Pros: A brutally violent look into Octavia's fictional future.
Cons: Starts off slowly.
The Bottom Line: Read the entire Patternmaster series. It's not just science fiction, it's a study on human relationships, and much more. Clay's Ark is just one major tale piecing it all together.
shaithis's Full Review: Octavia E. Butler - Clay's Ark
Finally I have finished writer Octavia Butler's Patternmaster series and all I can say is what a ride.
There were amazing ups and some surprising downs to this series, but as a whole I would have to say it's been one of the best I’ve ever read in science fiction.
Clay's Ark is the final novel in the series and is it ever a doozy. First introduced to us in her initial novel of the series 'Patternmaster', this is the story of an organism that mixes with humans. It ends up essentially genetically mutating our children and a new race is born. In the first novel these mutants are called clayarks. At that time, we never really knew how they got that way or what happened to them, but now we do.
What is amazing about this series is how Ms. Butler has written these stories all over the place in time. For example, Patternmaster is really the last novel in this series (according to a timeline). Survivor, written before Clay's Ark, is the story of the last remaining humans not affected by the new virus leaving Earth. The other novels are similar to that effect.
Clay's Ark takes her time travel to the extreme though. Each chapter that you read bounces you from one timeframe to another. I'll have to admit it took me until midway through the novel to fully comprehend what the heck was going on and get used to jumping back and forth.
The novel itself is has many individual stories. The most important one is that of the astronaut Eli. His ship crashed back on Earth and the entire crew died, except him. Infected with this new organism he runs from the scene into the general populace, infecting everyone he comes into contact with. Eventually he creates a family of infected humans. The organism polluting their bodies forces them to pro-create all the time and to find new hosts.
How fast will this organism infect all of humanity? Will there even be a humanity left? Will these infected humans do the right thing and destroy themselves in time?
Octavia Butler is usually quite a graphic read which is one reason I like her. The novel though got quite horrific and brutal, especially near the end. Cutting off a sixteen-year old girl's head with a dull blade? Gang rape, incest, body mutilation, Ms. Butler held nothing back for the big conclusion to her Patternmaster series.
I recommend everyone read these novels. After reading her previous novel Wild Seed, I didn’t really get into this one immediately like I have all her other works. However, once she got going midway through the novel I don't know if I was just stunned and unwilling to put the novel down or shocked at the brutality of Octavia's futuristic world. This has got to be the best science fictionish type of a series I have ever read, period.
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