"The truth is, I hate short story writing," Octavia Butler admits at the outset of this book, a collection of seven tales and two essays. "I am essentially a novelist," she adds. "The ideas that most interest me tend to be big."
The science fiction community had a different assessment of Butler’s short stories. "Bloodchild," the first tale in this collection, won the Hugo and Nebula—the two most prestigious honors in the filed—among various other awards. "Speech Sounds," also included here, is a Hugo winner, and "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" was nominated for a Nebula, and won the Science Fiction Chronicle Award. The book, as a whole, consistently ranks among the best-selling collections of sci-fi short stories, still read and assigned in classrooms more than a decade after the author’s death. For a novelist who didn't have much interest in short forms, Butler hasn't done too poorly.
That said, I’m not entirely sure that this book ought to be classified under science fiction. The essays included in Bloodchild and Other Stories are a hybrid of memoir and advice to aspiring authors, and make for useful reading for anyone who hopes to make a career in genre writing. But even the short stories here tend more toward horror than sci-fi. In fact, Butler’s entire career as a novelist, from Patternmaster in 1976 to Fledgling in 2005, revealed a deep and recurring interest in the tropes of the horror genre: dystopias, epidemics, vampires, spirit possession, murderous cults and the like. Even when the story takes place on another planet or the distant future, the plot is as likely to feature more terror than technology. That’s a Butler trademark.
But here’s the most interesting twist: Butler somehow manages to mix horror and compassion in these tales. That’s not an easy recipe, and no one does it better than her. Perhaps all genre fiction thrives on good-versus-evil plots, with clear signals to readers so they can cheer and boo at the right moments; but horror fiction may be the least nuanced of them all. Only a handful of scary books—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Stephen King’s Carrie —teach us compassion for the monster. Most don’t even try. We shed no tears over Freddy Krueger, put no flowers on Dracula’s coffin. But when Butler wrote her vampire book, Fledgling , she elicited our empathy as well as our apprehensions.
Readers encounter similarly complicated ethical twists again and again in these tales. The title story “Bloodchild” presents a disturbing futuristic account of human beings bred and raised by a group of extraterrestrial parasites who use the bodies of their captives as living nests for their maggot-like offspring. This is the stuff of nightmares. But only Octavia Butler would incorporate elements of a romance story in this, and describe the relationship between human host and alien parasite as a kind of marriage.
"Some people have seen 'Bloodchild' as a story of slavery," Butler explains in a provocative postscript included in this volume. “It isn’t.” She then shocks many readers by describing the tale as, among other things, a "love story between two very different beings" and a "coming-of-age story." I can imagine assigning this work for classroom discussion, and then watching the arguments unfold, as students try to reconcile the disparate and almost incompatible elements contained in this short narrative. That kind of moral resonance and existential ambiguity isn't generally the domain of genre fiction. Butler made it her specialty.
The same paradox emerges in the second story in the collection, "The Evening and the Morning and the Night.” Here a small number of people are afflicted with "Duryea-Gode Disease," a disorder that turns them into demented, self-destructive killers. Almost every other writer would use this as a pretext for a tale of blood and violence, pitting ‘normal’ humans against deranged murderers in a gruesome battle royale. Butler, in contrast, pushes in the exact opposite direction. First, she tries to defuse our terror; then she arouses our compassion; and then, finally, she pushes further, challenging our preconceptions about abnormality and even finding a kind of blessing in the plight of the diseased.
The degree of difficulty in pulling off this sort of turnabout is off the charts, especially in a short story where every incident and interlude must push forward to a final resolution. In fact, I believe Butler’s stated aversion to the short story format derives from this self-imposed challenge, one that recurs in her writing, to transform horror into illumination. The unconventional framing she n eeds to impose on her material in order to a chieve this would normally require a hundred pages or so. Butler’s ability to compress this process into a much shorter work reflects a virtuosity, not so much of writing style but in terms of psychological insight.
Butler does a similar job of overturning the standard formula in “Amnesty,” which deals with the arrival of technologically superior extraterrestrials on planet Earth. Here, too, the familiar framing would present this as a conflict between ‘good’ humans and ‘evil’ aliens, but Butler refuses to give readers that smug satisfaction. By the end of the story, we aren’t quite sure which side has the moral upper hand. Nor can we say with any certainty whether collaborating with these invaders is a treasonous act or heroic gesture
Butler was often asked, as she notes in one of the essays included in this collection, why she didn't write about subjects more clearly related to her identity as an African-American woman. “When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was ‘What good is science fiction to black people?’” She admits that she even came to resent the question. "Why should I have to justify my profession to anyone?" she laments in these pages.
But it’s perhaps easier to see now, with the benefit of hindsight, how much we can learn from her life project of eliciting compassion and empathy, her refusal to brand those different from her as irredeemable villains, or assume that any one group has a monopoly on good intentions. Above all, she might be most surprised at how many now follow in her path. Octavia Butler started out as an outlier and iconoclast, but she now has taken on a second posthumous vocation as role model and influence.
“I write science fiction and fantasy for a living,” she proclaims in the essay “Positive Obsessions.” Then adds: “As far as I know, I am still the only black woman who does this.” Not anymore. Today a whole movement called Afro-Futurism acknowledges her as one of its founders. The blueprint she set for herself decades ago, mixing technology, humanism, multicultural cooperation and a gaze to the future is one of the most exhilarating recipes on the cultural scene. I’m not sure what Butler would make of all this. But I’m certain of one thing: she would at least be happy she was no longer forced to defend the scope of her stories or the shape of her life’s work.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).
"The truth is, I hate short story writing," Octavia Butler admits. "I am essentially a novelist. The ideas that most interest me tend to be big."