FEATURED POST: Blood Child and Aliens

When it comes to science fiction, there is nothing I love more than aliens. Perhaps it is because I grew up fascinated by animals, creatures, monsters, and reptiles. The biggest impact on me was the actual alien, from the movie Alien. I remember as a little kid thinking that it was the coolest looking creature ever and playing with the alien toys. To me, aliens are really the pinnacle of science fiction. Often what will sell me on a work of science fiction is the inclusion of aliens. They just have so much potential for variation, in appearance, intelligence, evolution, you name it. They can be essentially monsters, like in the Alien movies, or more humanoid and intelligent, like in say, Star Trek. even more interestingly, they can often be a combination of both- like the very alien appearing creatures from the film District 9, who are still quite human when it came to emotion and intelligence. Or, the insect aliens from the short story Blood Child, by Octavia Butler. These aliens are extremely alien; they are essentially giant bugs. Multiple limbs, claws, mandibles, everything. These creatures could easily be mistaken for some B-movie horror monsters. But they are more than that. They are actually intelligent beings, with emotions and awareness of their surroundings that matches that of a human. Even more interestingly, in the context of the story of Blood Child, they are actually the superior species, holding humans in what you could call controlled captivity. It is quite interesting how humans and these insect aliens interact in the short story, living together almost as a family. The dependence of the aliens on the humans also adds another layer to the strange relationship between species. These aliens need humans for hosts for their young larvae newborn. Without humans, these creatures would have a hard time multiplying, so they keep humans almost as cattle. It is interesting that the humans go through with the process, though they do not seem to have much of a choice. Part of the reason these insect aliens interest me so much is that their method of using other species as hosts is literally straight out of the movie Alien. In both cases, humans are used as the hosts, the newborn aliens living inside the human body. The difference being that in the movie Alien, humans are unwillingly used as hosts by the monstrous aliens, whereas in Blood Child humans accept this relationship and often expect or even volunteer to be hosts for the, somewhat at least, more caring insect aliens.