Why We Misread Her
The slavery interpretation Butler couldn’t escape.
in octavia e. butler’s novelette “Bloodchild,” a quantum of humanity fleeing Earth finds sanctuary on a distant planet—but at a price. The native Tlic, a species of intelligent aliens, establish the Preserve, where humans can work, marry, and raise children without interference; in return, some humans are implanted with eggs by Tlic females, whose larvae must feed on living flesh. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1984, “Bloodchild” won Butler the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award for Best Novelette—a sci-fi triple crown. Narrated by a young human host who begins to question the whole arrangement after witnessing a gruesome larval delivery, the story represents Butler at the height of her powers, patiently unfolding the consequences of an upsetting moral premise with horrific serenity. The author herself viewed “Bloodchild” as an unusual kind of love story as well as “a story about paying the rent”—that is, one that took seriously what it might cost humanity to survive on an alien planet. “It wouldn’t be the British Empire in space, and it wouldn’t be Star Trek,” Butler wrote in an afterword. “Sooner or later, the humans would have to make some kind of accommodation with their um … their hosts.”
But many readers found a different kind of parable. “It amazes me that some people have seen ‘Bloodchild’ as a story of slavery,” Butler wrote. “It isn’t.” She later recalled telling this to a college student who had written a paper on the topic. “Well, the author doesn’t always know!” the young woman replied. In a sense, both of them were right: The question of what exactly to make of the disturbing relationship between Gan, the human narrator, and T’Gatoi, the Tlic politician to whom he has been promised since birth, is not only the thematic core of “Bloodchild” but also a topic of heated debate among the story’s own characters. “We were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people,” Gan says of humanity’s standing among the Tlic, even as he defends the practice of implantation after his bitter elder brother accuses him of being a willing host animal. But Gan will still end up staring down T’Gatoi, pointing an illegal rifle at his own throat, demanding to be seen as more than her property. “What are we to you?” he whispers, terrified. “You know me as no other does,” the alien gently answers. “You must decide.”
Butler made her own decision, coolly telling an interviewer in 1996, “The only places I am writing about slavery is where I actually say so.” Yet she had often seemed to say so. In fact, slavery had been present in Butler’s work from the very beginning: Her debut novel from 1976, Patternmaster, was the first in a saga about the millennialong breeding of a telepathic master race, known as the Patternists, who eventually enslave some of Earth’s population. Three novels later, Butler found mainstream success with Kindred, in which a presentday Black woman is transported to the antebellum South to repeatedly save the life of her slave-owning white ancestor. That novel was followed by Wild Seed, about two sparring African immortals and set against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade.
In this light, fans could be forgiven for taking “Bloodchild” as one more of Butler’s slave stories. But there was another explanation for readers’ responses. “So many critics have read this as a story about slavery, probably just because I am Black,” Butler observed. For decades, Butler was nearly the only Black woman writing science fiction in America, and the slavery reading would dog her throughout her career. There was more to this than the racist notion that Black people have nothing better to do than pick at historical wounds. What Butler also faced was the enduring idea, not exclusive to white people, that African American literature represents one long riff on the slave spirituals that first awakened a young Frederick Douglass to “the soul-crushing and death-dealing character of slavery,” as he wrote in 1855. In other words, if the slavery reading prevailed among Butler’s readers, this was perhaps because they were working from the assumption that the underlying impulse of all Black art is to get free.
Yet to make this assumption, at least in Butler’s case, is to miss one of her finest
qualities as a writer of science fiction: her often ruthless commitment to writing about highly rational people who choose to give up
their freedom, or their chance at going free, in exchange for something they need more. To be sure, they typically make these choices under threat of violence, enslavement, or death, and they almost universally resent being made to choose. But they do not strike their bargains simply in order to survive. They ultimately judge that, in their specific situations, freedom has less value than, for instance, hope or pleasure. Even Kindred,
in its depiction of the protagonist’s ambivalent relationship with her slave-owning ancestor—she briefly considers becoming his lover before killing him—toys with the idea that such bargains could exist within
the institution of American chattel slavery. In this sense, the true object of Butler’s interest was not slavery per se but the real possibilities opened up when freedom is no longer humanity’s North Star.
It’s not hard to see why Butler might have been skeptical of slavery as a theme. Issues of colonization, enslavement, and empire had after all been the bread and butter of science fiction since Isaac Asimov. At the same time, the genre had all but sealed itself off to non-white characters during Butler’s time. Early in her career, she participated in a panel alongside an editor who cheekily suggested that Black characters were superfluous in science fiction since “you could always make any racial statement you needed to make by way of extraterrestrials.” (The experience would inspire her 1980 essay “Lost Races of Science Fiction.”) Even now, science fiction remains the preferred genre of white-slavery narratives; a Black sci-fi writer wishing to write about slavery may achieve little more than redundancy in a genre whose appeal has long consisted in ethical carte blanche to rehearse historical wrongs like the Atlantic slave trade, the British Empire, the Holocaust, or the dropping of the atom bomb, so long as half of the people involved are blue.
But what Butler might not have anticipated was a latter generation of admiring readers who would actively want her stories to be about slavery. It is increasingly difficult to separate Butler the author from the hagiography that has sprung up around her since her untimely death in 2006; this is especially the case in academic and activist circles, where she is hailed as a prophetic voice, a public intellectual, and an Afrofuturist visionary. Her work is sometimes called utopian, even as Butler herself was a political pessimist with a lifelong aversion to utopian thinking, and scholars have praised her novels for being “queer,” staring past her relentless focus on biological reproduction. In 2015, the editors of the fiction anthology
Octavia’s Brood went so far as to draw a straight line from Butler’s legacy as a Black science-fiction writer all the way back to “our ancestors in chains dreaming about a day when their children’s children’s children would be free.” Indeed, it is no great mystery why the neo–slave narrative Kindred—a good novel, but not a great one, and one that Butler never considered a work of science fiction—remains her most widely read and taught book today.
Butler, who in 2000 would tell Charlie Rose she had no interest in saying anything about race other than “Hey, we’re here,” made it a point to avoid critical theory of all kinds, regarding herself first and foremost as a writer. Yet her novels are rarely afforded the full privileges of literary criticism, perhaps because this would puncture the apotheosis to which she is regularly subjected. Her prose, sometimes called spare, is just as often lackluster. Her heroines tend to occupy the vantage point of lucid species-consciousness at the expense of their interior lives. None of this is to say Butler is undeserving of remembrance or critical evaluation; on the contrary, it is to say that, like many writers, she was often good, sometimes bad, occasionally brilliant, and rarely satisfied with her own work.
Butler would go so far as to disavow her 1978 novel, Survivor, which she blocked from being reprinted in perpetuity. In fact, as a decent execution of a derivative premise,
Survivor is no worse than Patternmaster, to which it serves as an oblique prequel, describing the fate of a group of human colonists called Missionaries—quasiChristian religious refugees who have fled the Patternist telepaths on Earth and hope to reestablish humanity among the stars. On a faraway planet, the Missionaries enjoy a cautious peace with the Garkohn, a tribe of bioluminescent aliens. When the Missionary heroine, Alanna, is captured by the rival Tehkohn clan, she learns the Garkohn have been quietly enslaving her fellow humans with a highly addictive drug, and she persuades the Tehkohn chieftain to help liberate them.
Butler would disparage Survivor as her
“Star Trek novel” on account of what she saw as the book’s scientific absurdities and simplistic picture of interstellar exploration. But worse than this for Butler was the fact that she had naïvely repeated the old colonial encounter that had characterized so much of the stories she had read in her youth, in which the colonists must conquer the natives or risk being subjugated themselves. When the Garkohn leader learns of humanity’s designs to escape, he offers them a familiar bargain: Be fruitful and multiply in the south in exchange for submitting to Garkohn rule. But the colonists successfully escape anyway, resettling in uninhabited territory in (of all places) the north.
This was Butler’s biggest issue with Survivor: Humanity goes free. It was a mistake she endeavored never to repeat. “Bloodchild” presents a very different scene of negotiation. What Gan demands, loaded rifle under his chin, is that T’Gatoi allow him to give up his freedom on his own terms. “No one ever asks us,” he tells the alien, but when she offers to take his sister instead, he stops her. “Do it to me,” he says, letting T’Gatoi lead him to bed and slide her ovipositor into him: “The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine.” T’Gatoi hesitantly asks Gan if he has offered himself in order to spare his sister. “And to keep you for myself,” he answers, nuzzling into her. Pressing his naked flesh against T’Gatoi’s velvety body, Gan accepts the risks of being unfree; in return, he wins fidelity, purpose, and a deeply compromised version of love—overclose, carnivorous—that may nonetheless form the basis of a good life.
To return to “Bloodchild” today is to be confronted with the prospect of a Black writer for whom freedom was rarely, if ever, the highest good. That this may appear paradoxical says less about Butler than it does about a contemporary tendency to compensate for the underrepresentation of minority artists by inflating their art until it reflects the experience of not being represented. This is to respond to pigeonholing by overstating the value of being a pigeon. Undoubtedly, Butler’s fiction was informed by her experiences of racism and misogyny, but we must never assert the obvious fact that Butler managed to be both a Black woman and a fiction writer as if this were a literary accomplishment instead of a social one. What recommends Butler’s work is not her status as one of the few Black science-fiction writers of her time but the fact that, despite this overwhelming professional isolation, she never gave in to what the critic Ismail Muhammad recently called “the pressures of easy legibility that Black writers have always faced in America.” For Butler, nothing was harder than the act of writing. If we owe her a debt, as devotees often claim, we may pay it by having a harder time reading her.