
Frankly, my full review is that Jenny Slate meme about having to unfollow NASA because it made me too crazy. Hello? This is about to live in my head without paying rent (also a theme in this story). I actually have so many thoughts about this but it’s late so for now I’m just going to leave it at “this is absolutely one of my favorite pieces of short fiction of all time”. I might come back to this at some point, because there is a lot going on here, but regardless it’s incredible, absolutely deserving of its Hugo and Nebula, and I think you should read it! I also adored this review of the story. It isn’t… On one level, it’s a love story between two very different beings… ‘Bloodchild’ is my pregnant man story.” It’s a strangely romantic, or even erotic, story. Butler said of this story: “It amazes me that some people have seen ‘Bloodchild’ as a story of slavery. Maria Ferrandez said of Octavia Butler's classic short story "Bloodchild" that it involved “Human subject dismantled and demolished: a human body whose integrity is violated, a human identity whose boundaries are breached.” It is this that I loved so much about this story: The horrific ciclicism, the possession and inevitability to that possession, and a deep-running claustrophobia.īut it is not strictly a horror story, either. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington state. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public and awards judges. She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction. She began writing science fiction as a teenager.

Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.Īfter her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother.



Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field.
