Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was an iconic US writer of science fiction who received multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for her writing before dying of a stroke in 2006. The recipient of a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 1995, Butler was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2010. After her death, the Carl Brandon Society established the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship to support attendance of students of color at the Clarion West Writers Workshop and Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Butler had gotten her start at a Clarion workshop thirty-five years before.
Butler’s science fiction novels include her Patternist series, Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984). During this time she also wrote a stand-alone time-travel slave novel, Kindred (1979). In the eighties and nineties Butler produced two more outstanding series, the Xenogenesis trilogy and the incomplete Parable series. Butler’s writing often used the context of alien situations and environments to comment on race and gender relations.
Although she did not write many short stories, considering herself primarily a novelist, Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984) is a masterful example of the form and addresses many of the themes found in her longer works. It also fits comfortably within a kind of “science fiction realism” tradition that pushed back against the simplified cause-and-effect of much earlier speculative fiction—doing for space colonization what James Tiptree Jr.’s “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” and Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” did for the glamour of astronauts.
In her story notes for Bloodchild and Other Stories, Butler told readers that “Bloodchild” was not “a story of slavery.” Instead, she considered it a love story and a coming-of-age story. On a secondary level, “Bloodchild” was her “pregnant man story” and “a story about paying the rent,” in the sense that members of an isolated space colony would need to make “an unusual accommodation” with their hosts. She also wrote the story to overcome her fear of botflies.