How Octavia Butler’s Life Connects to “Bloodchild” Will humans become slaves to an alien race? Will history repeat itself? Octavia Butler answered these questions and many more in her science fiction short stories. Butler was an African American woman dealing with both racism and sexism in her daily life as a writer. She wrote about this adversity in her stories and forces people to consider what it means to be human. In particular, “Bloodchild” deals directly with power imbalances and slavery in the future. In the short story, Gan is a Terran living in a Tlic controlled society where he’s forced to discover the truth behind the relationships he’s made through his life. “Bloodchild” is an allusion for the discrimination Butler faced as an African American illustrated by the inequality between the Tlics and the Terrans, the way the Tlics used the Terrans for personal gain, and the Terrans being trapped under Tlic control. The inequality between the Tlics and the Terrans mirrors her own life experience dealing with racial discrimination. In “Bloodchild” Qui says, “You’re not her. You’re just her property.”…show more content… The Preserve is a physical representation of societal pressure; it’s enescapable. Qui even tries to escape as Gan describes when he says, “He began running away- until he realized there was no away. Not in the Preserve. Qui wants to escape the Tlics and the role of a Terran in their society. But he realized there was no way out, just like Butler’s mother realized when she was a child. Butler describes her mother’s sacrifices by saying, “If my mother hadn’t put up with all those humiliations, I wouldn’t have eaten very well or lived comfortably.” Butler realizes that her mother had a certain role in society, and had she not accepted it, they wouldn’t have had a nice life. These societal pressures are the same that the characters in “Bloodchild”