Environmental Awareness

"The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived," T'Gatoi reminds Gan during the story's climactic scene. This suggests an environmental context for the psychological drama at the center of the story. Butler does not detail the reasons why the earlier host animals began killing Tlic eggs, but it is implicit that the tensions of plot have come about because the Tlic planet's ecosystem - that is, its ecological community and physical environment considered as a unit - is no longer in balance. "Bloodchild" explores the troubled interdependence between Tlic and human species during what might be understood as an environmental crisis on the Tlic planet. This reflects a sense of environmental crisis here on earth at the time that Butler wrote the story, when there was growing awareness of damage to the earth's ecosystem. Starting with...