I’ve been meaning to read Octavia Butler’s books for a while now. She’s one of the great masters of science fiction, and I think it’s important for writers to read the greats of their genres. I also think it’s necessary now more than ever for everyone to read books by diverse authors, and Octavia Butler is also one of the first black women to become famous for writing science fiction. So I recently bought a copy of Blood Child and Other Stories, to check out some of Butler’s short fiction.
In the forward to her book, Butler writes that she doesn’t consider herself much of a short story writer, but I think she must be being incredibly modest or her novels must blow your socks off. These are some of the most powerful, shocking (in a good way), and imaginative science fiction short stories I’ve ever read. It’s hard to put into words how radical and incredible her ideas are. To much science fiction reads like badly updated Star Wars or Star Trek novels (I mean, I loved Star Wars, but I don’t think most people really improve it much with their thinly veiled rip offs). In stories like the titular “Blood Child” or “Amnesty,” Butler depicts aliens in an entirely original and unique way. And the relationships she imagines between humans and aliens are complex, fraught, and uncomfortable in ways that are alternately hopeful and horrifying. It’s hard to explain without giving too much of the stories away, but it’s incredibly powerful and unlike any other science fiction I’ve read.
Blood Child and Other Stories by Octavia Butler, reviewed by Alexis Lantgen of Lunarianpress.com
Other stories that vividly stand out to me are “Speech Sounds” and “The Evening, the Morning, and the Night,” both of which refer to pandemics. They hit home (also, I heavily suspect that at some point “Speech Sounds” was the inspiration for the movie Bird Box—some of the parallels are too uncanny). “The Evening, the Morning, and the Night” explores the concept of not trusting your own mind and the fear that genetic diseases like Huntington’s or Alzheimer’s, with a terrible homicidal/suicidal twist. Yet, for whatever terrors both of these stories inspire, in the end, they have hope.
One of the things I loved about all of Butler’s stories is how many of them had hope even in desperate and nightmarish scenarios. While I haven’t yet read Butler’s novels, I know that one of her most famous, Kindred, explores the horrors of slavery. I wonder if stories like “Amnesty” aren’t influenced by this historical awareness, the understanding that many people survive even the most unimaginably horrifying situations. The understanding that to a certain extent, losing a war against aliens is only the beginning. After that, we can find a way to survive, or not.
I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who loves science fiction or cares about the future. The book also has two essays that writers, especially science fiction writers or writers of color, should read. Her writing advice is thoughtful and usable. And her stories are mind-blowing, visceral, and incredibly powerful.
What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow, footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing , thinking—whoever “everyone” tends to be this year.
—Octavia Butler, “Positive Obsession,” from Blood Child and Other Stories