What I Am Reading: "Bloodchild (and other stories)” by Octavia E. Butler

After reading quite a few books in a row by white men, I was ready for a departure. I decided it was about time to finally try Octavia E. Butler’s books; but when I was reading their synopses, her novels seemed a little too Big-Idea Hard Science Fiction for my tastes. I decided that the best thing to do would be to ease into things with her only short story collection, to see how I liked her writing. That turned out to be the right move, as this book definitely whetted my appetite for some of her larger works.

There are five stories and two brief essays in this collection; the main two are “Bloodchild” and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” which between them take up half the book. “Bloodchild” bears (what I understand to be) the most resemblance to Butler’s hard SF, and is about humans living in a symbiotic relationship with aliens, who need to incubate their eggs in their bodies. I don’t have very much of a stomach for body horror, and body horror involving parasitism is especially repellent to me. What struck me most about this story was the feeling of vulnerability it induced, as the humans in question were essentially kept on a preserve and were at the mercy of the insectile aliens of the story. This all may sound a little pulpy, but it is handled well. She makes the situation seem old hat to the characters, but looking at it from a remove triggers primal feelings of revulsion. My understanding is that this is similar to what her “Lilith’s Brood” series is about; I did not expect that “Bloodchild” would make me want to read that trilogy, but it did (it is the only one available to me directly through my library).

“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” was also very good. Harrowing in a different way, it is about sufferers from a human-created genetic malfunction, and how two of them react when they are told that there might be an effective treatment available to future generations. The other stories in the book were fine, but in my opinion are mainly there to round out the collection. Butler starts the book by saying that she is more of a novelist, and usually did not like to write short stories. She provides brief postscripts to each story, but these are mostly just quick notes on the circumstances of their creation. As she says in one of the essays, a biographical sketch, she “[has] no doubt at all that the best and the most interesting part of me is my fiction.” I look forward to consuming more of it.