Clay's Ark (The Patternist, #3)

by Octavia E. Butler

'A book that shifted my life... Epic, game-changing, moving and brilliant' VIOLA DAVIS on Wild Seed

'Butler's evocative, often troubling novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human' NEW YORK TIMES

A PATTERNIST NOVEL: BOOK THREE

Blake Maslin is a doctor. In an alternate America marked by volatile class warfare, he and his twin daughters are taken captive by armed men demanding urgent medical care.

In an isolated desert compound, the family encounter a collective of people suffering from an unknown and deadly disease. They appear sickly yet possess unnatural strength, torn between the dangerous compulsion to infect others or to hold on to their own humanity.

In the following hours, Blake and his daughters each must make a vital choice: risk everything to escape infection and warn the rest of the world, or accept their place in this strange new society.

• ISBN10: 1472281020
• ISBN13: 9781472281029
• Publish Date: 21 January 2021 (first published 1 January 1984)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Headline Publishing Group
• Imprint: Headline Book Publishing
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 240
• Language: English

Reviews

[Metaphorosis Reviews]

reviews.metaphorosis.com

3 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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