Blood Child

     This blog was created for the 2018 spring class for Lit of Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy course at Ringling College of Art and Design. In this blog I will talk about the books we read and what they mean to me personally. If you have come across this blog and have not read the book I am talking about this week, I will warn you now that I will spoil it.
      This week our teacher had us read Blood child specifically. the story itself is about how humans (or terrans as the book calls us) have become enslaved by an alien race and brought to their planet. over time we gained more rights and were pretty much promoted to household pets, but not because we fought for it, because they didn't want us to try escape. In order for the alien race to survive they need to use our bodies to hatch their young, sort of like a forced symbiotic relationship. Our teacher asked us what we felt about the relationship the Terrans and aliens have, and If I can speak candidly, It's really creepy. It makes sense how and why this would happen, and the use of skin color to compare it to enslavement in America helps illustrate that this really isn't a situation we should be comfortable with. Humans are raised like livestock and used to hatch alien babies, specifically the males because the process is near-fatal and they need the women to make more humans for them. 
     We were asked what changes we would make to adapt the story to another medium, and If I were to adapt it to a different medium I would choose film, because there is a lot one could do with this story visually to make its point, aside from just the skin color I mentioned earlier. The first change I would make is make the aliens look human like, similar to what you see in one artist's interpretation above. Other changes I would make is to the environment itself. It is mentioned the humans live on a reserve, but to emphasize the fact of how factory-like they are used for, I would make the reserve look similar to the stacks from ready player one, with open houses instead of trailers obviously. Having the houses stacked on top of each other in a staircase like fashion would visually compare their situation to what we do with bees or other animals we use to get things from.