Clay's Ark

"Clay's Arc" is the prequel to her patternist-series in which the extraterrestrial and immortal patternmasters navigate through immortality, genetic engeneering and their fight with the animalistically evolved humans, the clayarks. In this novel we find out how the clayarks evolved through an extraterrestrial illness in which humans are invected with alien microbes and evolve into quadrupled beings with heightened senses through a symbiosis with them. The novel follows Blake Maslin and his daughters that are brought to a clayark community. Blake and his daughters struggle in different ways to accept the clayarks, varying from endearment to straight out fear of their non-humanness. "Clay's Arc" is a novel that deals with issues of race, gender and power, deconstructing the the fine line between the human and the non-human. Compelling and gruesome, this science-fiction novel questions the human and its identity.