An important turn in Butler’s career as a writer came when she attended the Clarion Science Fiction workshop in 1970. She continued to write and submit stories, which continued to be rejected by publishers. Her teachers gave her little encouragement, expressing no interest in Butler’s science fiction themes.īutler attended Pasadena City College and California State College in Los Angeles, after which she took several office, factory, and warehouse jobs. Despite the fact that she was unaware of the work of any black authors, she was determined to publish and began submitting stories to magazines in her teens. From the age of ten, Butler knew that she wanted to be a writer. Her mother, a maid with a limited education, instilled in Butler a love of books and learning. Butler was a shy and solitary child who took refuge in reading. Her father died when she was a baby, and she was raised by her mother and grandmother. Octavia Butler was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947, the only child of Laurice and Octavia Butler. In the disconcerting world of “Bloodchild,” Butler raises provocative questions about sex roles, self sacrifice, and the interdependence between different species. Butler is acclaimed for her fully realized characters and her sensitivity toward the psychological dilemmas created by her imaginative science fiction scenarios. He witnesses the violent “delivery” of alien grubs from the abdomen of another man and is forced to question the relationship he has long taken for granted with the species whose planet he shares. Set on a foreign planet inhabited by giant, powerful, and intelligent insect-like beings, “Bloodchild” is the story of a young human male coming of age and coming to terms with his role as the carrier of an alien species’ eggs. That same year, Butler was awarded the celebrated MacArthur Fellowship-commonly known as the “genius” award-for the body of her work.īutler has described “Bloodchild” as a story about male pregnancy. By this point, Butler had gained a much broader critical and popular reputation, and the collection was praised highly in distinguished mainstream forums such as the New York Times and Booklist. Butler, who is known primarily as a novelist, did not publish the story in book form until 1995, when she collected five of her short stories and two essays in Bloodchild and Other Stories. The story was well received and won two of science fiction’s most prestigious awards, the Hugo and the Nebula. Octavia Butler, science fiction’s most notable and influential African-American woman writer, first published “Bloodchild” in Isaac Asimov ‘s Science Fiction Magazine in 1984.
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