Blood Child

Blood Child was very strange but I did enjoy it and it made me think.

Though I've complained about writers holding back too much information before I liked it in Blood Child. I think it's because it was a short story so it didn't take 50 pages to explain who the characters were. I like the way that the author let the scenes build from nothing to an image. She let the reader picture what was happening on their own instead of making the reader struggle to find the author's point of view.

The Tlic/Terran living situation is a head scratcher. I want to call it negative but this situation is much better when the Terran showed up and attacked the Tlic only to be enslaved by them. Now the two species have a mutual relationship. Now the Terran live on a reservation, which maybe is meant to allude to Native American reservations but honestly the more I think about it, it feels like a farm. A well maintained farm with happy sheep but a farm nonetheless. When the worms are transfered from the man to the achti i felt like it was a metaphor. The worms didn't see the Terran as anything different from the farm animal. The Tlic/Terran relationship might be positive but they are not equal. The Tlic are the superior beings who live longer and are the original inhabiters of this planet. The Terran are lesser in all honesty. I feel bad for the Terran.

BUT, from the Tlic point of view their species needs to survive. So they must USE the Terran bodies to progress their species. Tlic need Terran even though Terran probably don't need Tlic. It's not like the Tlic like doing it, but it must be done. They're doing a bad thing but there's no other option. At least the Tlic are as nice as they can be to the Terran about the situation.

In all honest the situation sucks but that's what it is. I can't think of a positive solution that'd make both groups as happy as can be. That's just the way it for them. Mutual relationships between species like this is common in the animal kingdom, but as humans we don't really think about this. I'm glad the writer looked and animals when coming up with the story, they really feel like a different species from humans.