K, first off, "Bloodchild" = creepy and not to be read right before going to bed, especially if one is particularly phobic about personal invasion by insects to begin with. Personal nausea aside, though, the contrast between assimilating a species into one's own, and using the Other as purely breeding ground is fascinating. "Bloodchild" made "Lilith's Brood" sit far more easily with me.

Ooloi--when I first saw the word, it looked very familiar, but I've never read anything by Butler before, and poking around on the web, she's the only one who's meant to use the word. It's not the pronunciation of the word that's familiar, it's the physical shape of it. Can anyone shed any light on this? It's driving me bonkers. The OED offers a fascinating array of words that start with oo (a prefix which means having to do with eggs or ova, yay butler making up intelligent names!), but nothing looks familiar.

Interesting that "Lilith's Brood" is also referred to often as the Xenogenesis Trilogy. Lilith's Brood is a far bleaker title.

Lilith's myth-based history is fascinating. Yay for Scott_of_the_Sahara's post on it. My first introduction to Lilith was through Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" series, where he highlights Lilith's refusal to be sexually dominated by Adam, a motif that comes up again in a play that was put on here fall of 2004, "The Lovesong of J Robert Oppenheimer." The focus on sex that comes up with her, both in the above mentioned and in Scott_of_the_Sahara's post, with the seduction of men and the wantonness of spawning a demon race, is an interesting backdrop to the trilogy we just read.

There's a comic series, "Lucifer Morningstar," that's a spin-off of Sandman that I also kept thinking of during Lilith's Brood. In it, the Lilim, her demon children, are one of three sides in the armageddon battle. The three sides of a story instead of the traditional two plays out rather interestingly. The series also deals a lot with the creation of new worlds and species and the responsibility that comes with creation and manipulation and birth.