bloodchild and other stories by octavia e. butler

BLOODCHILD AND OTHER STORIES BY OCTAVIA E. BUTLER PLUS

The Evening and the Morning and the Night (1987, 33 pp.) All and all, sound writing, but the moral complexity is quite thin, and while the overall build up works, it becomes a tad too predictable too fast. It’s interesting Butler notes in the afterword that it has nothing to do with slavery whatsoever: this is her version of a pregnant man story. Without wanting to spoil that much, it’s about alien overlords and their symbiotic relationship to humans. As such, it pushed a lot of buttons the right way. It’s also about family, love and compassion. It’s also excellent in evoking mood: it’s creepy, with a horror vibe at times.

Butler being black must have added to that impression. On the surface, it looks like it is about slavery.

This’ll be a fairly short review for a short book: 145 pages in my edition. I’ll just do a quick write up of each story and a wee bit of concluding thoughts. There’s also 2 short essays on writing, and I’ll say a few words about those later. They are generally interesting, nothing spectacular, but nice enough. It’s somewhat of a behind the scenes publication: each story is followed by an afterword of about 2 pages, in which Butler talks a bit about what she wanted to do with the story or how it came about. The fact that I chose to look online for the additional material is telling: this is not a bad collection – and that from an author who opens the preface to her collection with this line: “The truth is, I hate short story writing.” I did some googling and I found those easily, here and here – I’ll review them too. From 2005 onward however, it has been printed with two more stories – Amnesty and The Book Of Martha, both written in 2003.

BLOODCHILD AND OTHER STORIES BY OCTAVIA E. BUTLER PLUS

The copy I got was published in 1995, and that has 5 stories, plus 2 essays. There’s a couple of editions of the collection. I found a cheap second hand copy of Bloodchild and Other Stories easily, and here we are. As I hadn’t read anything yet by Octavia Butler, I thought Bloodchild would be a good place to start. For what it’s worth, it also won a Hugo, Locus, Nebula & SF Chronicle award. Butler was ranked as the most cited (i.e. Harris – who blogs about sci fi and getting older over at Auxiliary Memory. Hence me browsing the fantastic Classics of Science Fiction, an aggregated ranking site by James W.

Bloodchild and other stories by octavia e. butler