abilities in Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind. Those abilities are strictly genetic, but again, their transmission is forced; Doro breeds his people like pedigree animals. People with strong psi abilities repel each other, so Doro resorts to murderous measures to coerce them into reproducing. This masterminded eugenics is just as much rape as the uncontrollable sex drive produced by the disease. They're two sides of the same coin that pays for The Next Stage in Human Evolution -- which is one of several good reasons to find it too expensive.
February 17, 2025
Although these aren’t the order they were written in, the common practice of reading first Wild Seed, then Mind of My Mind, then Clay’s Ark has you start in a dark place and just keeps taking you darker. I wrote longer reviews of the first two books already, but I’m recapping them quickly because Clay’s Ark only makes sense to me in the Patternist context. Thematic spoilers for those books but few specific facts.
Wild Seed is a story of Anyanwu’s ethical choices within a brutal, disturbing system in which she cannot use her power (or even her love for people and humanity) for good without also being complicit in horrors. The protagonist is complicated, a conscientious voice but the Devil’s best servant.
Mind of My Mind is much darker, especially if you take Anyanwu’s part-white American descendant Mary as a symbol for the 20th century version of this story. Anyanwu lived free in Africa, and perhaps that is why she has a conscience; Mary, and the world Anyanwu helped create, has no conscience. Her acceptance of complicity is not a nuanced ethical choice out of a rotten set of options; she rushes into it with her desire—for incestuous sex, for domination over others. In Wild Seed, our ties to other humans are battered by oppressive systems and individual cruelties; in Mind of My Mind humans separate into castes so distinct that they become cattle and masters.
Clay’s Ark has a new premise, a disease that changes you into something inhuman. On a biological level, you are driven to infect others through violence, betrayal, and rape. The book makes much hay of the characters’s varied responses and struggles to retain some ethics, but what is always clear—as it is in all three of these books—is that uncompromised ethical action is only possible through suicide. Any attempt to survive requires compromise, and the best we can do is prepare and adapt as best we can to achieve the least harmful compromise we can. With enormous effort, we can kidnap teenage girls instead of letting fathers and daughters have sex with each other. We can wait for the virus and the trauma to fuck with the teenager’s head until she also has an uncontrollabe sex drive, instead of giving in to the urge to rape her in a more traditional, immediate sense.
The pattern here is that each book gives its characters less and less room for agency. I can’t summarize the whole philosophies of the books myself, but these particular ideas stand out to me now that I’ve read these three:
1. Wild Seed: “What can ethical action possibly look like in a system where you are both utterly dominated and utterly complicit? How can you stay human?”
2. Mind of My Mind: “Is a society built on domination capable of creating real humans in real relationships? Are we all trapped so badly that even political change can only be a brute power struggle?”
3. Clay’s Ark: “What does free will look like in a regime of a ruthless and deterministic biology? How do you keep going if you have no option but to be a monster?”
The first is a set of ideas that is fundamental to many ethical humans, even ones who do not fully buy Butler’s premise.
The second is incredibly relevant as well, but I am not sure yet what to gain from it. Accepting the premise seems to lead to defeatism, and if you reject it, the book offers you little. But I am still thinking on it.
The third is simply horrifying, and even if you do accept the premise, the premise is that you can do nothing. The characters of Clay’s Ark put in so much effort merely to be a bit more civilized about the ultimate, inevitable enactment of their every biological compulsion. That’s not my experience of biology: I frequently succeed in not eating, fucking, touching, harming when I can sense an urge but understand the harm associated with following through. What is the point of a premise that removes that control by making every urge permanent and eventually irresistable? I can shape a community around different principles than those in book 2, but I cannot inject my community with different hormones and microorganisms; the best I can say is that I don’t agree with this book and that we should face our real urges and biological realities with a much more nuanced understanding of our agency toward them.
On a personal character level, one way Butler consistently makes these themes fit a novel (and disturb me on the level of roiling internal organs) is by wrapping in sex, love, pair bonding in many twisted ways. And as this series reduces the main characters’ ethical agency book by book, it also reduces their age and sexual maturity. Disturbing as it is, I can understand that sex and love fit into Anyanwu’s and Doro’s relationship, and think on how their depiction relates to complicated power dynamics in real world relationships. That already becomes nearly impossible in Mind Over Mind, which makes every aspect of romance monstrous. By Clay’s Ark real agency and ethics have collapsed so much that the “relationships” are merely created by uncontrollable desire, the post-hoc justifications for a biological urge that ruins children, families, and even all of nature.
‘Herbivores tend to be immune’ to the disease, we find out. But we were born meat-eaters and horny, the inheritors of an inescapable original sin. I find no value in that philosophy, and the small moments of attempted tenderness between afflicted, sex-crazed, animal-chewing humans only make me ill.
Wild Seed is a story of Anyanwu’s ethical choices within a brutal, disturbing system in which she cannot use her power (or even her love for people and humanity) for good without also being complicit in horrors. The protagonist is complicated, a conscientious voice but the Devil’s best servant.
Mind of My Mind is much darker, especially if you take Anyanwu’s part-white American descendant Mary as a symbol for the 20th century version of this story. Anyanwu lived free in Africa, and perhaps that is why she has a conscience; Mary, and the world Anyanwu helped create, has no conscience. Her acceptance of complicity is not a nuanced ethical choice out of a rotten set of options; she rushes into it with her desire—for incestuous sex, for domination over others. In Wild Seed, our ties to other humans are battered by oppressive systems and individual cruelties; in Mind of My Mind humans separate into castes so distinct that they become cattle and masters.
Clay’s Ark has a new premise, a disease that changes you into something inhuman. On a biological level, you are driven to infect others through violence, betrayal, and rape. The book makes much hay of the characters’s varied responses and struggles to retain some ethics, but what is always clear—as it is in all three of these books—is that uncompromised ethical action is only possible through suicide. Any attempt to survive requires compromise, and the best we can do is prepare and adapt as best we can to achieve the least harmful compromise we can. With enormous effort, we can kidnap teenage girls instead of letting fathers and daughters have sex with each other. We can wait for the virus and the trauma to fuck with the teenager’s head until she also has an uncontrollabe sex drive, instead of giving in to the urge to rape her in a more traditional, immediate sense.
The pattern here is that each book gives its characters less and less room for agency. I can’t summarize the whole philosophies of the books myself, but these particular ideas stand out to me now that I’ve read these three:
1. Wild Seed: “What can ethical action possibly look like in a system where you are both utterly dominated and utterly complicit? How can you stay human?”
2. Mind of My Mind: “Is a society built on domination capable of creating real humans in real relationships? Are we all trapped so badly that even political change can only be a brute power struggle?”
3. Clay’s Ark: “What does free will look like in a regime of a ruthless and deterministic biology? How do you keep going if you have no option but to be a monster?”
The first is a set of ideas that is fundamental to many ethical humans, even ones who do not fully buy Butler’s premise.
The second is incredibly relevant as well, but I am not sure yet what to gain from it. Accepting the premise seems to lead to defeatism, and if you reject it, the book offers you little. But I am still thinking on it.
The third is simply horrifying, and even if you do accept the premise, the premise is that you can do nothing. The characters of Clay’s Ark put in so much effort merely to be a bit more civilized about the ultimate, inevitable enactment of their every biological compulsion. That’s not my experience of biology: I frequently succeed in not eating, fucking, touching, harming when I can sense an urge but understand the harm associated with following through. What is the point of a premise that removes that control by making every urge permanent and eventually irresistable? I can shape a community around different principles than those in book 2, but I cannot inject my community with different hormones and microorganisms; the best I can say is that I don’t agree with this book and that we should face our real urges and biological realities with a much more nuanced understanding of our agency toward them.
On a personal character level, one way Butler consistently makes these themes fit a novel (and disturb me on the level of roiling internal organs) is by wrapping in sex, love, pair bonding in many twisted ways. And as this series reduces the main characters’ ethical agency book by book, it also reduces their age and sexual maturity. Disturbing as it is, I can understand that sex and love fit into Anyanwu’s and Doro’s relationship, and think on how their depiction relates to complicated power dynamics in real world relationships. That already becomes nearly impossible in Mind Over Mind, which makes every aspect of romance monstrous. By Clay’s Ark real agency and ethics have collapsed so much that the “relationships” are merely created by uncontrollable desire, the post-hoc justifications for a biological urge that ruins children, families, and even all of nature.
‘Herbivores tend to be immune’ to the disease, we find out. But we were born meat-eaters and horny, the inheritors of an inescapable original sin. I find no value in that philosophy, and the small moments of attempted tenderness between afflicted, sex-crazed, animal-chewing humans only make me ill.
July 9, 2015
Enjoyable, but certainly not the best of the Patternist series. The characters are thin even for Butler, and I never could fully suspend my disbelief in their motivations and subsequent actions. Without giving too much away, the only character I did have any affection/empathy for (I'll let you guess) ended up dying gruesomely haha. Oh well!
However, Butler does a tremendous job of describing the insidious and terrifying symptoms of the Clay's Ark disease, i.e. the physical changes, the urges, need to infect, etc. She's just so good at providing believable, visceral descriptions of what people are experiencing--it's a strength across all of her books so far as I can tell. And to some degree, this phenomenological approach does make up for the thin characterizations; at the story's best points, I was turning pages just to read more about the disease! The book still suffers from some explain-y, hand-wavy writing, which is unfortunate, and possibly attributable to the fact that Butler wrote Clay's Ark as a kind of background postscript to the Patternist series.
Anyway not a bad book, and this is the closest we'll ever get to the book that I always wanted from Butler--Scratching Where It Itches: A Day in the Life of a Clayark.
However, Butler does a tremendous job of describing the insidious and terrifying symptoms of the Clay's Ark disease, i.e. the physical changes, the urges, need to infect, etc. She's just so good at providing believable, visceral descriptions of what people are experiencing--it's a strength across all of her books so far as I can tell. And to some degree, this phenomenological approach does make up for the thin characterizations; at the story's best points, I was turning pages just to read more about the disease! The book still suffers from some explain-y, hand-wavy writing, which is unfortunate, and possibly attributable to the fact that Butler wrote Clay's Ark as a kind of background postscript to the Patternist series.
Anyway not a bad book, and this is the closest we'll ever get to the book that I always wanted from Butler--Scratching Where It Itches: A Day in the Life of a Clayark.
May 24, 2021
2021 Reread review:
This is a disturbing story full of violence and uncomfortable situations.
Butler's work often features violence and oppression themes.
I am least comfortable with the romantic elements.
Also I think this feels jarring to folks reading this book out of publication order. This story is much richer if you understand that it exists, like Wild seed & Mind of my Mind as prequels or explanations for the world that exists in Patternmaster.
If you read Patternmaster first, this book is considerably better and fits the narrative.
I'm unsure why folks do not see Mary from Mind of my Mind as evil. I loved her character but she was Doro's true successor and could never be anything but bad. I also was attached to her.
Yet many see Anyanwu & Doro's story in Wild seed as a love story and I see it as as a story of prolonged oppression.
So I think if you felt good at the end of Mind of My Mind then this feels jarring. I read Patternmaster first in this series and feel very differently about the other Patternmaster novels.
Previous reread review:
I forgot how much I loved this story.
It holds up beautifully.
This is a disturbing story full of violence and uncomfortable situations.
Butler's work often features violence and oppression themes.
I am least comfortable with the romantic elements.
Also I think this feels jarring to folks reading this book out of publication order. This story is much richer if you understand that it exists, like Wild seed & Mind of my Mind as prequels or explanations for the world that exists in Patternmaster.
If you read Patternmaster first, this book is considerably better and fits the narrative.
I'm unsure why folks do not see Mary from Mind of my Mind as evil. I loved her character but she was Doro's true successor and could never be anything but bad. I also was attached to her.
Yet many see Anyanwu & Doro's story in Wild seed as a love story and I see it as as a story of prolonged oppression.
So I think if you felt good at the end of Mind of My Mind then this feels jarring. I read Patternmaster first in this series and feel very differently about the other Patternmaster novels.
Previous reread review:
I forgot how much I loved this story.
It holds up beautifully.
June 22, 2021
Actual Rating: 4.5/5
I could not stop thinking about this book the minute I picked it up. Its obviously the same world as the other two books in the series but a very different focus, although with a lot of the same thematic overlap of almost forced community building because of biological necessity. Its also a paced very much as a thriller with two timelines, the past on how this community came to be and the present where we follow this family learn about this community and what's about to happen to them. Its extremely gripping but also very dark. The world itself is actually set in 2021 is a very dark world that you only really see bits and pieces of but is still a great backdrop. I would say that you could easily read this as a standalone without much knowledge of the previous books.
I could not stop thinking about this book the minute I picked it up. Its obviously the same world as the other two books in the series but a very different focus, although with a lot of the same thematic overlap of almost forced community building because of biological necessity. Its also a paced very much as a thriller with two timelines, the past on how this community came to be and the present where we follow this family learn about this community and what's about to happen to them. Its extremely gripping but also very dark. The world itself is actually set in 2021 is a very dark world that you only really see bits and pieces of but is still a great backdrop. I would say that you could easily read this as a standalone without much knowledge of the previous books.
September 20, 2016
This could easily be read as a brief standalone novel. Rather than fly, a wealthy family from a rich area takes a drive on the violent, dangerous roads between enclaves and gets kidnapped. Butler's series theme of genetics this time concerns an alien microbe that mutates human hosts. Fascinating story...as always.
April 18, 2023
Just for the record: I'm rating this 2 stars because I've read my fair share of 1-star stuff and Butler's work certainly doesn't belong to that category. But I found this third book in the Patternist series to be neatly inferior to the two preceding volumes, even though I rated those which 2 stars, too (I know it makes no sense; sue me).
November 18, 2023
3.5 stars
February 23, 2025
Once again, with any other author I would throw this book across the room. Jeeeeeeeeeez
March 18, 2013
This is the third book I've read in the Patternist series, going in the order they are collected in Seed To Harvest. I previously read Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, and those two books were directly related, with a few of the same characters 200 years down the road. However, I didn't notice any direct links between Clay's Ark and Mind of My Mind, but maybe I missed something.
Anyway, here's the plot in a nutshell: an astronaut has crash landed on Earth, carrying with him a contagious disease-organism from another galaxy. The organism assumes control over a human's body and makes it act in accordance with staying alive and spreading the disease to others. It's like an evolutionary survival instinct, except now humans are just a host for the real survivors.
Don't want to give much more about the story away, even if it wouldn't spoil the enjoyment of the read.
The story is told in chapters that alternate between the past, when the astronaut first crash landed on Earth, to the present when a father and his daughters are kidnapped by a strange cult. The setting is in the USA around the year 2060 (I think), and now the country is divided into safe enclave communities and everything else which is ruled by gangs and thieves.
Just as with the first two Patternist stories I read, Clay's Ark incorporates many of the same themes: gender, race, evolution, survival, breeding programs, and morality. As I've come to expect, Butler never gives an easy answer to any of these ideas, and instead poses situations in which morality seems like a luxury in the face of survival. She masterfully creates situations in which there seems to be no right answer, and the reader cannot root for one decision or the other, but instead wait to see how everything unfolds.
The characters were sympathetic and flawed, and her choice of characters were quite interesting. What I love about Butler's stories is that even the people who seem to be perpetrating a bad situation, once told from the other perspective, one can see how the "bad guys" are not really bad at all but just other people with another perspective. Indeed, this element is really strong in Clay's Ark.
Whatever awards Ms. Butler received in her lifetime, she surely deserved them and then some. Her writing is a great example of how science fiction is the genre that is often best suited to handle the big questions about human nature, and where it might be headed.
Anyway, here's the plot in a nutshell: an astronaut has crash landed on Earth, carrying with him a contagious disease-organism from another galaxy. The organism assumes control over a human's body and makes it act in accordance with staying alive and spreading the disease to others. It's like an evolutionary survival instinct, except now humans are just a host for the real survivors.
Don't want to give much more about the story away, even if it wouldn't spoil the enjoyment of the read.
The story is told in chapters that alternate between the past, when the astronaut first crash landed on Earth, to the present when a father and his daughters are kidnapped by a strange cult. The setting is in the USA around the year 2060 (I think), and now the country is divided into safe enclave communities and everything else which is ruled by gangs and thieves.
Just as with the first two Patternist stories I read, Clay's Ark incorporates many of the same themes: gender, race, evolution, survival, breeding programs, and morality. As I've come to expect, Butler never gives an easy answer to any of these ideas, and instead poses situations in which morality seems like a luxury in the face of survival. She masterfully creates situations in which there seems to be no right answer, and the reader cannot root for one decision or the other, but instead wait to see how everything unfolds.
The characters were sympathetic and flawed, and her choice of characters were quite interesting. What I love about Butler's stories is that even the people who seem to be perpetrating a bad situation, once told from the other perspective, one can see how the "bad guys" are not really bad at all but just other people with another perspective. Indeed, this element is really strong in Clay's Ark.
Whatever awards Ms. Butler received in her lifetime, she surely deserved them and then some. Her writing is a great example of how science fiction is the genre that is often best suited to handle the big questions about human nature, and where it might be headed.
December 23, 2020
This again was quite an interesting read. Contains content that could make readers uncomfortable.
.. "We can teach them, but we can't know ahead of time what they'll become."- Meda
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
I need to know what crystal ball or future visitation from an ancestor that Ms. Butler got to write these stories with such clarity and uncanny resemblance to our current reality and possible fate.
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
Her mind was obviously tuned to the trajectory that our future would take because reading her works now, in this time, breeds a certain recognition and discomfort, leading to questions of could this happen and will this be us in a hundred years?
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
In Clay's Ark, a certain alien entity has attached itself to a host and compels this host to infect, thus spreading and increasing their chances of spreading and achieving their ultimate goal: survival.
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
However, these organisms appear to be complex and sentient as they are unwilling to spread beyond what they can control, preferring to add people who will remain within the compound they have established for themselves.
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
What I love and appreciate about Butler's prose is the simplicity with which she creates her worlds, her lean writing communicates with clarity the tension that unfolds across these pages. It is rich and vast, yet easily accessible and imaginable.
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
What is obvious is that this being has no concept of family and other human-held concepts such as incest. It is only concerned with procreating and surviving and will achieve those by any means.
CW for rape.
But again, Butler stuns with her clear, precise take on a topic that is very much explored.
.. "We can teach them, but we can't know ahead of time what they'll become."- Meda
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
I need to know what crystal ball or future visitation from an ancestor that Ms. Butler got to write these stories with such clarity and uncanny resemblance to our current reality and possible fate.
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
Her mind was obviously tuned to the trajectory that our future would take because reading her works now, in this time, breeds a certain recognition and discomfort, leading to questions of could this happen and will this be us in a hundred years?
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
In Clay's Ark, a certain alien entity has attached itself to a host and compels this host to infect, thus spreading and increasing their chances of spreading and achieving their ultimate goal: survival.
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
However, these organisms appear to be complex and sentient as they are unwilling to spread beyond what they can control, preferring to add people who will remain within the compound they have established for themselves.
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
What I love and appreciate about Butler's prose is the simplicity with which she creates her worlds, her lean writing communicates with clarity the tension that unfolds across these pages. It is rich and vast, yet easily accessible and imaginable.
🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸🛸
What is obvious is that this being has no concept of family and other human-held concepts such as incest. It is only concerned with procreating and surviving and will achieve those by any means.
CW for rape.
But again, Butler stuns with her clear, precise take on a topic that is very much explored.
September 21, 2017
I feel so mentally and emotionally spent reading this book in one sitting after randomly picking it up. Holy shit. Holyshitholyshit. My first Octavia Butler book and I've learned a few things: nothing is easy, everything is morally gray, and prepare for the writing to grab you by the shoulders and shake you. My experience reading this was akin to watching a train wreck in slow motion, and not only was I unable to look away, but I pulled up a couch, got some popcorn, and watched with eyes wide open in sheer, utter amazement at the calamity before me.
And then wept inside and wondered how I came to love the people in said train wreck who I barely know.
I don't have anything intelligent to say. It was just a ride through a long dark tunnel and I came out on the other side, stunned. There are books that you read and then there are books that happen to you. I think this was the latter.
And then wept inside and wondered how I came to love the people in said train wreck who I barely know.
I don't have anything intelligent to say. It was just a ride through a long dark tunnel and I came out on the other side, stunned. There are books that you read and then there are books that happen to you. I think this was the latter.
August 14, 2019
I really liked this dystopian novel of an America in the early 2020s. A spaceship, Clay's Ark, returns to Earth and crashes in the the desert somewhere between California and Arizona, leaving its only survivor alive and infected with an alien virus to spread among the savages who live there. Society has basically descended into the "wallies" aka those with property and wealth, and the tribal have-nots outside of the sheltered cities. I wasn't prepared for the violence that occurs in the book, but it's essential to the story.
This is my first reading of anything by Octavia Butler. I'd seen an interview with her in the old SyFy Channel show called "Sci-Fi Buzz" way back in the 90's. For some reason, her books were not so easy to find in the chain stores. Clay's Ark is number 3 in a series of novels, but you can absolutely read it as a stand-alone. I have Patternmaster also and am looking forward to reading it soon.
This is my first reading of anything by Octavia Butler. I'd seen an interview with her in the old SyFy Channel show called "Sci-Fi Buzz" way back in the 90's. For some reason, her books were not so easy to find in the chain stores. Clay's Ark is number 3 in a series of novels, but you can absolutely read it as a stand-alone. I have Patternmaster also and am looking forward to reading it soon.
June 9, 2024
Jesus Christ. I'm not sure what to say about this book. It's the sixth Butler novel I've read....the three Exogenesis books (loved them), the first two (chronologically) Patternmaster books (loved them), and this one. While it bears only the slimmest, nearly non-existent thread of connection to the previous two stories in the tetralogy, it delves into typical Butler themes...racism, sexual/gender dominance, xenophobia, power dynamics in relationships, etc. On paper, it seems like typical Butler fare.
But also on paper, it's a jarring divergence from her previous works. The events depicted are some of the most brutal, horrifying, relentlessly unredeemable ideas I've read anywhere (and I've read tons of horror and violent novels). It's hard to imagine what Butler experienced in her life that could prompt her to even think about these kinds of things. If you did a drinking game based on how many times variations of the word "rape" appear in this book, you'd be dead of alcohol poisoning a third of the way through.
As usual her prose is clean and deep, her ability to move the story forward with momentum and purpose is unparalleled. But the depth of depravity of the story itself is shocking. I know there was a fifth Patternmaster book that Butler let go out of print and wanted removed from her canon....it's hard to imagine how it could be worse than Clay's Ark. I'm still a little stunned any publisher green lit this thing. Yikes.
I'm still planning on reading Patternmaster to finish the series, and will probably read more of her works because her good stuff is very good indeed. But Clay's Ark has left me shaken, and will stick with me (in a bad way) for quite some time.
But also on paper, it's a jarring divergence from her previous works. The events depicted are some of the most brutal, horrifying, relentlessly unredeemable ideas I've read anywhere (and I've read tons of horror and violent novels). It's hard to imagine what Butler experienced in her life that could prompt her to even think about these kinds of things. If you did a drinking game based on how many times variations of the word "rape" appear in this book, you'd be dead of alcohol poisoning a third of the way through.
As usual her prose is clean and deep, her ability to move the story forward with momentum and purpose is unparalleled. But the depth of depravity of the story itself is shocking. I know there was a fifth Patternmaster book that Butler let go out of print and wanted removed from her canon....it's hard to imagine how it could be worse than Clay's Ark. I'm still a little stunned any publisher green lit this thing. Yikes.
I'm still planning on reading Patternmaster to finish the series, and will probably read more of her works because her good stuff is very good indeed. But Clay's Ark has left me shaken, and will stick with me (in a bad way) for quite some time.
July 4, 2024
3 1/2 stars. For me, anything written by Octavia Butler is seminal, open to analysis but beyond critique. I'd call her a fearless writer, except that I get the feeling that the concept of 'fear' doesn't exist for her as an author. She has no problem making her readers uncomfortable - not to shock or challenge, but just to force us to look at what we'd rather not see. The first novel in this series, Wild Seed was sheer, brutal brilliance. The second, Mind of My Mind, went in a totally unexpected direction for me, but that was where it had to go. This 3rd installment feels like a Mad Max style outlier, but I am guessing that it will tie in to what has come before in the next novel. I've given it a lower star rating because it didn't have the philosophical density of the first two - it was more of a straight up action/survival story, at least compared to the others. Butler always leaves me feeling weird and unsettled in a way only she can do.
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