Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler*
167 pages
Published 1984
Read from July 27 to July 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
*Denotes a reread.
I made an early, halfhearted effort to diversify my sci-fi reading back when I first became an independent adult with access to money and a bookstore, circa 2002. I'd seen the arresting mass market cover art as a teen, and it made enough of an impression on me that it was one of the first few dozen books I hauled off to my barracks room, on foot, five and a half miles away. (Not through snowstorms, perhaps, but definitely through the heat of Fayetteville summers.) Unlike Dhalgren (which I still plan to get around to) and The Mists of Avalon (which I no longer desire to read, what with the child molestation allegations against Marion Zimmer Bradley, not to mention the general boringness of the book), I actually read Clay's Ark in a timely manner. After twelve years I recalled almost nothing of it: until I read Parable of the Talents earlier this year, I thought I remembered reading that book instead. What I thought I recalled -- a Black man with mutant powers surviving the aftermath of an apocalyptic plague, hiding out from torch-wielding normies in an abandoned house far out in the desert -- turned out to be spottily accurate at best.
Once I got to reading it again, I remembered more scenes as I got to them, in that "Oh yeah, I've been here before" feeling I get for seemingly any book I read before 2003 or so. I didn't remember all the rape gangs and incest; maybe I glossed over that stuff when I was 19, who knows? Reading it in its proper sequence in the Patternist series, I found it slighter than I remembered, an entertaining but brief book that amounts to a serviceable amount of backstory for a faction in 1976's Patternmaster, which I have yet to read. The decaying American West of the 2020s reads like a prototype for the much more vivid post-collapse society of the Parable series. It isn't the great, haunting novel I seemingly remembered, but on its own it functions well, and tells a tidy little story.
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