As we’ve reached the year in which Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower begins, it’s become something of a cliché to comment on how prophetic the novel truly is. The Earthseed duology, which imagines a world ravaged by climate chaos and besieged by incipient fascism, is frightening prescient. It’s no wonder countless podcasts, think pieces, and social media posts have proclaimed, “Octavia was right!”
And don’t get me wrong, I love the Parable series. It certainly deserves its praise, as does Octavia Butler, whose visionary career paved the way for a new generation of Black SFF writers. But I also think the acclaim around the Parables sometimes eclipses Butler’s other work, which is just as fascinating, just as disturbing and challenging. Octavia Butler has more to tell us than what we can glean from Parable of the Sower.
I’ve been especially interested in revisiting three of her strangest works—her vampire novel Fledging; “Bloodchild,”a short story about a colony of humans living alongside an insectoid race of aliens; and the Xenogenesis trilogy, which explores human’s post-apocalypse relationship with a bioengineering race of extraterrestrials called the Oankali. Across these stories, I see a recurring fascination with the reality of our bodies, our needs and frailties, and the way our bodily desires inextricably link us to each other.
In each of these stories, humans are less powerful than their nonhuman counterparts, whether that’s the tentacled, pheromone-exuding Oankali in Xenogenesis or the three-meter long, centipede-like Tlic in “Bloodchild.” But for all of their physical superiority, the nonhuman characters are desperately reliant on their relationships with humans. In Xenogenesis, the Oankali can exude chemicals that drug humans with a thought and heal with a touch. They manipulate their own genetic makeup and easily heal their own bullet wounds. Yet they depend on their human relationships in order to live. Oankali adolescents go into metamorphosis where they are comatose—profoundly helpless—and rely on their human partners to care for them. In Imago, the final book in the trilogy, a young Oankali begins to physically dissolve, unable to survive because it does not have human companions to ground it in a stable form. As the narrator notes, “We called our need for contact with others and our need for mates hunger. One who could hunger could starve.”
And in Fledgling, the Inaaren’t your typical vampires who can feed on any convenient person. They instead form lifelong connections with human “symbionts” and hunger for physical intimacy just as they do for blood. This relationship is one of mutual symbiosis, as human symbionts live longer and healthier lives than typical humans. For both Ina and their symbionts, these relationships come with challenges; much of Fledgling is about navigating the tangled web of resentment and jealousy in these sprawling, polyamorous households as Shori, the novel’s vampiric protagonist, learns how to care for her symbionts and let them care for her.
There are similar themes in “Bloodchild.”In the story, the Tlic aliens rely on human hosts to carry their parasitic eggs. Tlic “grubs” born from human bodies are bigger, healthier, and more likely to live. It’s implied that the Tlic were sickly, perhaps even dying out, before humans crash-landed on their planet. The humans are restricted to a patrolled area called the “Preserve,” but the Tlic are dependent on humans for their own species’ survival; they regard humans with a “desperate eagerness.” “Bloodchild” references a past where humans were treated as little more than animals, but in the story’s present time Tlic are integrated into the families of their hosts and the position is one of honor. Humans are “necessities, status symbols, and an independent people.”
“Bloodchild” is sometimes interpreted as an allegory for slavery, an interpretation Butler flatly denies—“It isn’t,” she says in the story’s afterword. She describes it instead as “a love story between two very different beings”—between Gan, a teenage human boy, and T’Gatoi, the insectoid alien who will come to implant her eggs in his body by the story’s end. Butler also said she wanted to challenge herself to write a story where a man chooses to be impregnated “as an act of love.”
“Bloodchild” has a lot of body horror for a love story. Gan witnesses a Tlic birth gone wrong, a bloody and painful affair that seems to him like a form of torture as the ravenous grubs burst from a man’s flesh—Gan thinks, “it was worse than finding something dead, rotting.” There’s horror in Butler’s others stories, too. Shori, starved and gravely injured, kills and eats a man in one of the first scenes in Fledgling. And across the Xenogenesis trilogy humans struggle with their horror of the Oankali, their revulsion at something so alien, so different from our own bodies.
Despite their revulsion, despite the bloody horror of Tlic birth or the slimy Oankali tentacles, the human characters in these stories still chose to join with the alien, the nonhuman; to become their symbionts, to reach eagerly for those same tentacles, to be held still and impregnated with Tlic eggs. In “Bloodchild,” Gan chooses to be implanted out of obligation, but afterward, as he rests his naked skin against hers, he admits it was to also because he wanted to keep T’Gatoi for himself. In this choice I see Octavia Butler’s fascination with pleasure, its seduction, its irresistibility. She seems to be asking: what does pleasure do for us? What does it make us willing to give up?
The pursuit of pleasure is often treated as hedonistic or self-indulgent. As Audre Lorde says in her 1978 essay on the power of the erotic, “we have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” In Butler’s stories, characters follow their own pleasure, whether that’s the sensual bite of a vampire or the healing of the Oankali’s tentacles. But her characters aren’t punished for this pursuit. Pleasure is depicted as seductive, as addicting, but not shameful.
Instead, pleasure becomes a way of overcoming what Lorde calls the “threat of difference,” the means by which the human and nonhuman characters come to better understand each other. Pleasure is, as Lorde says, “a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them.”
In the final book of the Xenogenesis series, the Oankali discover a group of humans who have resisted their influence. Hidden in the mountains, the human colony has persisted for generations to “preserve” the human race by refusing to birth constructs—the children born of both humans and Oankali. Generations of inbreeding has burdened the colony with congenital diseases that leave them in physical pain and increasingly disabled. Their young people are offered few other options than to marry and keep having babies; some of the residents are driven to suicide by the bleakness of their lives.
As the colony is seduced by Oankali, the residents’ desire for pleasure isn’t depicted as immoral or self-destructive. Pleasure is a guidepost, a way of moving the colony from a life of unnecessary suffering to one of healing, satisfaction, and connection. Once the residents experience the pleasure of being with the Oankali, it’s unimaginable that they could return to a life of such pain. This is the power of the erotic that Audre Lorde names: its ability to teach us the pleasure our bodies can experience, to demand of ourselves and the world the fullness of feeling we have learned we are capable of.
Fledgling, “Bloodchild,”and the Xenogenesis series aren’t without their violation or violence. There’s an aspect of coercion to all of these relationships; the Ina and Oankali have physically addictive qualities that make consent to their partnerships uncertain. The Oankali, especially, often manipulate and lie to their human counterparts as part of their seduction, and it’s eventually revealed that they will destroy the Earth through their habitation, leaving only an empty husk behind.
Despite Butler’s objections, you can read “Bloodchild”as a parable for slavery, or at the very least as a story of an alien race violently exploiting a captive colony of humans as meat for their parasitic children. And let’s not even get into the disturbing sexual politics of Fledgling, a book where a vampire in the body of a child seduces several adults into sexual relationships. To be sure, Butler explores violation alongside pleasure. But I think that’s intentional. Our own relationships are not without the complications of power, exploitation, or hierarchy. Pleasure is a bridge, and any connection has the potential for harm.
This is explicitly discussed in the climax of “Bloodchild.”After witnessing the gore of a Tlic birth Gan, sickened and terrified of his own fate, threatens his life with an illegal gun. Though T’Gatoi talks him down from any bloodshed, he convinces her to let him keep the gun despite the danger it poses to her safety. As Gan tells her, “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is a risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.”
All of these stories explore how to deal with this risk, and with how to care for ourselves and each other across such immense difference. Though they are capable of physically overpowering them, the Ina, the Oankali, the Tlic all learn to give back to the humans they come to see as partners; to share in pleasure, to heal, to care for them. They learn to make concessions for the benefit of their relationships, to give their human partners autonomy knowing that autonomy comes with risk. Sometimes that leads to violence, as it does it in our world.
Like the characters in Butler’s books our bodies, our desires, entangle us in relationships of mutual dependence, whether those relationships are sexual, platonic, or familial. And if pleasure is as Butler imagines it—addicting, irresistible; if it is not frivolous but necessary and life-sustaining as Audre Lorde argues, if our pleasure depends on the pleasure of others, then it also a responsibility. We all hunger, and anyone who can hunger can starve. With these stories I see Octavia Butler asking us to interrogate what we owe to the partnerships that shape our lives and our future, what our obligations are to the people we rely on, the ones who care for us when we’re sick and who share our joys as their own.
