A few years ago I was the artist guest of Foolscap, a small Seattle-area con geared to readers rather than film or TV or gaming. Octavia Butler, the celebrated SF novelist, was the author guest of honor. I hadn't read her before, and was surprised and intrigued to find her stories mostly disinterested in SF matters of technology and its effects, and full of suffering. And I mean suffering: torture, rape, deprivation -- her protagonists and sympathetic characters endure a lot.
A gentle, softspoken woman, modest despite her MacArthur "genius" grant, she gave the sense she'd suffered a bit herself. Now she has died, after slipping and hitting her head on a cobble walkway outside her home in Seattle. She was only 58.
I painted the accompanying image for the Foolscap program book, illustrating her award-winning story "Bloodchild." It's a coming-of-age tale, in which a young boy learns the appalling secret adults never speak of: the benign, nurturing aliens living among the humans on this planet must, to reproduce, plant eggs in human hosts, which gorily (but not fatally) emerge as alien infants.
If you think about it, this is a realization every human girl goes through. Bad news, honey! You're going to endure the worst pain of your life and bear children for those people with the hair on their faces. The process looks like this...
Talk about seeing things in a new way.
My technique wasn't quite up to my ambition in this painting, but I do think I got the ambiguity of the boy's relationship to the alien right. Click to enlarge.
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