Clay's Ark (Patternist, #3) in What's the Name of That Book???

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Clay's Ark (Patternist, #3)

Octavia E. Butler

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Jan 20, 2020 Thomas rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: e-book, 2020, science-fiction

Though considered a part of the Patternist series, this book only has a tangential relationship to it: Dana Clay, who appeared in Mind of My Mind, is the inventor of a spaceship that takes astronauts to Alpha Proxima and returns them with an alien parasite. The rest of the story is about what that parasite does, and how it first breaks out across the planet. Dana isn't even a character, just an informational aside to loop the two worlds together. The book becomes another post-apocalyptic plague Though considered a part of the Patternist series, this book only has a tangential relationship to it: Dana Clay, who appeared in Mind of My Mind, is the inventor of a spaceship that takes astronauts to Alpha Proxima and returns them with an alien parasite. The rest of the story is about what that parasite does, and how it first breaks out across the planet. Dana isn't even a character, just an informational aside to loop the two worlds together. The book becomes another post-apocalyptic plague novel, though it's a very good one.

What I liked most about the book is how Butler played with the concepts of the antagonists and protagonists in the book. The book opens with a kidnapping in an already violent, volatile society, so we immediately rank the kidnappers as the antagonists and the kidnappees as the protagonists. She flips this, though, not just by showing the kidnappers having a nobler motive than first expected, but by having the kidnappees try to escape: they're infected, and they know it, so escaping means dooming the rest of the world to the infection.

This part of the story makes for an interesting read, and elevates it above the usual survival plots that most post-apocalyptic fiction uses, but in the final act, Butler has them kidnapped again, this time by a group of brutal, violent, depraved survivalists, and it turns into a more typical post-apocalypse story. Butler uses this section of the narrative to speak of submission and power, but it's overshadowed by the brutality of this group, which feels thrown in just to show how bad this time is. It didn't start out as that kind of book, and I was disappointed to see it make that turn after having a unique approach for the first two acts.

Regardless, the story is worth reading (it's almost required, given what happens in Patternmaster, and to understand what the clayarks are), and it's impressive that Butler manages to write an entire series of books, each of which can stand alone with its own self-contained story, instead of threading one plot among four (five?) books. Modern writers could learn a lot from how Butler created this entire series. ...more

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Mar 08, 2024 Ray rated it really liked it

Very short and sweet. Stands alone from the series it belongs to (and not really sure how it relates...oh how I wish I had read in publication order and not the internal timeline of the series!)

I really appreciate how focused Butler is on enslavement. I have read in interviews that this wasn't always conscious for her, but Clay's Ark illustrates the pervasive and zero-sum destructive nature of slavery. ...more

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Nov 17, 2022 Melissa Rochelle rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: ebook, read-2022

When I started this series, I just followed the order of the bundle I purchased. I'm glad I did BUT when I came to this book I had NO IDEA what it had to do with the Pattern. Despite that, it's really interesting. ...more

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