Reviews

Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler

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yanareadit's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.5

robynrambles's review against another edition

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challenging mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

chlloeann's review

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dark emotional tense medium-paced

Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.5

Brutal! Like, multiple gang-rapes-brutal. Like broo-TAL as they pronounce it in Tirol. But that's not why I liked it... I just feel like I need to say that first. So triggers be warned!

In the about the author blurb we all know and love she calls herself "a pessimist if I'm not careful." What is interesting is her most pessimistic futures, like this one, seem to actually be upon us, more or less. This book takes place now, in our time, and I always love that when I read old SF that takes place in the early 21st Century and it's all really terrible and I'm like, yeah, that's pretty close to how it is.

For a while I was thinking, this could be a hit HBO series. Two foxy mixed-race sisters at the center of the story, and a real page turner... something you would binge-watch... tons of bondage, etc. The "psychological horror" as another reviewer described it, meaning the bits where the characters wrestle with their rapey 'compulsions' ... and I think the biggest appeal for a TV series nowadays is the insider/outsider thing, the stigmatized (in this case, actually monstrous) characters who become more and more sympathetic the more we understand about them ... these characters would be a group people would like to identify with, the way Harry Potter fans are like, "I'm a wizard not a muggle cuz I read this" or Orphan Black fans are in the Clone Club or the whole vampire trip kids get into. But then things got so broo-TAL that I was like, um, maybe this is not quite ready for prime time.

Yeah, there's the obvious sort of AIDS reference in a book that came out in 1984, but it's more the 'compulsions' that makes this exceptional. It's going to sound trite in my words, you'll have to take my word for it that this book handles it much better, but it's kind of like, she poses the question, what makes humans human? and answers the question with "not raping people." I happened to read the rape chapter in [book:Men Explain Things to Me|18528190] around the same time, so I am really glad to see the topic addressed in this way, like, this is a problem at the center of all our problems. And then she makes it more interesting by making most of the not-raping-people people be half-aliens who need to rape and some of the hey-ho-let's-rape-people people be fully homo sapiens who are just assholes.

There's a lot of nasty stuff in here about poor people living in "sewers" and "cesspools" which are the novel's slang words for ghetto, slum, skid-row or whatever, partly to underline how much worse those places are in the early 21st Century compared with the height of the Reagan disaster. Although I guess that's not totally true. This novel is kind of pre-crack epidemic I guess. I confess that a P.C. voice in me wanted something about the violent crimes of the wealthy, because the poor are pretty damn demonized in here. But you can't have it all, I guess.

I have no idea how this fits in to the Patternmaster series. I read the first two, and this just seems to have nothing to do with the others at all. I am a little nervous about the fourth one, if the characters from the first two are in a post-Clay's Ark world... that is going to be bleak as hell. Bring it, Butler!

cb613's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

savaging's review

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3.0

Either this book is more violent and disturbing than the others in the series, or I'm starting to grow a little weary of plots revolving around master/slave relationships where

Spoiler

teenage girls fall in love with the older men who coerce them into sex. Also lots of father-daughter incest in all of this.

I'm fine if Butler was just into that sort of story, but when it repeats and repeats it starts to feel reductive.