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Bloodchild and Other Stories

4.22 of 5 stars 4.22 · rating details · 2,567 ratings · 206 reviews

A perfect introduction for new readers and a must-have for avid fans, this New York Times Notable Book includes "Bloodchild," winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and "Speech Sounds," winner of the Hugo Award. Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between hum...more

Paperback, 224 pages

Published October 2005 by Seven Stories Press (first published 1995)

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Jul 16, 2011 Emily O rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: basically everyone

Shelves: women-authors, people-of-color, anthologies-and-collections, short-stories, speculative-fiction

Bloodchild is a collection of short stories by the famous science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. The problem with most short story collections is that they are usually a mixed bag, populated with mostly mediocre stories speckled with a few stinkers and a few gems. Well, I am happy to report to you that Bloodchild is not like that at all. Every single story in this collection is captivating, intelligent, and written in a style that is clear and accessible without losing any of its sophistication....more Bloodchild is a collection of short stories by the famous science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. The problem with most short story collections is that they are usually a mixed bag, populated with mostly mediocre stories speckled with a few stinkers and a few gems. Well, I am happy to report to you that Bloodchild is not like that at all. Every single story in this collection is captivating, intelligent, and written in a style that is clear and accessible without losing any of its sophistication.

What really struck me about Bloodchild was the sheer emotional impact of each story. Because each story is such a perfect little world, and because the characters are so well realized, every story really packs a punch. I put down the book between each story, incapable of doing any real thinking because I was so blown away by what I had just read. I think the effectiveness of the stories comes from a mix of excellent writing and characterization and the way Butler uses those characters to explore complex ideas. One of Butler's strengths is in never letting her work become preachy or one-sided. Butler's ideas are as complex as her characters, and that makes her stories resonate in a very real and powerful way.

Usually, this would be the part of the review where I would tell you which stories were my favorite and which ones to skip, but I can't really do that with this collection, because they are all absolutely worth reading. I believe that Butler's most famous stories are Bloodchild and Speech Sounds, both of which are in this collection and both of which are absolutely mind-blowing. Bloodchild actually left me speechless and shaking by the time I finished it. Her other stories are more subtle, but are still incredibly well-written. There are also two essays included in the book, my favorite of which was Positive Obsession. Since I bought the updated version of the book, I got an extra two stories on top of the original five stories and two essays. If you are going to get it, I recommend getting the updated version, because the two added stories are both very good, especially Amnesty. In all of the stories Butler's characters are absolutely convincing, and her story-telling is so smooth that you never need time to get adjusted to the story, even when you are dropped right in the middle of the action. That is, to me, a sign of a great writer.

I know this review is vague, but that is only because Butler's stories are so good. I don't feel like I need to speak for them, and I'm not sure that I could even if I wanted to. If you want intelligent stories with concise yet vivid writing and realistic characters, then Octavia Butler is absolutely the writer for you.

Rating: 5 stars
Vivid writing, engaging plot, convincing characters, and intelligent world building. Highly recommended. (less)

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Apr 12, 2008 Icky A. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: radical-sci-fi

A great collection of short stories from this great writer. The first story is particularly creepy and fascinating. Octavia Butler was a tough lady and I find her stories to be pretty tough too, tough as in bleak, which doesn't always appeal to why I like scifi (stupid escapist...). But she is always worth reading, her stories are really thoughtful and there are no other scifi authors that I know of who when they write about aliens it actually feels freakily alien (does that make any sense??).

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Aug 19, 2008 Caroline rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of the author, people who liked "I am Legend" (book, movie, or both)

Shelves: sci-fi

"Bloodchild" is a showcase of Octavia Butler's talent in short stories and essays.
The title peice is about humans enslaved to giant bugs, and the bugs place eggs in the humans so they can hatch. It was intriguing and not for squeamish people. It reminded me a little of "Fledgeling".
Then there was a story that I forget the name of about a disease that made people destructive. People got the disease from a drug that could cure Cancer (kind of like the "I am Legend" movie) and passed it on to their...more

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Mar 31, 2012 Jillian rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: recent-books

Although I wanted to like Butler's science-fiction stories, I'm troubled by the way Butler romanticizes "impaired" characters: they have special gifts; they are exceptionally artistic; they translate with aliens. All of this seems to re-script "magical negro" into "magical crip." The specialness reads as a defense for the disabled character's existence. But do we need a defense for anybody's existence? The stories are highly imaginative and idea-driven. Surely, post colonial scholars savor a sto...more

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Feb 01, 2009 Dave rated it 4 of 5 stars

Scifi (mostly)...this consists of a few short stories/novellas. Some are stronger than others, but the first, "Blood Child" is well worth the price of admission. I've also read her novel "Fledgling", an unusual take on the vampire theme. My experience has been that Butler liked to use sci-fi/fantasy as a tool to explore the details of unusual and nontraditional relationships. I've found her stuff interesting.

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Mar 19, 2009 Theo rated it 5 of 5 stars

I don't know if it was a refreshing read after a bout with Cormac McCarthy, but this small collection of short stories and two essays was amazing. Butler is characterized as a sci-fi/fantasy writer, but these shorts have only have trace amounts of those genres. The stories themselves are strong narratives that employ slight variations on reality to move the plot while quickly developing readers' understanding of the characters.

This collection perked my interest in picking up a couple of her nov...more

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Mar 04, 2013 Outis rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: politics, religion, space-fantasy

The final story of the collection (The Book of Martha) was the most interesting for me because while some of the other stories were more compelling (especially Amnesty), they felt warmed-up to me because of the similarities with her novels.
Warmed-up or not, most Butler stories are of course good reads.

Prior to reading this collection, I already suspected Butler was a crypto-Christian and considered her to be the quintessential late-20th century Yankee writer.
So it was interesting to read a piece...more The final story of the collection (The Book of Martha) was the most interesting for me because while some of the other stories were more compelling (especially Amnesty), they felt warmed-up to me because of the similarities with her novels.
Warmed-up or not, most Butler stories are of course good reads.

Prior to reading this collection, I already suspected Butler was a crypto-Christian and considered her to be the quintessential late-20th century Yankee writer.
So it was interesting to read a piece in which she (unwittingly?) acknowledges the religious roots of her politics and of the dominant ideology in her culture. People are too often in denial about how much of their core assumptions are religiously-grounded, especially if they identify as atheist or something.
Most obviously, the way Butler mixed selective stories from the Tanakh with political issues is reminiscent of Yankee exceptionalism or Rastafarianism. But that's only a small part of the intersection between religion and politics...
Doubting the Holy Spirit without accepting Islam doesn't make a Christian into some kind of humanist. It only turns them from someone who sees divine grace as the only escape from some kind of sinful nature into someone who sees no alternative. That's part of why the dominant Yankee ideology breeds social anxiety and political despair.
Like Muslims, most contemporary Protestants believe there is such as thing individual free will outside of divine grace but since most sinners are supposed to benefit from it, that freedom is usually taken to mean freedom to engage in sociopathic behavior and freedom to suffer the consequences from such (as it does in Butler's story, except individual punishment is replaced by ecological catastrophe or something). Unlike Muslims however, rather than seeing social institutions as regulators of sociopathic behavior (which would implicitely affirm collective as opposed to individual freedom), most crypto-Protestants naturalize or deny their effects. TINA again.
Butler's God says "free" over and over in the story but means individual freedom to fail. The first thing he does in the story is frame the situation so as to prevent communication and cooperation: social problems are to be dealt with by a lone individual faced with God. Collective solutions which would save humanity from self-destruction such as people "treating their environment more sensibly" are a priori deemed dangerous utopias. I guess the ozone layer is utopian as well.
When a curb on sociopathic behavior is proposed, it's assimilated to tyrannical interference (remember: sociopathy is freedom) which would for nebulous reasons (mainly because free will is supposed to be so very useful even though every other useful thing can be identified, tested and so forth by the virtue of its usefulness) lead to horrific side-effects. The horror of speed limits and of jackbooted thugs harassing careless automobilists! A drop in roadside causalties would surely threaten "competitiveness" (yes, Butler's God actually brings that up) and therefore humanity's very survival!
Last but not least, in Butler's puritanical world, addictive drugs (such as nicotine?) "take over" one's life and unearned satisfaction would cause people to lose their "self-respect" and neglect their children so much that many of them would die in infancy! It is known.
A demon-haunted world indeed...

Even though she might not have been entierly serious with some of this stuff, the politics of that fanciful pseudo-religious story goes a long way to explain much of what I found strange and alien about Butler's portrayal of humans in her other books.
And that made it a satisfying read for me. Other than that, it's certainly far from being the most thrilling or imaginative thing she's written.(less)

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Feb 18, 2012 Marilyn rated it 5 of 5 stars

In this collection the short story, "Bloodchild," was the first piece I had ever read by Octavia Butler. But, I had read it in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine back in the 80's and could never recall its name or author. Yet, it stayed in my mind. Last winter, when I downloaded Bloodchild to my Kindle and began reading, I cried out in joy when at last here was the very story that had haunted me! That multi-awarded story is worth the price of the book! Basically, it focuses on Gan—a human—living...more

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Jun 04, 2011 Mary Stephanos rated it 4 of 5 stars

Comprising five stories and two essays, this slim volume was my introduction to Octavia Butler. I found her work more disturbing, more bloody, and much more absorbing than I had expected. The highlight for me was the title story, in which refugee humans must serve as hosts to their parasitic "landlords." Difficult, painful, and somewhat gruesome, the story explores the line between compassion and compulsion and asks the reader to consider what each of us might do willingly for those we care abou...more

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Jan 31, 2010 Dinah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: collection, gender-business, fiction, writers-on-writing, sci-fi

Butler begins her introduction to this anthology with a warning: she's never been one to write short fiction, because her ideas are usually too big and too complicated to fit well in the genre. With the exception of the title story "Bloodchild," it seems like Butler knows herself pretty damn well -- none of them blew me away, although the two short essays sandwiched between new and old fiction were gold. It's Bloodchild and the Essays that salvage this collection as a 4-star for me.

In my very li...more Butler begins her introduction to this anthology with a warning: she's never been one to write short fiction, because her ideas are usually too big and too complicated to fit well in the genre. With the exception of the title story "Bloodchild," it seems like Butler knows herself pretty damn well -- none of them blew me away, although the two short essays sandwiched between new and old fiction were gold. It's Bloodchild and the Essays that salvage this collection as a 4-star for me.

In my very limited experience with science fiction, it would appear that every author worth his/her salt interested in the genre's subversive possibilities has his/her own "pregnant man" story. Or similar. You know, blurring boundaries of reproductivity defining destiny and mapping to certain traits of dominance and all that. Bloodchild is that story for Butler, and it is very, very good. I'll go light on the details since you should just read it, we're talking about a short story for Pete's sake. But Bloodchild really does ask its reader to reconsider very basic aspects of the human condition, whether they should be considered humane, and how we can continue to live with and love each other in either case.

The essays are perfect examples of what makes Butler's prose compelling. She pulls no punches, never makes you run for the dictionary or turn back four pages to pick up a muddled reference. She speaks with dead honesty but without condescension. When some asshole like Bukowski tells me I can't be a writer unless I've got the burning need to write, I want to tell him where he can shove his burning whatever. When Butler tells me the same thing in her essay "Furor Scribendi," I take some damn notes and start thinking about making a writing schedule.

Unfortunately, I can't find much praise for the other short stories -- they lack the complexity of the world of Bloodchild, which I assume mirrors the complexity of the worlds of her longer fiction. That is, I suppose, the downside of her no-frills prosity: absent the mystery elements of trying to decode a sci-fi world, Butler doesn't seem to be able to muster a whole lot of structural intrigue or interest. The one other story I'd consider a success is Butler's attempt to present a compassionate story of incest: again, an experiment that troubles the basic social mores we take for granted. But the story is set entirely in this world, and for all its merits, without the obfuscating challenge of integrating vocabulary and rules that are alien, the revelation of the story comes as no surprise, and the characters don't transcend that which is typically communicable in 15 pages or less.

The biggest success of this collection is that I want to go out and read Butler's novels immediately. And that's not nothing.(less)

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Jun 06, 2011 Brandy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf-fantasy, anthologies-short-stories

This is collection of short stories and two short essays. Of course some are stronger stories then others but none are bad.

The collection is a really good summery in short works of what makes Octavia Butler such a wonderful writer. Her works give a very complicated sense of realism. No matter how alien or odd the situation you know the people who populate her stories and if you don't agree with their actions you can at least understand them because they are so human. On the flip side of that hum...more

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Aug 10, 2012 Dorothea rated it 3 of 5 stars

These stories don't seem quite as painfully powerful to me on the second reading, but I'd still recommend them.

"Bloodchild" is about a very well-described alien species that finds, after a colony of humans arrives on its planet, a gruesome but important use for them. It's told from the perspective of a human child, who is growing up and learning just what it means that he's been chosen to be used in this way. (Despite the title, the aliens are not -- not exactly -- vampires.) I like this story b...more These stories don't seem quite as painfully powerful to me on the second reading, but I'd still recommend them.

"Bloodchild" is about a very well-described alien species that finds, after a colony of humans arrives on its planet, a gruesome but important use for them. It's told from the perspective of a human child, who is growing up and learning just what it means that he's been chosen to be used in this way. (Despite the title, the aliens are not -- not exactly -- vampires.) I like this story but it is grim and gross!

"The Evening and the Morning and the Night" explores the idea of a disease that -- well, perhaps something that indicates this subject doesn't go so well with the short story format is that it takes quite a long time to describe the disease! It's from the perspective of a woman who has the disease, recounting growing up with it, the social stigma attached to it, and discovering that there might be something more for her later in life than succumbing to it. I think there's a lot of insight into human behavior in this story, but the ending disappointed me a little. (view spoiler)

"Near of Kin" is not science fiction, but a short story inspired by Butler's reading from the Old Testament as a child. In it, a bitter young woman going through her dead mother's apartment talks to her uncle about why she hated her mother, and finds out a secret. I think "some women hate some other women for no good reason! men don't get it!" was a theme that interested Butler. I wish it weren't.

"Speech Sounds" occurs in the aftermath of a plague that left all of humanity unable to communicate. I like it more for its exploration of how people continue to function (or don't) than for the actual plot.

"Crossover" is either science fiction or about someone with a very detailed and persistent hallucination. In her afterword Butler says she wrote this before she was able to support herself by writing, when she took a series of extremely horrible jobs in factories and retail, terrified that she'd never get away from it. I think "Crossover" is powerful because it's written out of that fear.

"Positive Obsession" and "Furor Scribendi" are essays about writing. The first is autobiographical vignettes and the second is more concentrated advice.

"Amnesty" is one of the two final stories that were published for the first time in Bloodchild. It has a strange number of mistakes that should have been fixed by an editor, which is especially strange following directly after the advice in "Furor Scribendi" about the importance of writing mechanics. That doesn't make me like "Amnesty" any less, though -- it's a good long story about satisfyingly different aliens who (typical for Butler) have found a use for humans and aren't willing to give them up, no matter what the humans have to say about that -- and about a human who's realized that the aliens won't give them up so it's better to find out how to live with them.

"The Book of Martha" is the anticlimactic ending: Martha, a writer (no, there aren't many stories about writers that I really like), is asked by God to imagine one change that will make humanity stop destroying itself. I don't believe there's any such change and neither does Martha, but she finds something anyway -- which I found unconvincing.(less)

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Jan 28, 2013 Flatfoot Vertigo rated it 3 of 5 stars

I loved Butler's book Kindred, which I read many years ago. Blood Child is a collection of short stories that is interesting and sometimes disturbing. The short story Blood Child was disturbing because it dealt with a kind of slavery, humans 'kept' by creatures that sounded to me like spiders or centipedes that were two or three times the size of the humans - on a different planet. The slavery was not abject but nonetheless the humans had little choice about their role in the creatures' lives. A...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Kaitlynn rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: aliens, sci-fi-fantasy

Octavia Butler's one and only short story collection proves two things: 1) she is terrible at appraising her own skill in short stories, and 2) the woman delivers.

Bloodchild is an anthology collection that is primarily dominated by sci-fi stories, but also includes some short fiction, essays, and a short biography of Butler complete with photos. Each item is followed by a brief discussion from Butler regarding the inspiration and meaning behind the piece.

I can honestly say there is not a short...more

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Dec 10, 2009 Melisa Resch rated it 4 of 5 stars

this book ruled for a couple of reasons. the first is that Octavia Butler wrote afterwords! afterwords are far superior to forwards, which i have already stated my opinion on (they should be read afterward, if at all. somebody start a fucking facebook page about this already). learning the context for the stories deepened my understanding of the themes and subtext of the stories. it was also just interesting to lay these futuristic stories up against the moment that Butler was writing in and thi...more

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Jun 21, 2010 Amanda rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-story-compilation, favorites

Octavia E Butler is one of the greatest writers I have discovered in a long while. Intelligent and thought provoking - I found myself in green-eyed envy of her skill at taking such a simple writing style and imbuing it with such depth and meaning. Her contribution as a black American woman is invaluable to the usually Caucasian male dominated Science Fiction genre and this collection is an example of how very good Science Fiction writing can be. Not shying away from difficult and heavy ideas, th...more

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Feb 22, 2013 Jermaine Henry rated it 5 of 5 stars

Never even picked up an Octavia Butler book, but after reading these short stories I think I'll make her one of my few favourite authors. I do not know of any black authors who have written for the fantasy/sci-fi genre, so this was very interesting change from the usual which I have grown bored with. Admittedly, I was more intrigued by the little notes she made at the end of her short stories, detailing her past thoughts and life history. It's a shame she is no longer alive, as I'm sure she woul...more

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Aug 05, 2012 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-sf-fantasy

I had read the title story a long time ago, but I don't recall having read the rest of this collection. I really think Octavia Butler is brilliant -- I love her novels -- but her short fiction, while still wonderful, seems more uneven to me. Some of these stories are absolutely incredible; others seem more like sketches, rather than complete works. All of them, though, are breathtakingly original -- so completely different from anything else you've read. Surprisingly, I disliked the "afterwards"...more

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Sep 17, 2009 Barrett rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: on-real-shelf

So everyone knows that I love, love, love OEB and that even when I read stories of hers that are less than satisfying (which is rare, I'll agree), I'm still very satisfied. This compilation of short stories and essays is a wonderful insight into OEB's, well, awesomeness.

As she says at the beginning, she's not much of a short story writer. That is to say, her short stories, while wonderfully imaginative, provocative and genuine, are these huge, wonderful ideas, with lots of people to love and hat

...more

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Dec 19, 2012 Chon Mkliiry rated it 5 of 5 stars

The story 'Blood Child" is fucking crazy. It is a well thought out post-colonialist allegory to the experience of living as a fringe member of society. I do not want to spoil it too much, but the story takes places in the future as humans are made the servant class of an extraterrestrial race. We are used as house pets, "friends" and as a vessel for their reproduction. This story is uncanny, creepy and genius. Very well thought out and an example of science fiction doing what it does best- illum...more

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Mar 09, 2012 Julia rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: dystopian, reread, short-stories, science-fiction, urban-fantasy, best-book-i-read-in-2012

I reread “Speech Sounds” for our real life book club discussion of Butler’s Wild Seed. It was for the short story “Speech Sounds” that Butler got her only Hugo and Nebula awards. In that story nearly all people have lost language, speech, and reason due to a world- wide disease.

“The illness, if it was an illness, had cut even the living off from one another. As it swept over the country, people hardly had time to lay blame on the Soviets (though they were falling silent along with the rest of t...more

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Apr 12, 2012 Shara (Calico Reaction) rated it 5 of 5 stars

The premise: ganked from BN.com: A perfect introduction for new readers and a must-have for avid fans, this New York Times Notable Book includes "Bloodchild," winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and "Speech Sounds," winner of the Hugo Award.

Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between humans and a species of invaders. Also new to this collection is "The Book of Martha" which ask...more

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Apr 09, 2011 Nikki rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: speculative-fiction, post-apocalyptic, non-fiction, short-stories-novellas

Second book for the twenty-four hour readathon!

Bloodchild and Other Stories is -- unsurprisingly -- a collection of short stories. The book comes with an introduction by Octavia Butler which explains that she wasn't very good at short stories, because most of them weren't meant to be short stories. The ones in this volume, however, were. And each story comes with an afterword by Butler, explaining what she thinks needs to be said about the story.

Bloodchild: I found this quite disturbing, especia...more Second book for the twenty-four hour readathon!

Bloodchild and Other Stories is -- unsurprisingly -- a collection of short stories. The book comes with an introduction by Octavia Butler which explains that she wasn't very good at short stories, because most of them weren't meant to be short stories. The ones in this volume, however, were. And each story comes with an afterword by Butler, explaining what she thinks needs to be said about the story.

Bloodchild: I found this quite disturbing, especially when I'd read Butler's afterword about what inspired the story. Her ideas, though, are fascinating, and it's fascinating to know where they came from. It didn't take long for me to pick up what was happening in the story, though I felt a bit at sea at the start. It has themes that link in with her other writing, not surprisingly -- people being bound together, the responsibilities people who are bound together have for each other, co-existence of different races, and though she says it isn't about that, yes, slavery.

The Evening and the Morning and the Night: A story about genetic diseases and self-destruction, and again, about responsibility -- if you can help someone, do you have to? Scary, yes, and always likely to be relevant. The afterword offers a little reading list, which is nice.

Near of Kin: A sympathetic story about incest, as the afterword says. Not at all speculative fiction.

Speech Sounds: This one reminded me of Day of the Triffids and books like that. It's sort of post-apocalyptic, with the apocalypse being the loss of communication for most people. It's a punch in the gut, in the middle, but it does end with hope.

Crossover: I didn't like this one very much, and wasn't entirely sure what was going on. Again, not speculative fiction, more like realism. The afterword does make sense of it.

Positive Obsession: An essay about how Octavia Butler came to be a writer, with the last section being about what use this has been to black people. Worth reading, and not at all tedious -- quite short, actually.

Furor Scribendi: A very short piece on what you have to do to write. Pity I only have this on my Kindle, I'd like to print it out and show it to the other members of my creative writing group. Particularly the guy who refuses to listen to me when I correct his grammar and punctuation. I like the way she called a creative writing workshop "rented readers".

Amnesty: Back to short stories. The usual themes of Octavia Butler's work crop up here, and if I wasn't in the middle of a readathon, I'd be looking up the story that inspired this -- the real life of Doctor Wen Ho Lee. It's an interesting story, another aliens-coexisting-with-humans one.

The Book of Martha: A black female author is asked by God to make the world a better place. Octavia Butler's attempt at creating a utopia -- a fascinating idea, and I agree with her that a utopia is a very difficult thing to construct, because it would be different for each person.

The one irritating thing about this book was that, unlike many Kindle books, you couldn't jump between the beginnings of the different stories. You just have to go straight through linearly. No complaints about the content -- the stories were different, though they had similar themes in several cases, and Butler's writing style is matter of fact and easy to read.(less)

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Oct 30, 2010 Arrianna rated it 5 of 5 stars

"There seems to be an unwritten rule, hurtful and at odds with the realities of American culture. It says you aren’t supposed to wonder whether as a Black person, a Black woman, you really might be inferior- not quite bright enough, not quite quick enough, not quite enough to do the thingds you want to do. Though, of course, you do wonder. You’re supposed to know you’re as good as anyone. and if you don’t know, you aren’t supposed to admit it. If anyone near you admits it, you’re supposed to rea...more

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Aug 20, 2011 Katie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Are they good? Yes, they're good. That I could talk for hours about each story made them relevant, striking, and layered to me. In short, great fiction.

Does that mean I enjoyed them? Eh....

Butler has a lot to say about social responsibility. If you want to live among people, you have to pay a tax. If you expect to be happy for yourself, you must learn how to be happy for others. I suspect Butler is a wiser, more selfless person than I'll ever be, but there's something her ragingly self-destruct...more

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Sep 22, 2010 Parvoneh rated it 3 of 5 stars

Octavia Butler writes with such clarity and inertia that I don't even mind that I didn't like this collection much. Missed my subway stop as pages turned and turned. She's got big ideas and I like big ideas. She does admit that she's a novelist over a story writer, though, and I agree. The prose wasn't really very different from Parable of the Sower, it's just the pacing--stilted. Many of these stories felt like ideas, ideas that are tacked to the board, stark. Ok, I see what you're doing here....more

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Jun 30, 2008 Tracy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: strange-fiction

While in NY for a month, one Sunday I took up a practice of Marlene Dumas (via Rosselini) and just holed up in my room and spent time with ideas, words and my ipod. I brought five or six books with me (um, I shipped a whole library back home when I departed this weekend, two boxes y'all) and this is the only one I actually read. I've read Kindred (also written by Butler), which is possibly one of the best science fiction/fantasy novels ever written. One day I was describing Kindred, and I couldn...more

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Apr 19, 2009 Leah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-literature, science-and-speculative-fiction

Octavia Butler is one of the most talented, creative contemporary writers. "Bloodchild" is a collection of eight short stories, which essentially span from futuristic dystopias, to parasitic alien races, to strange diseases. While in theory these concepts may be dated and arguably cliche, she writes so fluidly and in such a skilled manner that, litearlly, every word she pens is unique and original.

Butler is still a relatively new voice in the world of writing. Rightly or wrongly, she is catogori...more Octavia Butler is one of the most talented, creative contemporary writers. "Bloodchild" is a collection of eight short stories, which essentially span from futuristic dystopias, to parasitic alien races, to strange diseases. While in theory these concepts may be dated and arguably cliche, she writes so fluidly and in such a skilled manner that, litearlly, every word she pens is unique and original.

Butler is still a relatively new voice in the world of writing. Rightly or wrongly, she is catogorised at science fiction, a genre which tends to tie up the loose literary ends of writers who don't exactly fit into any definite species. While at their barest what she writes about is science fiction, she inundates her writing with an artistically humane quality: Moreso than just writing about the ooh's and aah's of science, she writes about the complexities and values of humanity. Her writing is evenly paced, without being drawn out - she does not feed into flashy or gimmicky story lines, but rather baits the reader with beautiful (though not overly wordy) descriptions and portrayals of characters.

"Bloodchild," the opening story, tells of a young adult who is to undergo a "rite of passage," so to speak. In this story, an alien race is symbiotically related to humans: They provide comfort, warmth, and assistance. In exchange, humans house the eggs of these creatures, undergoing a horrendously painful "hatching" prcoess that does not kill them, but leaves them with horrific memories of pain. Butler tells this short story with first person narrative, imparting a sense of emotion and realism that could never be experienced outside of her authorship.

Despite her stylistic flow, Butler still manages to keep what she writes interesting. She tackles each story, however seemingly tired the concept may be, with a refreshing tone. She is able to deftly craft a story with as few brush strokes as possible, but still leave a dazzling landscape.

Bloodchild is definitely one of the most marvelous, beautiful workds of fiction that I have read in recent times. It is science fiction without ever being scientific, fiction without ever being imagined. Butler is talanted and creative, and undoubtedly one of the best contemporary writers I have encountered. (less)

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Feb 18, 2010 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi, 100-in-2010, essays

I read the short story Bloodchild years and years ago and forgot how good it was. I didn't know it was in a larger short story anthology, and was happy to read more Octavia Butler. She mentions in one of the extra essays in the back of the book that she's the only black woman who makes her living writing sci-fi, and after reading the short stories, I want to read some of her novels. The stories touch on interspecies love (via a parasite kind of relationship); incest; disease's effect on progeny...more

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Dec 04, 2012 Joseph rated it 3 of 5 stars

This second edition collection is an example of "more is less". The more recent stories added to it are much less interestingly written than the earlier ones from the first edition--whereas the earlier stories function like condensed novels, sketching ideas and worlds through action, dialogue and gesture, the later ones suffer from too much exposition-through-monologue. The first, eponymous story, though, is one of the best I've ever read, by anyone. And I love the idea of appending afterwords t...more

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About Octavia E. Butler

Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.

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“I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.” — 4 people liked it

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