Clay's Ark

This book was a bit of a slog. As much as I like Octavia Butler's books, she definitely has some issues. And this one puts them in sharp relief.

Butler has great ideas, and she does a great job of using science fiction to comment on society. I usually come out of her books with a lot to think about. That's part of the problem, really. I want more from her. Her books have a tendency to resemble outlines more than stories. There's no connective tissue between the big events. Characters are introduced as plot points and discarded as soon as they're not useful anymore.

At the end of Ming of My Mind, I was frustrated that Doro and Anyanwu both died. I had become invested in their relationship over the centuries and in their competing visions for the future. But Mary was interesting enough, and I was looking forward to seeing where her story went.

It turns out that it went nowhere. This book deals with an entire different set of characters facing an entirely different problem. If not for the brief mention of Clay, also a minor character in the previous book, it could be from an entirely different series.

Even that wouldn't be so bad, but this book is so short that I never really got to know and care about the huge, new cast of characters. It was frustrating.

I would have liked for this book to be twice as long. There are so many hints about the dystopian state of the world that never get expanded on. The characters turn on a dime, and I wanted to learn more about their histories and motivations. Instead I got a bunch of stock character types thrown into a bizarre situation whose ending is so inevitable that the moral debates fell flat.

The next book is even shorter, which is a point for me reading it. But I also feel no real urgency. All the characters I cared about are dead, and I'd be surprised if any characters from this book showed up again. And I just don't want to read a book where I don't care about the people in it.

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