VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)
By:
August 25, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
CLAY’S ARK | OCTAVIA E. BUTLER | 1984
The cool thing about Clay’s Ark is that it manages to commingle the near-future prescient apocalypse of Parable of the Sower with Butler’s weirdo alien-hybrid fascinations that suffuse most of her non-Parable works (the Xenogenesis trilogy and Patternist tetralog). The result is a slow-moving human-caused apocalypse very similar to the Parable books — decay of the social order, social hierarchy stretched and disfigured to its limits, the middle class perilously living in gated communities stuck between the desperate poor and the indifferent rich — with a fast-moving alien infestation stacked on top that threatens to solve their Social Darwinism problems with xeno-Darwinist solutions.
Like in Xenogenesis, the humans who are infected are transitional organisms — no longer really human, but not the perfected creature that their offspring will be either. As a result, the main characters can’t really relate to one another any more than the regular folk who have become itinerant, perpetually attacking or attacked “car families,” can relate to the middle class in their semi-safe gated communities or the wealthy who can afford to be fully insulated from the world. Our view of who is a protagonist and who is an antagonist shift as we survey the pressures under which the humans, the infected part-alien humans, and their fully alien but still half-relatable children, are operating. Because this tripartite structure is sitting askew atop the class structure, it makes for a really rich nine-dimensional muddle.
The protagonists shift as well. At first, we’re following the first human to be infected, the only survivor of an expedition to another planet on a desperation spaceship dubbed Clay’s Ark (leaving us to imagine how bad things are on earth that they are sending spaceships named “ark” out into the galaxy). The crew encounters the alien virus and returns to Earth only to crash with this single survivor. The point of view then shifts to a middle-class family — a doctor and his daughters — who are kidnapped by the now settled-down infected astronaut and his infected adopted family. When they are all cast together, their struggles pitted against one another, it’s hard to know who to root for.
When I first read Clay’s Ark — it might have been the first Patternist book that I read, even though it was written last and occurs second in the narrative arc — I incompletely intuited what Butler was doing with these overlapping points of view. It’s a great story, full of action and peril and sorrow, a microcosm of the alien battle for Earth… but it’s also this vast, muddy pool in which we can, sporadically, troublingly, see our own reflections. Until we can’t. At which point we must wait for the story to rotate back around; to see if we recognize ourselves again.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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