Wednesday, June 12, 2019

45:100 Clay's Ark by Octavia Butler

Patternmaster - Seed to Harvest #3

Earth but set into the future.  A father, who remembers a time before, driving with his two daughters, one of whom has incurable cancer, in a world where few people drive outside of their city neighborhoods and now that they've been abducted, he fully understands why.  But in this case, their abduction is nothing like he could have imagined in his wildest dreams.

Clay's Ark was a ship that went into space on a mission of discovery and that crashed back home with no survivors, or so everyone thought.  There was no way to know that Eli did survive but that he is no longer fully human but instead a hybrid host with a parasite from another world that is intent upon survival and spreading itself far and wide.  It is virulent, tenacious, and single-minded of purpose and initiates almost uncontrollable procreation instincts upon those it infects.  Eli has tried to maintain some parts of his humanity but really, the best he can do is keep himself and those he infects as isolate as possible to not doom the entire planet.  To transmit this to another human only requires fluid transfer and they continue to look human which makes it that much easier to continue to transmit but then the children are born and there is no way anyone could mistake them for human but the urge to keep them safe and make more is such a strong compulsion there is no resisting it.


This was written last in the Patternmaster series and it's inclusion here is strange.  I figured out pretty quickly that the Clay the ship is named from is Clay Dana from Mind of My Mind but he's not actually present.  There aren't any people from Doro's line which we've been following the last two books.  I'm sure it will make sense once I read Patternmaster but right now it seems like it belongs to a totally different universe, an interesting universe mind but just not this one.

Page count: 224p/10,993p ytd/321,688p lifetime

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