Background of the Study
Introduction
Octavia Butler Debuted in Issaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1984 winning a Nebula and Hugo Awards It won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and SF Chronicle Awards for Best Novelette the following year. It was also the title story for Butler’s 1995 collection Bloodchild & Other Stories.
Asimov’s was founded in 1977 by Joel Davis and Isaac Asimov. Then known as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, it hit the newsstand with the Spring issue as a quarterly publication. The magazine immediately picked up a large number of subscribers and by the next year, it had expanded to a bi-monthly. By 1979, Asimov’s had become a monthly. The magazine is now released six times a year, each edition a substantial 208-page double issue.
Isaac Asimov was the editorial director, but he insisted on hiring excellent personnel to edit the magazine. Asimov’s founding editor, George H. Scithers, had already received the Hugo Award for his fanzine, Amra, when Isaac picked him to run Asimov’s. Both Isaac and George viewed the magazine as a market that would welcome beginning authors alongside well-known professionals. Authors whose careers George launched include Barry B. Longyear and S. P. Somtow. Barry Longyear’s novella, “Enemy Mine” (September 1979), won Hugo and Nebula awards and was made into a movie with Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr. In addition to publishing award-winning stories, George won two Best Professional Editor Hugos before retiring from the magazine in 1982.
Kathleen Maloney took over as editor in 1982. Although she didn’t stay long, she managed to publish Connie Willis’s Nebula Award winning “A Letter from the Cleary’s” (June 1982) and to take me on as editorial assistant (also June 1982!). Kathleen left the magazine later that year and Asimov’s talented managing editor, Shawna McCarthy, took over the helm.
While remaining a welcoming home for new writers, Shawna’s Asimov’s acquired an edgier and more literary and experimental tone. Shawna published much of Connie Willis’s award-winning work as well as stories by Octavia E. Butler, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lucius Shepard, Karen Joy Fowler, John Varley, Nancy Kress, Bruce Sterling, Esther M. Friesner, James Patrick Kelly, Kit Reed, John Kessel, Michael Swanwick, Roger Zelazny, Pat Murphy, Gardner Dozois, and many others. Shawna won a Hugo for Best Professional Editor in 1984.
Shawna McCarthy left the magazine at the end of 1985 and Gardner Dozois took over as editor with the January 1986 issue. Gardner had actually worked on the magazine as an associate editor for six months in 1977. And one of his two Nebulas had been awarded to his August 1983 Asimov’s short story “The Peacemaker.” Gardner continued to publish many of Shawna’s stalwarts as well as authors like Robert Reed, Jonathan Lethem, Greg Egan, Judith Moffett, Terry Bisson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mike Resnick, Allen M. Steele, Joe Haldeman, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Neal Barrett, Jr. In 1986, Gardner published the magazine’s first novel serialization, Count Zero by William Gibson, and he later serialized two novels by Michael Swanwick and Harlan Ellison’s screenplay for I, Robot. Gardner won an unprecedented fifteen Hugo Awards for his work as a professional editor before retiring in 2004.
Having served Asimov’s under almost every known editorial title, I took over as editor in chief with the January 2005 issue. Familiar bylines continue to appear in Asimov’s. In addition to many of the authors listed above, some like Paolo Bacigalupi, Kij Johnson, Ian McDonald, Frederik Pohl, Lisa Goldstein, Paul McAuley, Rudy Rucker, Chris Beckett, Alexander Jablokow, and Ian R. MacLeod, had earlier publications in Asimov’s. Other established writers, such as Carol Emshwiller, Elizabeth Bear, Brandon Sanderson, Aliette de Bodard, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ken Liu, Christopher Barzak, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Lavie Tidhar, Dale Bailey, Will McIntosh, Suzanne Palmer, Megan Arkenberg, and Daryl Gregory made their first appearances in Asimov’s over the past decade. Authors making sales to Asimov’s early in their careers during this period include Ted Kosmatka, Felicity Shoulders, Henry Lien, William Preston, Alice Sola Kim, Derek Künsken, Jeff Carlson, and Steve Bein.
Personnel change has not been limited to Asimov’s editors. The magazine started out life with regular editorials by Isaac as well as monthly puzzles by Martin Gardner, and a regular round-up of upcoming SF conventions by Erwin S. Strauss. Our long-time book reviewer was Baird Searles. Martin retired from the puzzle columns when Shawna McCarthy left the magazine, but along the way, we added book reviews by Norman Spinrad. Sadly, both Isaac and Baird passed away in the early nineties. In 1993, the editorialist mantle was passed to the superb author Robert Silverberg and he’s been writing “Reflections” columns for us ever since. Also in 1993, we picked up some new book reviewers, and twenty years later Peter Heck and Paul Di Filippo are still sending their reviews our way. In 1998, we added James Patrick Kelly’s bi-monthly column about what’s new “On the Net.” Every so often, we feature nonfiction “Thought Experiments” by authors like James Gunn, Ray Kurzweil, Allen M. Steele, Aliette de Bodard, and many others. Our award-winning poets include Robert Frazier, Bruce Boston, Jane Yolen, Megan Arkenberg, William John Watkins, Laurel Winter, and Janis Ian.
Literature Review
INVASION OF THE INCUBATORS Butler’s “Bloodchild” protagonist, Gan, is born on a planet colonized by humans and home to a species of giant, sentient centipedes. When the humans first arrived neither race recognized the other as intelligent, but by the time the story begins a tense truce has been negotiated. Humans live on special preserves, and each family “voluntarily” commits one male child per generation to incubating the centipedes’ offspring. Usually the grubs which hatch from eggs laid in these men’s bodies are removed before they devour them from the inside out.
Unfortunately, young Gan encounters a man whose centipede is absent, and who is therefore experiencing the horror of a hatching without her surgical intervention or the tailored pain relief drugs only she can provide. Humans are the aliens in this scenario. And challenging the popular science fiction narrative which reenacts white imperialism by mapping the subjugation of non-European lands onto the conquest of extraterrestrial space, it is the foreign humans, rather than the natives, who are reduced to the status of a commodity. SLAVES TO THE RHYTHM METHOD That the commodity humans represent is a highly valued one doesn’t really matter.
That the long-term success of the centipedes’ reproduction cycle is dependent on them means that they’re coveted and protected, not that they have much choice as to whether or not they’re impregnated. Despite the many parallels to slavery that critics pointed out to her in her story, Butler was always adamant that the real inspiration for “Bloodchild” lay in the politics of sex. Consent and bodily boundaries are often troublous in Butler’s work. In this story as in many others, constraint is a factor in supposedly consensual agreements. Like women in patriarchal societies coupling with men, the human families must come to accept their selection by centipedes endowed with power and privilege. Then they carefully decide which family member will render services; it’s almost always a male, in order to ensure that human reproduction is less impacted by the incubation process.
Relationships between unequals can never be purely consensual; they’re built on imbalance. The humans in “Bloodchild” risk annihilation. A scenario in which psychoactive chemicals and imprisonment accomplish the centipedes’ goals sans human agency lies in the story’s very recent past. Suicide is another option Gan seriously considers. Love such as he feels for the centipede who has befriended his family can function as weapon, or a cage, circumscribing movement away from its problematic focus. But as “Bloodchild” ends we know that Gan, at least, is willing to keep dancing this awkward dance. AIN’T I A WOMAN? The pressure to classify this story as an allegory of slavery comes on multiple fronts. That Butler resisted doing so shows how stubborn she could be when it came to sticking to her aesthetic principles. Framing the proposition as either/or, though, is a failure of understanding. People can claim multiple identities and multiple oppressions, and these often inform our creative work.
Butler was black and a woman and tall and shy and nearsighted and a vegetarian and an atheist and a high blood pressure patient. Three of these identities divided her from this culture’s default settings in ways the culture calls important: race, gender, and religion. Viewing “Bloodchildren” through at least two identity lenses—race and gender—produces binocular vision. Depth. Room to wander around in the world the author made. IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW Per its proponent Darko Suvin, cognitive estrangement is science fiction’s tool for getting readers to recognize truths they’d otherwise be averse to.
By locating her story on a distant planet, in the future, Butler made the unpalatable so fresh, so unfamiliar, that it could be swallowed whole and mentally digested later. Not a “spoonful of sugar,” but a place setting of utensils wrought of finest unobtainium. The terrifying, choice-poor path lying before Gan is one many marginalized readers know well, while this society’s giant centipedes may find it so mundane as to be beneath their ordinary notice. BUY IT NOW IMMORTAL LACKS Butler urged students to write about what they feared. What did she fear? Parasitic insects appear repeatedly in her work—though only in “Bloodchild” do they argue their own case. Loss of autonomy features frequently as well—as in her breakout novel Kindred and her made-for-sequels last book, Fledgling.
The beauty of her treatment of these themes is how she transforms such horrors into achingly involving, deeply compelling calls for autonomy, freedom, and bodily integrity. BECAUSE THEY CAN Beyond the coercion implicit in his people’s situation, Gan’s motivation for allowing himself to be impregnated is twofold: he loves and wishes to protect his sister Hoa, the family’s other candidate for hosting the natives’ living larvae; and he loves and wishes to please his family’s giant centipede, T’Gatoi.
For centuries women have weighed the dangers of childbirth against its rewards. With her story of a man dealing in similar complexities, Butler strikes a rich and reverberating chord, one that echoes through multiple identities, multiple dynamics, multiple contingencies. “Bloodchild” is a glorious accomplishment—an elegant, urgent tale that changes all who read it. Perhaps that’s because it’s also a lasting and faithful depiction of what we can and will do to survive.