Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler Questions

1. What is your reaction to the text you just read?
After reading Bloodchild by Octavia Butler I felt confused, so much so that I ended googling to find out more about what I had just read. Once I had done that I felt like I could better understand the story and was less confused and more disturbed. Online this story is argued to be a love story, but I think the only way I could believe that is if it was familial love. Gan makes all of her decisions to help her family. She gets impregnated so her brother and sister do not have to carry that burden, not because she has fallen in love. Once I started thinking about it that way it wasn’t so much a love story as a coming of age story, which fits with the opening line “My last night of childhood began with a visit home.”

2. What connections did you make with the story? Discuss the elements of the story with which were able to connect.
Personally I did not feel as connected to this story as I could have been. I tried not to let the fact that it’s a short story sway me, but I’ve never been a fan of short stories. Past that this work has a lot of good in it, if only it had been written in an easier way. I had a hard time getting into the story and understanding just what was happening. Once I figured it out I realized it was just a twist on a modern day problem. Sex, family, and survival are all problems addressed in this work, but the entire time you are wondering which side is the good. The problem is, they both are. These creatures are just doing what is needed to stay alive, and harming the others as little as they can. It’s almost a paradise, but it is twisted and corrupted by the fears of a child.

3. What changes would you make to adapt this story into another medium? What medium would you use? What changes would you make?
I think this story would make an interesting mini series or tv show. I might just be biased because I believe most books should be turned into tv shows and not movies, but the story would unfold more natural with having an overarching plot like this story gives, and smaller subplots of other things that happen on this planet. We would be able to go deeper into the children’s backstories, the mothers past, how humans got to this planet, other people being impregnated on this world, how this world has developed a new type of family all without losing the main story of a young girl afraid to do what she must to protect her family. Right now with the boom in young strong heroins this story would be a hit. It would be dark and horrible like The Handmaids Tale but it would follow its traditional African roots giving it a new and refreshing take.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

I picked to read this book after I watched the Netflix adaptation.  I had really enjoyed the show so I wanted to see how close the book would follow to it, and then try to figure out why things were changed.  After reading the book I can say that, for the most part, the TV show only changed the characters and left the plot alone.  The same things seem to happen in both things, but the people are completely different.  The tv show introduced a few great new characters to us that the book either glosses over, doesn't have, or is a combination of a few smaller characters.  The TV show also stepped up its racial diversity.  But all of that really comes down to stylistic changes, both are good with what they have.  That saying, the biggest character change of all, was Takeshi Kovac.  Maybe I found the main character of the TV show hard to read because most of his acting is actions instead of dialogue, but he comes across as more of a bad guy rogue.  The book allowed him to be funny and even cheerful at some parts.  That's not to say that the TV show didn't have him laugh, but he seemed more plagued by his past than anything else.  Book Kovac is constantly stalked by an ex-partner who is missing an eye (TV is a black woman lover who lead his rebel team) but even in the moments of an one eyed ghost telling him how to change his life, Kovac seemed less melancholy.  I have to chalk this all up to being able to understand his thoughts, something a book can give you the privilege of that the TV cannot.

Amanda