Plot: 5/9.

After witnessing how T’Gatoi, an alien friend of the Terran family who was given birth by the hero’s father and also served as the Tlic government official in charge of the Terran Preserve devoting herself to ameliorate the conditions of humanity on this exotic planet, vivisected an alive Terran to facilitate his production of Tlic babies, the hero was so nauseated by the bloody operation that he ran out of the house to vomit, which was noticed by his elder brother who then confessed that his last failed attempt of escaping from Preserve was owing to have once accidentally watched a Tlic kill a Terran host to feed her own children from the inside out.

Out of extreme terror, the hero thus threatened T’Gatoi not to impregnate him by staking his own life, yet bent his mind to protect his sister from the same inescapable fate. In the end, the hero accepted the injection, although he was determined to enjoy the right of bearing guns as allegedly Gatoi’s partner, and kept asking whether Gatoi cared he was the chosen one or not—a question that elicited nothing except the alien’s lingering regret over the possibility of losing her potential children and her own life in the incident just happened.

Core: 8/9. Butler amplified and transformed some women’s painstaking struggles and powerless complications in undignified labor and loveless marriages—sometimes driven by men’s inherent requirement for procreation—in our own era onto men themselves during the time of alien colonial domination in a marvelously artful and revolutionary manner.

Character: 5/9.

World and Others: 5/9.

Overall: 6/9.