We’re watching a trainwreck we can’t turn away from. Partly, that’s the vivid writing, but partly it’s the horrifying details. First of all, it succeeds because it’s compelling. This morning, as I reread the story, I tried to observe myself reading it. There was no shortage of botflies in the part of Peru that I intended to visit.īutler, Octavia E. In particular, I worried about the botfly-an insect with, what seemed to me then, horror-movie habits. I was going to travel to the Peruvian Amazon to do research for my Xenogenesis books ( Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago), and I worried about my possible reactions to some of the insect life of the area. Could I write a story in which a man chose to become pregnant not through some sort of misplaced competitiveness to prove that a man could do anything a woman could do, not because he was forced to, not even out of curiosity? I wanted to see whether I could write a dramatic story of a man becoming pregnant as an act of love-choosing pregnancy in spite of as well as because of surrounding difficulties.Īlso, “Bloodchild” was my effort to ease an old fear of mine. I’ve always wanted to explore what it might be like for a man to be put into that most unlikely of all positions. On a third level, “Bloodchild” is my pregnant man story. On another, it’s a coming-of-age story in which a boy must absorb disturbing information and use it to make a decision that will affect the rest of his life. On one level, it’s a love story between two very different beings. IT AMAZES ME THAT some people have seen “Bloodchild” as a story of slavery. I partly assumed that because Butler is African-American, but Butler herself assures us it’s not in her afterward to the story in her collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. The first time I read “Bloodchild” I assumed it was about slavery. But I keep asking, “Why is it great?” What ingredients did Butler use to cook up such a tale? I’ve read “Bloodchild” three times now, and it is a great story. It has 18 citations that remember it over the last 35+ years. It’s the #1 story on our Classics of Short Science Fiction list. I’ve been waiting months for us to get to “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler. Story #72 of 107: “Bloodchild” by Octavia E. Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction
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