Thursday, July 10, 2014

"Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler: what might a relationship with a parasitic alien race be like?

I bumped into a reference to this 1984 Nebula- and 1985 Hugo-winning novella in an article today, and quickly found the full text online in  couple of places; here's a link to a PDF with the story and some notes about themes from Butler herself:

http://boblyman.net/englt392/texts/bloodchild.pdf

I was interested in the idea of parasitic intelligent races, which is one of the big subjects of this story. I was impressed by the nuances of what Butler does with the idea.  I had just been thinking mainly of the conflict: ooh, yuck, that race reproduces parasitically.  Butler sets up a situation where the races need each other. I'll say no more; it deserves all the acclaim it's received.

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