Butler's 'Bloodchild', originally published in African American Review vol 28 (1994) pp. Elyce Rae Helford has written the best developed analysis I have yet found of this interpretation of the story in 'Would you really rather die than bear my young?': The Construction of Gender, Race and Species in Octavia E. Many of them see it as a story about slavery or about slavery combined with gender exploitation. There are already a lot of on-line reviews of 'Bloodchild', either on its own or considering it as a part of Butler's oeuvre (which includes little short fiction but numerous novels). T'Gatoi balks at the suggestion that a private act become public, but Gan seems confident that he will bring her around in the end, and indeed there is enough of a sense that the relationship between humans and Tlic as a species is still developing that we believe him. Shocked by the process of the larval hatching (though in fact it's described in terms which are, excruciatingly, almost familiar to anyone who has witnessed a human birth), he takes the responsibility of suggesting that in future humans be made more aware of the process, pointing out that 'no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right'. Gan's position as the future partner and indeed half-brother of T'Gatoi ('She had been taken from my father's flesh when he was my age') is very important. He witnesses a hatching event which almost goes horribly wrong, but none the less agrees in the end to bear T'Gatoi's children. The narrator of the story is Gan, a young human whose family has been 'adopted' by T'Gatoi, a leading Tlic. The Tlic have moved from a period of time when humans were basically kept as brood animals for the eggs, to a social system of adopting humans into their family with any luck, the newly hatched larvae can be removed from their human host before too much damage is caused. Fortunately for the Tlic, humans also live on the planet and are ideal hosts for their eggs. However the mammal-like animals native to the Tlic world have evolved a natural defence which poisons the eggs before they hatch.

The story is set on a world dominated by the insect-like Tlic, whose reproduction system includes laying eggs inside a living host the larvae then hatch and eat their way out. When I last read it in May 2001, I wrote:

Bloodchild octavia butler audiobook