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    Clay's Ark
    Clay's Ark
    Clay's Ark
    Audiobook7 hours

    Clay's Ark

    Written by Octavia E. Butler

    Narrated by Robin Miles

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A powerful story of survival in unprecedented times, from the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower.
    In an alternate America marked by volatile class warfare, Blake Maslin is traveling with his teenage twin daughters when their car is ambushed. Their attackers appear sickly yet possess inhuman strength, and they transport Blake's family to an isolated compound. There, the three captives discover that the compound's residents have a highly contagious alien disease that has mutated their DNA to make them powerful, dangerous, and compelled to infect others. If Blake and his daughters do not escape, they will be infected with a virus that will either kill them outright or transform them into outcasts whose very existence is a threat to the world around them.
    In the following hours, Blake and his daughters each must make a vital choice: risk everything to escape and warn the rest of the world, or accept their new reality -- as well as the uncertain fate of the human race.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateMay 30, 2023
    ISBN9781668637814
    Clay's Ark

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    Reviews for Clay's Ark

    3.5/5

    300 ratings13 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I spent most of this book wondering how it connected to the rest of the Patternist series. And the first connection I noticed happend 72% of the way through it. I couldn't help but wonder where the Patternists were and what they were doing.

      Since the book took place in 2021 and was written in 1984, I was amazed at the things Butler predicted that turned out to be true, like the video phones.

      This book seems to be a mix of both Dawn and the Parables, having the society of the Parables and the alien reproductive interference of Dawn. I am interested to see how Clay's Ark plays into the next Patternist novel.
    • 3/5
      This is part of the Patternist series, but works as a standalone; I presume it is setting up for more intriguing clashes further on in the series. Clay's Ark doesn't seem related to the first book of the series at all (I'm out of order, haven't read book 2).
      This tells the story of a doctor and his two daughters driving along a road in the near future US, where society seems to have somewhat but not completely broken down. The family is kidnapped and brought back to the isolated ranch of a strange group of people, who appear emaciated but are super-strong and super-fast. We learn soon that they have become infected with a virus from space, through the lone survivor of the mission that was out exploring. The virus is easily passed, and the community is attempting to remain isolated so as not to pass it to the population as a whole, while still increasing their numbers a bit so as to remain viable.

      This book is a bit similar to Fledgeling, Butler's final novel, and suffers some of the same weaknesses. It's long on explication, violating that classic writing rule: "show don't tell". Her other books I've read (Wild Seed, Kindred) don't have this problem.

      But what I found most troubling is that the theme seems to be that this community is doing what it can to avoid destroying the world, which is clearly a hopeless endeavor in the long term if they continue to live on the same planet. They have some ethical boundaries they won't cross, but apparently kidnapping innocent passersby and forcibly infecting them is not quite over the line! Maybe future books will reveal Butler has a similar point of view, but it doesn't seem like it.
    • 3/5
      This was too much of a bleak and unpleasant read for me - I regretted finishing it immediately before going to sleep. It was, however, interesting to see how prominent themes from Butler's later work - alien influences on human sexuality and reproduction, consent and free will, and a near-future dystopia - are all present here, in a more compressed, starker, and less hopeful version. (Although in some ways the more complicated picture of the human future in the Xenogenesis books is more disturbing *because* it is more complex and less clear-cut.)
    • 3/5
      An abrupt right turn. If you know the chronology of the books, it's the last one she wrote which filled in the gaps of what the Clayarks were. You can read 'Patternmaster' first without the other books, but it's nice to see where they came from. In retrospect it would have been better for Patternmaster to have been rewritten with all this new information in mind.
    • 3/5
      This is Butler's version of an invasion from another planet. It is, of course, a symbiotic microbe. Its carriers have holed up, hoping to postpone a complete takeover, but this dark and violent future is about to become darker.
    • 3/5
      Not bad, but I think it's the weakest of the Patternist series. The clayark mutants from Patternmaster get their origin story here: the lone survivor of an interstellar exploration returns to a dystopian Earth carrying an extraterrestrial pathogen that gives him enhanced physical abilities and an overwhelming need to spread the contagion through bites/scratches and sexual contact. Sounds great, but a good chunk of the book is the infected explaining to the people they're about to infect why they're not evil rapists when they really kind of are.
    • 3/5

      The weakest book in the series, but still has a lot of thoughts about power.

      The book feels explorative (if that's a world) and explores power in a sci-fi setting to avoid some of our built-in biases.
    • 4/5
      Powerful, intense, riveting, a really good read. As in a couple of her other sci-fi novels, Octavia Butler begins her story in the near future, when the social fabric is pretty frayed. People live in enclaves, and the gangs and outlaws own the roads. Into this violent world comes a parasitic alien life-form. It kills but it also strengthens, and it creates a completely new kind of society.

      The novel is about the point of transition, when the humans are beginning to change into something different. How does it feel to let go of your humanity, to be driven by compulsions that you don't recognize? Butler does a good job of staying at that tight edge between will and inevitability.
    • 5/5
      In the (now) not too distant future, humanity has devolved. Civilization is now limited to walled-in enclaves, with the rest of the world a wasteland of violence. Into that wasteland, Blake and his two daughters, Rane and Keira, venture out in their Jeep Wagoneer. Only because their car is so solidly built, they are targeted by a group of super-fast, super-strong thugs who take control of their car and lead them to an isolated farm where they are introduced to Eli and his family. Eli, though, is far more than a thug - he's the only survivor of an exploratory mission to Proxima Centauri I, a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. To his great shame, he and the entire crew of the ship (called Clay's Ark) have been infected by an Alien symbiot. And this alien lifeform wants to breed.

      The structure of the story very much reminds me of the movie Memento. Two, seemingly unrelated narrative paths, one in the past and one in the present, slowly converging and from that point the real story begins. I think that was an interesting approach to the story - not quite as compelling as Memento, but then again, Butler's not trying to heighten the suspense, just to tell the story of Eli and how he came into the situation he's in.

      The most interesting part to me was that I found myself empathizing with both Blake and his family and Eli and his family. Blake was obviously desperate and was trying like hell to save both his family and the world. Eli motivations, though, were exactly the same. Exactly. But he had the constraint of the aliens who demanded that he infect or reinfect others often.

      The book was quite good, in my humble opinion. Short and to the point, but promoting solid ideas and presenting a reasonable (if not viable) potential future.
    • 4/5
      Published 14 years and seven books after Patternmaster this one goes back to explain the enemies of the telepaths, humans who’ve been infected by an alien virus. Telepaths, at least as written by Butler in this series, make lousy protagonists. These people, struggling to retain some humanity, are more noble, more interesting. A minor character in Mind of My Mind, Clay Dana, telekinetic, creates a space drive and takes 13 people to Proxima Centauri. The dystopian future in this book is very similar to the future in Parable of the Sower
    • 5/5
      Butler's characters are among the most complex and fascinating in contemporary science fiction, and this book is a short but gripping example. A father and his two daughters, one dying of leukemia, are abducted in a roadside attack by an off-the-grid village infected with an alien disease it takes all their self-control not to spread. Its side-effects give them strange powers: immunity to terrestrial illness, heightened speed and senses; but the children they raise in their hidden mountain enclave are not human, and their enhanced physical drives make avoiding murder and rape a daily struggle. The story is awash in complex, difficult-to-unravel moral situations, where you're unsure which side to be rooting for: do you side with the family struggling to escape, even if that escape might lead to a global epidemic? Does the society they live in *deserve* one? If the disease could cure his daughter's leukemia and let her live, is the father right to try to prevent her from contracting it? Are the half-alien children frightening merely because they are strange, or is there something more sinister in them? How much of your humanity can you sacrifice and still remain human? A strikingly thought-provoking, disturbing, and masterfully written novel.
    • 4/5
      Science fiction at its best.
    • 4/5
      A short seemingly simple story, but there is more to it. What makes us human? How much can we change, and still call ourselves human? Should we resist change?