Assessment

What is your reaction to what you just read?

One of the most important aspects of storytelling, as I’ve learned it so far, is that you cannot hand the readers everything at once. Confusion is what keeps the reader reading. Questions, intrigue. And while I don’t want to shade Mother Octavia—who the hell am I to shade Octavia Butler anyway?—I think that she may have gone too far onto the other end, at least for me. I went in confused, intrigued. I came out with a feeling of some unresolved confusion. 

So as far as I gather, the Tlic…exist…and implant humans with their eggs. They used to herd them like cattle but backed out before deciding on the joint family gig. 

I don’t feel like I have a concrete enough grasp on what the Tlic are, what an N’Tlic even is, what T’Khotgif Teh is. I feel like I grasping at something like I’ve grabbed a handful of sand and things are slipping through my fingers. 

It’s important to point out that style and taste is a thing worth acknowledging. A style of work can be a barrier to understanding and appreciating a work, especially when consumed on a time crunch. All that to say that the style here puts up a glass wall between me and the story. It feels, to me, somewhat stiff, rigid outside of dialogue. It makes it hard for me to connect.

What connections did you make? Discuss the elements with which you connected.

I think the biggest thing that I connected to was Qui. He was the character that I felt I could best understand and connect to. He has this sort of resentment for being effectively cattle. I think it isn’t unlike the prison pipeline in some ways. An overseeing party using people to their own ends, little regard for their actual lives and quality of those lives.

Because I read slow, though, I’m still writing this as we’re hitting the conversation about pregnancy, that is a thing worth connecting to that I entirely missed, mostly because of how far away and intangible the story felt for me. I would have liked a second read or more time to consume this in a way that is more productive. Would have connected to more, I think.

How would you adapt this story into another medium? What changes, what medium?

As a writer, I think about adaptation interestingly. Namely, would the story be elevated in any way by a change in medium? With this one, for me, I would actively not want it adapted. There is an otherworldly (ha) nature to the Tlic and the air of the story overall. Being forced to make yourself see the things on the page creates a different experience than it being drawn out for you. It would remove your ability to pace the experience for yourself (which is one of the things I love most about writing).

If I had to pick something, I would want it to be a radio play because I want to, if at all possible, maintain the experience of having to force yourself to see the thing that you might look away from were it visually represented for you. Keeping visuals out of it maintains intimacy. And this story, I think, wants intimacy.

15 years from now

Honestly, I l expect that more of the world to be bonfire than it already is (see the Amazon, California, and large swaths of Africa). Revolutions are happening now and will pick up speed. Certain governments will have collapsed and reformed, others  —the US—on the brink. US politicians, though? Too stubborn. Refuse to change, thus the fighting.

50 years from now

I actively can’t bring myself to think that far ahead, there is too strong a likelihood that I’ll be murdered before I even hit the 15-year mark. Can’t think too far forward. Makes me queasy.