[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: USA
year: 1984
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction, horror
series: Patternist, #5
dates read: 10.7.24
Clay’s Ark is the last of Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist novels, but it’s strangely disconnected from the others, primarily because it essentially doesn’t engage at all with the events of Mind of My Mind. there’s one kind of infodumping bit towards the end of the novel that mentions that psychokinesis has been scientifically documented and was the basis of the spaceship’s faster-than-light engine, but that’s all. one — me — might have been forgiven for expecting a bit more follow-up, especially since this was immediately preceded by Wild Seed.
however, in spite of this — and that weird homophobic aside, and the Butler-typical relentless heterosexuality — I think it is the best of the Patternist novels, because it is the only one that truly seems to recognize the story it’s telling as that of a horror novel. certainly there are horrific things in Patternmaster, in Mind of My Mind, in Wild Seed (Survivor is pretty tame in comparison!), but none of them felt to me like we were meant to see them as horror.
Eli, the sole survivor of an expedition to a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, returns to Earth and establishes a kind of commune in the wilderness in order to limit the spread of an alien microorganism that has taken over his body, giving him superhuman physical abilities and a nearly irresistible urge to propagate the organism — either by infecting new humans with it or by reproducing. the sexual impulse is strong enough to drive the infected to rape, to incest, to other kinds of violence; to self-destructive rage and physical pain if they are prevented from acting on the organism’s desires. the children of the infected are not human.
the primary protagonists of the novel are a 44-year-old white doctor, Blake, and his twin, mixed-race 16-year-old daughters, Rane and Keira. they are captured — and infected — as the next wave of Eli’s settlement’s expansion. they needed more women (in this case: anyone able to bear children), essentially; Blake — and especially his medical training — is a bonus. the novel alternates between “Past” chapters (recounting Eli’s return to Earth and initial establishment of the commune) and “Present” chapters, which rotate between Blake, Rane, and Keira as they come to terms with their situation, the reality of the microorganism, and what it would mean to escape.
and it is very much a horror novel: here, in contrast to Butler’s other novels, species transformation is not desirable, is not even an unwanted but grudgingly accepted long-term good. it is a violation, unequivocally, such that even though Eli and the others in his commune have come to love their children and to appreciate — however guilty this makes them feel — their improved strength and senses, they are conscious of and haunted by the fact that their survival will, sooner or later, destroy the world. but their bodies are not their own: “Confused, she tried to pull away, but somehow her desire to pull away did not reach her hands. They did not move.” they cannot refuse the alien organism’s compulsions, cannot abstain from reproduction altogether, can fight but not end the impulse to infect. they can either cooperate — embracing what it gives them (up to and including (spoiler alert) curing Keira’s leukemia) and working to contain it — or let it control them. utterly horrifying.
other than Kindred and Survivor this might be the only one of her novels that I would actively recommend, regardless of whether you’ve read the rest of the series (in fact, it might even be improved if you don’t have the context).
moods: dark, tense