'Bloodchild' and Other Stories

"Octavia Butler is one of my favourite writers. She’s had a huge influence on me. She writes about humanity and what it would have to offer to other species, to other ways of living, and what we’re prepared to trade to make a deal within ourselves or with other civilizations, if we ever met them. She’s very interested in the cost of trying to live together in harmony. Bloodchild is a novella. It imagines a future in which humanity is traveling through the stars and has ended up on a planet where other aliens are living. Part of the trade to live peacefully with them is that humans let the aliens implant their eggs in our bodies. It’s sensitively written and incredibly thoughtful about what that might mean and whether we’d be capable of doing that. At the same time, it’s stomach-churning to read some of the descriptions. It’s upsetting stuff, but it’s amazing, in terms of intelligently asking: What are we capable of trading? What are we capable of giving away about ourselves and what would we most want to protect about ourselves? Absolutely, and she never suggests that there would be a straightforward solution or that everybody would feel comfortable. Everybody, including the aliens, has their own thoughts and feelings about these intermingled and cooperative ways of life and how that’s going to play out. It’s never simplistic, and I love that about her work. Butler was an amazingly dedicated person. She was determined to write science fiction and to write what she wanted to write, at a time when that was very difficult to do for her. What’s good about this collection, about Bloodchild and the other short stories, is that you get a little bit of her own voice at the end, where she describes why she wrote those stories and what they mean to her. There’s even a little bit at the back of the book about her personal writing methods, which is really interesting to read. As I said, I just think she’s amazing."

"Oh, because it gets to the root of so many human fears. Again, to me it exemplifies Butler’s concern with moral ambiguity and survival. The entire book of short stories is worth reading, but that particular short story deals with an abandoned human colony on a planet circling another star, and the humans who have been abandoned there are dealing with sentient beings that lay their larvae in living organisms. They’re called the Tlic. They find that humans are the best organisms to use. It’s so great that these gift cribs have come from the stars. And there are all sorts of factions among the Tlic. One faction is like, ‘Let’s just keep them in cages and corrals, and let’s just impregnate them with our larvae and life will go on and it’ll be good for us.’ And then there are others who are like, ‘Well, you know, actually, they’re sentient too. And maybe they should have a little choice in this.’ There’s that kind of tug of war. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . And then there’s a tug of war in within the human community as well, you know, ‘Should we collaborate with these horrible monsters? It’s true that they give us these narcotic effects when they insert their larvae into us. But maybe we’re better off without that.’ So, there’s a tension there as well, in this particular short story. Because it’s a short story, it can’t be as sweeping as a novel. It just focuses on that conflict in the person of Gan, who is selected to bear the larvae of a long-time Tlic friend of the family. I think it’s such a fraught picture, and it’s gory. But it’s gorgeous, also. Yes. That’s a term that was created by Darko Suvin. That is a very helpful critical tool for analyzing science fiction, the idea that you’re making something about aliens, but the core is about humanity, that there are these questions that you can look at more objectively when they’re couched in terms of another time period, another place, that sort of thing. I am just so in love with the story, ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’, which has a lot to do with disability studies, in my opinion, because it’s about a new disease. It’s about a new genetic disorder that is caused by trying to treat cancer, basically. And it’s a horrific disease. I understand that Octavia modelled it on Huntington’s, but she put in some auto-cannibalism. It deals with hope in the face of these situations. When we talk about disability in science fiction, there are so many ways of looking at that intersection. Things that are a disability in one environment on Earth may not be a disability in the asteroid belt; things that are normal on Earth might be a disability in the asteroid belt. New technical solutions for one problem give rise to another problem. There are all sorts of ways of looking at that intersection. And I think that ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’ does it very powerfully."