Clay's Ark
Review
Clay’s Ark, by , is the third book in the Patternist series. It follows Eli Doyle, an astronaut, after he has returned to earth with an alien infection and attempts to contain it.
Like the previous books in the Patternist series, Clay’s Ark focuses on a loosely-defined “family” trying to survive in a world hostile to their differences. In Wild Seed, it was Doro and his children; in Mind of My Mind, it was Mary and the Patternists; and in this book, it is Eli and his ranch of people infected with the alien parasite brought back from Proxima Centauri.1 All three of those characters—Doro, Mary, and Eli—are forced to perform questionable, even evil, acts because of their biology, and the stories revolve around how they choose to act despite those constraints.
Clay’s Ark is also a slave story, but here the master is a parasite rather than a person. Those infected slowly lose their free will, compelled to spread the infection. Eli and his people struggle to retain their humanity by spreading the parasite slowly and in a controlled manner. They aim to prevent the extinction of the human race while still being forced by the parasite to kidnap new victims.
The plotting was a lot better than in Mind of My Mind, but overall, this series has convinced me that is more focused on characters than plots. The characters are more interesting than the ones in Mind of My Mind, but far weaker than Doro and Anyanwu in Wild Seed.
It feels like fell into the worldbuilder’s trap. She wrote Patternmaster and then seemed to think “Hmm, I wonder how this came to be”, leading her to write Mind of My Mind and this book. Both books fill in gaps in the history, but don’t tell compelling stories.
I’ll be moving on to Patternmaster next, and I’m looking forward to finally wrapping up the Patternist series.
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Which reminds me a bit of ’s The Andromeda Strain. ↩