Weird #65: “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler (1984)

@amethyststudio (from Canva) Octavia Butler’s weird science fiction masterpiece “Bloodchild” (1984) is set in a world where bot flies are sentient and lay eggs in human beings as incubators to propagate their species. It was difficult for me to to tell, at first, whether the narrator, Gan, was human or an oversized fly, since the …

Continue reading Weird #65: “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler (1984)

Weird #61: “The Little Dirty Girl” by Joanna Russ (1981)

Joanna Russ, author of How to Suppress Woman’s Writing, was part of the feminist science fiction movement, which ran parallel to second wave feminism. Ursula K. L Guin, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, and Octavia Butler were each a part of this renaissance in women’s science fiction writing. Women’s writing has been suppressed in one way …

Continue reading Weird #61: “The Little Dirty Girl” by Joanna Russ (1981)

Weird #60: “Egnaro” by M. John Harrison (1981)

M. John Harrison was part of the New Wave, a literary movement that, according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, introduced Mainstream fiction techniques into the “straightjacket” of mass produced science fiction. The literary values of the movement, which increasingly drew from the soft sciences rather than hard sciences, can be identified with the kind …

Continue reading Weird #60: “Egnaro” by M. John Harrison (1981)