Clay's Ark

"They were watching a movie from the ranch's family library - a 1998 classic about the Second Coming of Christ. There had been a whole genre of such films just before the turn of the century. Some were religious, some antireligious, some merely exploitive - Sodom-and-Gomorrah films. Some were cause-oriented - God arrives as a woman or a dolphin or a throwaway kid. And some were science fiction. God arrives from Eighty-two Eridani Seven.

"Well, maybe God had arrived a few years later from Proxima Centauri Two. God in the form of a deadly microbe that for its own procreation made a father try to rape his daughter - and made the daughter not mind."

'Clay's Ark' was the final novel written in the Patternist series. The other novels explored the history of the Patternists in depth, but until this book Butler hadn't dealt with the Clayarks, the Patternists' enemies in 'Patternmaster', since their appearance in the first book. 'Clay's Ark' rectifies this, giving the Clayarks the depth and history they were previously lacking, in a book that is almost as complex and compelling as 'Wild Seed', the Patternists' own origin story. 'Clay's Ark' artfully echoes 'Wild Seed', with its themes of agency, control and abusive relationships, and again winds up exploring the compromises people make when up against powerful forces they can neither fight nor control.

Clay's Ark is a spaceship powered by telekinesis, invented by Clay Dana from 'Mind Of My Mind'. It went on a mission to Proxima Centauri Two, where its entire crew was quickly infected by a disease which gives the victims enhanced strength and healing but with a compulsion to spread the disease and to procreate. The individuals born from infected parents are the Clayarks from 'Patternmaster', sphynx-like humans who run on four legs. Eli, the sole survivor from the mission, lands on Earth and tries to contain the disease and his compulsion to spread it to a small community. There are obvious parallels between the parasitic Clayark disease and Doro, as well as between Doro and Eli, two patriarchs trying to build a community they can live in on the fringes of society by dubious means.

The story is told from the point of view of a family - Blake and his two daughters, Rane and Keira, the latter who is dying of a terminal disease - who are captured by Eli and his community. The Clayark disease has a compulsion to spread, and Eli knows this will mean the end of humanity as we know it, so he tries to control it by living in an isolated commune and only picking up new people when they need to. 'Clay's Ark' follows Blake, Rane and Keira as they are captured and try to make their escape, before realising that for the sake of humanity they will have to make a new life in Eli's commune. Unfortunately a disastrous shoot-out with a rogue biker gang ends in tragedy and with the Clayark disease being spread across the world.

Like Doro, much of Eli's control is sexual in nature. In this respect Eli's commune resembles a cult, only the alien infection itself is part of what is reinforcing this control. However Eli has been doing this for a lot shorter than Doro, and he still has doubts and qualms of conscience. He does care for the well being of his people, especially the Clayark children, who he knows will be outcast by the rest of human society, caged and studied and hunted, simply because of people's difficulty extending human empathy to those who look different to them. He is sympathetic to Rane's illness. But at the same time, he knows that the nature of the Clayark disease is robbing him of his humanity; a lot of the decent things he does are a conscious effort on his part to maintain the humanity left to him. One of the more frightening aspects of the Clayark disease is that because it rewrites so much of a person's personality and biology, everyone infected has to question whether or not they are still truly human or if they are meat puppets being driven around by parasites under the delusion that they are still humans, a kind of extreme extrapolation of parasite modification of host behaviour seen in something like Toxoplasma gondii infection. Butler doesn't give her characters or her readers any easy answers on this one.

While 'Wild Seed' is set in our historical past, 'Clay's Ark' is set fifteen minutes into the future. As a result we get to see a different side of Butler's skill in world building and extrapolation. Her depiction of a future United States in which the middle classes live in gated communities while outside of these social order has broken down and violent gangs rule the motorways is vivid and disturbing. But once again, it is Butler's talent for creating memorable characters and putting them in morally complex situations that carries the book. Blake, Rane and Keira are all sympathetic, well developed characters, and Butler is brutally unsparing with them. Blake's attempt to save his family ultimately winds up dooming humanity as he knows it. Once the Clayark disease has spread through the world, there will be nothing left for the mutes, and the Patternists and the Clayarks will inherit the Earth.