![]() ![]() ![]() There were three primary motivators behind the story. ![]() From the start, she insists that her story is not about slavery. However, Butler’s afterword to “Bloodchild” is illuminating. Gan has been conditioned to view carrying T’Gatoi’s offspring as an honor, but he is too young to understand that consent between unequal partners isn’t really consent. The Preserve where they live is run like a prison, and the Tlic keep them slow and docile with a steady supply of psychotropic drugs. The humans in this story carry very little real power. In her 1997 book Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction, Jane Donaworth writes, “the conventional adolescent male narrator/hero is punished by rape, incest, reproductive exploitation by the dominant race, and anticipation of a painful caesarean birth – and he is expected to like it, as women in many cultures have been expected to comply with their oppression.” She argues that Gan takes on the role of black females slaves in the United States, who were “forced to carry the offspring of an alien race.” Some have interpreted “Bloodchild” as an allegory about slavery, and I’ll admit the idea crossed my mind as well while reading it. Needless to say, Gan does not take this well. T’Gatoi and Gan must perform emergency surgery to remove the larvae inside him before they eat him alive. One night a man arrives at his front door. He has spent his whole life by the side of his Tlic partner, T’Gatoi, and considers being a host an honor. The story centers on Gan, a boy who has just come of age to be impregnated (males are usually chosen as hosts so females can keep birthing more humans). They agree to shelter the humans on their planet, but there is a price: once a generation, each human family must offer a child as a host for Tlic offspring. The Tlic reproduce by laying their eggs in living life forms, and recognize that humans would make excellent hosts. Some time before the story begins, a group of refugees fleeing Earth land on a planet inhabited by gigantic sentient centipedes called the Tlic. “Bloodchild” reveals the details of its world organically. ![]()
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