Bloodchild was an uncomfortable read. The body horror in it was jarring, and the coercive elements were unsettling. It gave me the creeps—probably Butler’s intention. I don’t always read fiction with an analytical lens (a lot of the time it’s just for the plot), but this one clearly has deeper meaning.

I had to look up the Wikipedia entry to remind myself of the other stories in the collection. Speech Sounds and Amnesty were the ones I remembered enjoying—one vaguely post-apocalyptic, the other imagining what it might be like to live symbiotically with an alien species. Not really like Project Hail Mary, but it scratched a similar itch.

The collection also has some essays, which were interesting, but not exactly entertaining.

I don’t regret finishing the whole thing, but some of the stories were challenging in ways that weren’t the kind of escapism I was after at the time.