Cached US #KindleBookGiveaway on bsky: 6 copies of #OctaviaEButler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, over at https://bsky.app/profile/kithrup.bsky.social/post/3m5tvsyrqsk23

#ParableOfTheSower #ParabelOfTheTalents

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Book Review: Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984)

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984) is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984).1 It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read.2 It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

Note: This novel is not for readers seeking happy adventure or diverting escapism. It is an absolute bludgeon of the novel with a litany of unsettling themes, power dynamics, and disturbing scenes (rape, incest, a beheading, etc.). I apologize for the short review. Despite my appreciation of Clay’s Ark in particular, I struggle to write about Butler’s work.3

As always, there are spoilers below.

The Geography of the Wreckage

California, 2021 A.D. Across an almost “primordial” desert a few scattered “communities were dead or dying” (18). A few foolish, and well-armed, souls brave the distances between urban “enclaves” in armored vehicles. In the cities, the enclaves are “islands” surrounded by “vast, crowded, vulnerable residential areas through which ran sewers of utter lawlessness” (32).

Blake Jason Maslin, a doctor of internal medicine, travels across the expanse with his twin sixteen-year-old daughters (Keira and Rane), both “naive, and sheltered” (32), on a final trip to see a relative. Keira suffers from an untreatable leukemia. She confides that she sees “herself fading away” (6). On the way they’re abducted by Eli, Meda, and their strange, unusually thin, ill-looking, followers. They take Blake and his daughters to an isolated homestead with gardens, solar panels, and strange children that seem to run on all four limbs. “Everybody here looks like me, sooner or later” Meda confesses (23). Under duress, Blake is paired off with Meda, who scratches his face. Rane with Eli. And Keira with Stephen Kaneshiro. The ritualized infection commences.

A few years earlier, an injured Eli, possessed by an extra-human will to survive, happened across the homestead and its original inhabitants, followers of an “angry God” (56). Despite comments about his race, they took him in and cared for him. We soon learn Eli, a geologist, was the sole survivor of a sabotaged spaceship, the titular Clay’s Ark. On their voyage, the crew encountered an alien pathogen that develops a parasitical relationship with those that survive the infection. In return for heightened senses, the infected must infect and impregnate others or bear offspring of the infected. After impregnating the three surviving women of the homestead, Eli plans his first abduction (101). He promises, as if to convince himself that he’s still a human with a moral code, to only spread the disease as much as necessary to satiate the new biological urge. He’ll gather his new “family” at the homestead. They’ll develop a strategy to convince the infected to stay. If someone escapes, the world will be transformed. But everyone knows that isolation will only last so long. Someone will escape.

Both the narrative of Blake and his family and Eli’s simultaneously map the new nature of the wreckage and presage the future apocalyptic transformation that looms.

New Families in the Wasteland

As academic study of Butler’s science fiction abounds, I will only briefly discuss an element that I personally found fascinating–in this instance the unnerving new sense of family and connection Eli and his followers create.4 Butler explains that the works in the Patternist sequence sought to write a good story about a “strange community of people.”5 Butler’s careful world building creates a pervasive sense of social and moral disconnect. The wealthy and privileged, like Blake and his children, rarely travel outside of their urban oasis. The world outside can barely be described as human: “what the rat packs did to each other and to unprotected city-dwellers was not something [Blake] wanted to expose his daughters to” (137). Thus, inside the oases they attempt to “recreate the safe world of […] sixty years past for [their] children” (32). Blake’s trip is an attempt to reaffirm the ties that bind: Keira’s illness, and the fear of imminent death, made her want to visit her grandparents “one last time” (4).

Eli’s arrival in the past at the homestead and his abduction of Blake and his children reveal the strange new family in the wasteland. These are connections formed by “guilt and grief” (87). These are connections compelled through violence and an alien biology. While the children of the infected appear inhuman, they are still children. These are connections welded by the desire to make some semblance of normality in the abnormality of it all. Even Gabriel Boyd, the patriarch of the religious community that took Eli in, must push away the knowledge that Eli caused the devastation, and begs him to take care of Meda, his daughter (85). Rane must confront her desire for Eli. Keira must confront her feelings for Stephen: “You’ve sacrificed my family to spare yours” (93), yet when he puts her arm around her, “she was surprised that the gesture did not offend her” (91). Both girls are underage. How much is the alien microbe responsible for their actions? Blake must juggle his parental responsibility to protect his children with the need to alert the world to the illness. And Keira, in the final calculus of it all, attempts to forge a connection. The effective rendering of the moral landscape, and its networks of power, of the new age is the novel’s most unsettling, and brilliant, element.

Final Thoughts

As with Mind of My Mind (1977), I found Butler’s brutal view of power–and its interplay with relationships, gender, and race–a heady mixture. Perhaps due to the vividly realized dystopian backdrop of the community surrounded by the dry desert air and looming hyper-violent doom, I struggled less with Butler’s deliberately stark, clipped, and direct prose than in the past. I even found a metaphor tucked in here and there that accentuated the horror of it all. Simultaneously, Butler’s use of the two parallel narratives creates a simple but effective way to reveal backstory and the horrifying dichotomy of Eli’s position as bringer of the plague and community builder.

Clay’s Ark (1984) supplants Mind of My Mind (1977) as my favorite in the Patternist sequence. I am including both Wild Seed (1980) and Patternmaster (1976) despite abandoning both (I’ll try one of them again next year). I even think Clay’s Ark challenges Kindred (1979), which I never managed to review, as my favorite Butler novel so far.6

If my earlier caveat did not scare you off, go find a copy.

• Danny Flynn’s cover for the 1991 edition

• Geoff Taylor’s cover for the 1985 edition

Notes

1. A short story “A Necessary Being” was posthumously published in 2014. It takes place after Clay’s Ark (1984) but before her disowned Survivor (1978). I highly recommend Gerry Canavan’s monograph Octavia E. Butler (2016). As I’ve mentioned on the site before, Canavan explores Butler’s frequent rewrites, reconceptualization(s) of earlier material, and abandoned projects via her surviving papers. ↩︎
2. P. C. Jersilds’ After the Flood (1982, trans. 1986) and The Genocides, Thomas M. Disch (1965) might give Butler a run for her money. That said, I found both Disch and Jersild’s novels more grotesques in a Boschian sort of way than an relentlessly bleak moral conundrum. Russ’ We Who Are About To… (1976) also came to mind — but I found humor in her way of telling, not so much with Butler. ↩︎
3. Probably due to the spectacular range of scholarship written about her work. ↩︎
4. A brief search reveals a lot of academic scholarship on the nature of “family” in the novel. I have not read it before writing the review for fear of being dissuaded from writing anything. ↩︎
5. Referenced nabbed from Wikipedia. The article on the sequence cites “An interview with Octavia E. Butler” from 1997 in Callaloo, 20 (1), 47–66. ↩︎
6. I’ve also read and wrote a short review for Dawn (1987). ↩︎

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1980s #bookReview #bookReviews #books #fiction #OctaviaEButler #paperbacks #sciFi #scienceFiction #spaceships

🥳 @chano_san on PeerTube! 🥳
Watch here: https://peertube.anon-kenkai.com/videos/watch/119924

#LetsTry #Silksong #OctaviaEButler #YAFantasy #peertube #livestream #stream #twitch

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
-- Octavia E. Butler

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #OctaviaEButler #Cowardice #Fools #Government #Leadership #Lies #Politics #Wisdom

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Driftwood #Florida

„Doro ist ein Unsterblicher. Er tötet ohne Reue, wenn er von Körper zu Körper springt, um sich selbst am Leben zu erhalten. [...]“ (Umschlagtext)

Nach „Xenogenesis“ brauche ich auf jedem Fall mehr Stoff von Octavia E. Butler. Gesagt, getan. 😉 […]

Mehr: https://tinyurl.com/54sd7hmj

(Übersetzung: Will Platten)

#lesefrühling #roman #octaviaebutler #heyne #diezukunft #scifi #unsterbliche #gestaltwandler #menschheit #menschenzucht #lesen #leselust #leseratte #bücher #literatur

I started to research but found it hard to decide.
What do you recommend is the best book to start with when I want to read #OctaviaEButler.
I usually lean towards Sci-Fi but I know she wrote great non-SF stuff as well. #books

Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.

— Octavia E. Butler

#OctaviaEButler #OctaviaButler #Earthseed

"All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you." #OctaviaEButler

„Am Leben!
Noch immer am Leben.
Wieder am Leben.“ (Seite 7)

Man könnte ja meinen, wenn man ein paar Jahrzehnte viel und regelmäßig liest, hätte man irgendwann alles gesehen. […]

Mehr: https://tinyurl.com/fzkmnh3w

Kurz und gut: Ähem, kein Gerede – einfach lesen. Los!

(Übersetzung: Barbara Heidkamp)

#lesewinter #roman #octaviaebutler #heyne #scifi #menschheit #aliens #zukunft #gene #gender #gewalt #kinder #ausbeutung #lesen #leselust #lesenswert #leseratte #bücher #literatur

Horsey heroines and strange new worlds… #octaviaebutler #myreading #readindies @OxUniPress

Books about books or favourite authors always make pleasurable reading, and I've covered on the blog a few titles released by Oxford University Press in their 'My Reading' series. The latter is an interesting idea where an author or book is discussed by another writer, and I've very much enjoyed their looks at Dickens, Proust and Colette. However, a new title, released tomorrow,…

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2025/02/12/horsey-heroines-and-strange-new-worlds-octaviaebutler-myreading-readindies-oxunipress/

Yet another prediction from #OctaviaEButler in the 90’s that came true: lethal #Measles epidemics.

Measles for heavens’ sake!! Fucking idiots antivaxxers!!!

From: @arstechnica
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/113964819462034605

Das zweite Buch, dass ich euch ans Herz legen möchte ist das Buch
Kindred von Octavia E. Butler

Im Buch geht es um eine junge Afro-Amerikanerin, die unfreiwillig mehrmalig in die Vergangenheit katapultiert wird und sich dort mit der Sklaverei konfrontiert wird.
"Ein packender Roman über das rassistische System der Sklaverei, familiäre Verstrickungen und gesellschaftliche Verantwortung." – Verlag w_orten&meer

#BlackHistoryMonth #OctaviaEButler #OctaviaButler

My gods, this book!

"Embrace diversity.
Unite--
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed."

Chapter preface, Chapter 17
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler

#ParableOfTheSower
#OctaviaEButler
#OctaviaButler
#IAmReading
#Booksadon

"I've noticed that people who have a little bit of power tend to use it."

The Parable of the Sower, pg 122.
Octavia Butler

#BlackHistoryMonth
#IAmLearning
#OctaviaEButler
#OctaviaButler
#ParableOfTheSower
#IAmReading

@DoomsdaysCW @susurros

Gotta boost mentions of my favorite authors.

#OctaviaEButler

@noiseician at times it seems they are convinced #ParableOfTheSower and #ParableOfTheTalents are not #SciFi #Dystopic novels, but a blueprint for making America great again.

After all, it was #OctaviaEButler who coined the phrase #MAGA back in the 1990s

3/3

De verdad, es difícil de leer en esta actualidad 🥺😢

Que los poderosos violan la ley sin consecuencias, pues claman hacerlo “en nombre de dios” y por “el bien mayor”, lo que a la vista de muchos legitimiza sus acciones.

Qué horror, hace 30 años era ficción y hoy es una realidad.

#OctaviaEButler #TheParableOfTheSower #TheParableOfTheTalents #ParábolaDelSembrador #ParábolaDeLosTalentos