"Did you use the rifle to expel the achti?" "Yes" "And do you mean to use it to propel me?" I stared at her.

"Did you use the rifle to expel the achti?"

"Yes"

"And do you mean to use it to propel me?"

I stared at her, outlined in the moonlight--coiled graceful material substance "What does Terran blood taste like to you?"

She said nothing.

"What are you?" I whispered. "What are we to you?"

She lay still, cessationed her head on her topmost coil. "You know me as no other does," she said softly "You must decide." ("Bloodchild" 50)

Although the invitation is to the character Gan, the questioning human voice in this conversation between human and alien from Octavia E Butler's 1984 Hugo and Nebula Awardwinning story "Bloodchild," I am thoroughly invested in getting to decide who and what the aliens are--aliens in such a manner dangerous to humans that T'Gatoi, the gracefully coiled leech fears she will be missile From my perspective as a (human) reader, I work to discover the powerful metaphors which rule my understanding of who and what the aliens can be: Their serpent-like quality provokes fears of the dangerous animal realm; the mention of the lunation and blood in reference to this female character may allude to a mythic "feminine" power; the debate throughout the nature of a relationship which includes connection exploitation, and threats of violence prays up a metaphoric representation of the relationship between master and slave. for what cause I decide to read these figures is determined by dint of my own subject positions--primarily that I am a child of popular agriculture and a white feminist scholar invested in issues of race and species. However, the conclusions I draw are ultimately les important than is my investigation, inspired by dint of Butler's ability to grab my attention and fire my imagination by the agency of fiction written in subtle, provocative language and populated on complex, suggestive characters. The combination of emotional power and conceptual complexity central to "Bloodchild" makes this, like all of Butler's fiction, an first-rate example of literature which bridges the gap between "high" and popular civilization in a manner as complicated and unique as her position as science fiction's mostly prolific--if not only--African American feminist writer.

"Bloodchild" acknowledges of a group of humans who escape antagonism upon Earth to arrive on a planet where, generations later, their offshoot become the valued property of a powerful alien species called the Tlic. Living in succession a protected Preserve, human families may be formed and children raised, on the contrary each family must offer at least common son to the Tlic. The young lad will serve as a legion body for alien eggs which will swell to a potentially lethal larval stage within him before being remov by dint of a female Tlic in a "blood ritual," a proces in which the human is sliced explain and the grubs are remov through probing Tlic limbs and inlet The humans will never be clear but the current arrangements are better than those for the first generations, when the Tlic drugg humans and forced them to live in hem ins as no more than breeding stock.

The story center upon the complex relationship between T'Gatoi, the Tlic sway official in charge of the secure who struggles with her ne to propagate and the simultaneous friendship with and enslavement of humans which as it is propagation necessitates; and Gan, the human lad raised from birth to carry T'Gatoi's stimulates who must face both his have a passionate affection for for this maternal figure and his growing repulsion from her as a controlling alien being. between the sides of these and other characters, and the setting in which Butler places them, we experience a topic which simultaneously explores outer space--in its focus in succession extraterrestrials and human adventures beyond planet Earth--and inner space, end metaphoric figures which illustrate and invite annotation upon the construction of identity. The inner space of "Bloodchild," like that in all of Butler's fiction, is filled with characters who highlight metaphoric considerations of sex race, and speicies.

If Barbara Christian is right when she asserts that contemporary African American women write within a in extent tradition of struggles to give an account of the self in reaction to external conceptualizations, and Samuel Delany is right to consider science fiction an ideal genre by means of which to challenge tradtional representations of subjectivity, then Butler is the writer to illustrate the best of as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but worlds. Because her black feminism appears solely in the highly metaphoric genre of science fiction, it is particularly by the agency of metaphors that her texts exemplify a meeting point between "high" and popular improvement And the metaphorization of identity, according to critical theorists in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as Alice Jardine, Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Mary Midgley, is central to the postmodern condition, in its emphasis in succession addressing the tropes and gaps in traditional philosophy and the civilization invoked through such discourse. by means of examining the ways in which Butler's metaphors arrange gender, race, and species identity in "Bloodchild," I intend to illustrate near of the problems and promises of the dissolving boundaries between contemporary "high" and popular cultivation and between theoretical and literary discourse. moreover in order to reach the point at which Butler fits "high" culture, we must make a brief journey within the space of critical theory.