Clay's Ark

Clay's Ark is a novel by the American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 1984 and the last of her Patternist books to appear.

Eli Doyle is the only survivor of a ship that came home from the first human mission to another planet and crashed in the desert, and the organism that came back with him has changed him: his senses and his body are stronger than a human being's, and it also drives him to pass the infection on. What he has built in the desert is a kind of family and a kind of prison, and the arrival of Blake and his daughters means the group's isolation can no longer be maintained. Butler wrote the novel as a prequel, since the mutant offspring of the infection are the danger that human beings face in her earlier Patternist books, and reading it that way makes its horror more effective: the reader knows what the disease will eventually produce. Butler had been publishing science fiction for a decade by the time this appeared, and the book's interest in biology, kinship and the ethics of a species' survival runs through all of her fiction.