Clay's Ark

Octavia Butler Clay's Ark (1984)
Having established that Octavia Butler could certainly write, I had her on my mental list of authors whose books I would buy on the strength of name alone; but she sort of fell off the list after I read Dawn which was beautifully written but surprisingly dull. Then I came across this and decided that Dawn had probably been an anomaly.

Apparently not.

There's a lot to like about Clay's Ark, and as usual the sheer quality of Butler's narrative makes most of her contemporaries read like hacks. It's the story of an isolated community trying to get by after the apocalyptic breakdown of society - the sort of tale at which Butler was adept. They've contracted some kind of transformative virus brought back from a distant planet on the ship from which the novel takes its title. The virus either kills our people or bestows upon them seemingly superhuman qualities in terms of strength, enhanced senses, and accelerated healing powers. In fact the virus turns those it doesn't kill into randier versions of Wolverine out of the X-Men, and by the point at which we join the story, they've started having kids, and the kids aren't quite human.

Other than this, not a whole lot happens. Mostly it's characters wrestling with transformation into something other than human, striving to contain the virus whilst getting by in an increasingly hostile world. The chapters alternate between present and annoying flashbacks which don't really tell us anything we couldn't have worked out and serve only to interrupt the flow of the story, which eventually culminates with a couple of chapters of gratuitous torture and child-rape at the hands of a rival outlaw community. I couldn't see the point. Clay's Ark is probably something or other to do with how we deal with our own animal urges, but I'm not convinced it actually says anything.

It was okay. I've read worse. It wasn't terrible.

Dawn

Octavia E. Butler Dawn (1987)
I'm not sure if it's me or her, but each Octavia Butler novel I read seems less satisfying than the last. I recall thinking that Parable of the Sower was tremendous, and that Mind of My Mind had its moments even if it wasn't quite so convincing, but this one became a chore after the initial novelty of the premise had worn off.

The premise is that the Earth is fucked following some sort of war, and the human race has wiped itself out but for a few survivors rescued by an advanced and apparently altruistic alien species. The Oankali as they are known keep these survivors in a craft resembling a primal Eden, and are reviving them one by one, here and there making improvements at a genetic level which will aid in their survival once they all get to go back to Earth. Among the first to be revived is Lilith, the symbolism of whom is probably fairly obvious, herself being named after the Biblical Adam's first wife according to sources you're all perfectly capable of investigating under your own steam. You would think she might appreciate not only being alive, but the Oankali having cured her cancer and given her a sort of healing ability to ensure that it will neither trouble her nor anyone upon whom she lays hands ever again; but the narrative is preoccupied with coercion, things done to people against their will ostensibly for their own good, power dynamics and the like, and so Lilith is none too happy about it. As the novel increasingly comes to resemble an episode of The Outer Limits, others are revived, and none seemingly any happier about the situation than Lilith. They don't really trust her, or the supposed goodwill of the Oankali. They don't believe they're on a spacecraft. Dawn doesn't quite stoop to an angry Ernest Borgnine demanding to be let off of this stinking ship because he gots a business to run, but it comes surprisingly close.

Now, Lilith decided, was the time to Awaken two more people. She Awoke two every two or three days, no longer worrying about Awakening men since there had been no real trouble. She did deliberately Awaken a few more women than men in the hope of minimising violence.

Very wise, because you know how those men can be quite rapey at times, and who knows what could happen? If it has a penis the chance is that it will thump someone and take their dinner money before the day is over. I understand that the circumstances of the novel are supposed to be weird and exceptional, and Butler is dealing in metaphors up to a point, and as a black woman author it might be deemed fitting that she should address certain subjects traditionally ignored by other writers, but Jesus - just a little bit of faith in human nature really would have gone a long way here, as opposed to just assuming that everyone, left to their own devices, is going to try to screw you in one way or another. The sheer misanthropy of this tale, or specifically in the portrayal of its human characters makes Ayn Rand look like Martin Luther King. It reads like the work of someone who never left the house at all in some unfortunate respects.

That said, I suppose as part of a trilogy there might be some purpose to such a bleak view being given in the opening act, one which may only become apparent in the second or third instalments; but even so, as an author so frequently praised for her wonderful characterisation, there seems to be precious little of it here. The Oankali are nicely written, particularly as a plausibly alien species with three genders, but then they aren't really explored to any extent greater than that of Lilith's resentful bewilderment. Considering Dawn as the work of an author who was quite clearly more than capable of holding both sentence and story together, I'm astonished at how little I found myself caring about any of this one.

Mind of My Mind

Octavia E. Butler Mind of My Mind (1977)
It seems fair to say that black female science-fiction writers are fairly thin on the ground, and since Octavia Butler passed on in 2006, they've been sadly thinner on the ground to the tune of one, although I say that not so much for the sake of ticking any particular diversity box as the simple fact of her having been a fairly exceptional author and someone who really should have achieved wider recognition than she did.

Mind of My Mind was her second novel, and second of a series telling a much larger story spanning thousands of years in the lives of a roughly dynastic breed of telepaths. It's probably not what you would call hard science-fiction - as if that really matters - and oddly, it reminds me a little of Chris Claremont's New Mutants comic back when Bill Sienkiewicz was drawing thoughtful tales of young people struggling with weird powers, a book that had strayed a long way from standard superhero pastures, although then of course some idiot invented Rob fucking Liefeld and everything turned to shit. The details of the tale, the actual story onto which Mind of My Mind is bolted isn't that remarkable and, it might be argued, was later done to greater effect in Stephen Baxter's Coalescent; but Butler had a wonderfully persuasive narrative voice, a pleasantly gritty blue collar feel which was nevertheless able to convey subtle points without any of the usual showing off or ham-fisted allegorising one might expect of a novel such as this. In other words, she drew on her experience as a black woman without trading on her ethnicity as a virtue in itself, thus allowing for the sort of  communication of ideas which can sometimes be a problem with novels wherein such issues are raised.

Mind of My Mind is quite complex in terms of subject, being about relationships, power and coercion. Whilst some ideas regarding slavery enter the equation, there's much more going on here, with a dynamic in which the owned are simply obliged to accept their servitude to a master who seems at times quite likeable. There's no dramatic breaking of chains in the face of a scowling despot, nothing so obvious to intrude or detract from what is actually being said; and what Butler may have been saying is probably up to individual reader. I've seen this book criticised for raising issues and then failing to deal with them, but this strikes me as a basic misunderstanding, the assumption that a black woman writer is necessarily obliged to make bold, shouty statements just in case any of us had failed to realise that racism is bad, like in one of those stories where we set down the book and exclaim to ourselves hang on, these poor robots are being treated just like they used to treat the slaves!

I think my only criticism of Mind of My Mind is that the voice of the narrator is significantly more engaging than that of any of the subsidiary characters, all of whom get their fifteen minutes, but it's nevertheless a great book.

Martian Time-Slip

Philip K. Dick Martian Time-Slip (1962)
At the risk of writing the same Philip K. Dick review over and over, and further to the general theme of the disparity between that which Dick wrote and that which everyone seems to think he wrote, we come to Martian Time-Slip, a novel which so impressed me first time around that I actually got my mother to read it, no mean feat given how she seems to regard everything written, painted and performed since about 1400 as probably crap.

Aside from Martian Time-Slip being conspicuously lacking in android bounty-hunters screaming but am I even real? as they fall to their knees, arms cinematically outstretched to the heavens just as it starts to piss down; and aside from the complete absence of hard boiled action heroes - a quality shared with every single story Dick ever wrote - like We Can Build You from the same year, this would be a mainstream novel but for a few scenic details, at least in so much as any of Dick's writing can be considered mainstream. The story revolves around the desperate lives of Martian colonists scratching out a living in a hostile environment which harks back to the old west, or even to the Australian outback; water is scarce, and autism may turn out to be the condition of those with an unorthodox relationship to the passage of time. Of course, such elements constitute narrative language, the means by which the story is told rather than its subject.

Philip K. Dick's novels examine the nature of reality, often from the schizophrenic perspective of there being a different world hidden behind that which all but a few supposedly perceptive individuals can see. This, I would argue, is a structural aspect of Dick's perception rather than its central theme, said theme being truth itself: that which should be rather than that which is, the pure forms of being unsullied by entropic forces, or gubbish as they are rendered in Martian Time-Slip. I could be getting carried away here, but what I take from this, Dick's central idea, is a desire for progression or forward motion which relates to the notion of God equating to change - as I think Octavia Butler put it - change as differentiated from stasis, Dick's nightmare:

It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.

This passage is quoted in the foreword by Brian Aldiss - which I feel I should probably mention in case it appears that I'm trying to pass this off as some devastatingly original of my own - but it expresses a sentiment with which Dick remained preoccupied throughout his life, one which is restated a decade later in A Scanner Darkly:

That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected.

So, to get to the point - that's what the guy was on about, not all those Blade Runnerisms which are in any case thematically closer to the novels of William Gibson than anything Dick ever wrote.

Just sayin'.

Martian Time-Slip ambles along nicely, chuckling to itself without really trying for comic effect, its characters more in the spirit of Bukowski than Asimov; and like the man's best, it builds up a tremendous head of sorrow without conspicuously rooting for sympathy - a sad and beautiful song where most writers just about manage tunes. Instead of waiting for this to be stripped of all point and character as a shit film with some blandly photogenic cock playing Jack Bohlen - casting with all the sensitivity of Sylvester Stallone as two-fisted Franz Kafka - just read the fucking book, okay. Sometimes the book is how the story was meant to be told all along.