Madsen Hardy has a doctorate in English literature and is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she discusses some of the different models of dependence and exploitation in "Bloodchild" discussed by Butler in her afterword to the story.

"I tried to write a story about paying the rent - a story about an isolated colony of human beings in an inhabited, extrasolar world," Butler explains in her afterword to "Bloodchild." "Sooner or later, the humans would have to make some kind of accommodation with their um . . . their hosts. Chances are this would be an unusual accommodation." In "Bloodchild," Butler has created a compelling imaginative world where adolescent boys give over their bodies to carry the eggs of insect-like natives of a distant planet - this is the "unusual accommodation" to which Butler refers. Readers of the story, as well as characters within it, try...