When Science Fiction Becomes Real: Octavia E. Butler's Legacy

I wish I'd discovered her sooner...she's easily in my top five favorite scifi authors, today. Parable of the Sower (and its sequel) is beautiful and thought-provoking; the Lilith's Brood series (starting with Dawn) was way ahead of its time, tackling gender, race, sexuality, and xenophobia, in a really thoughtful and nuanced way (in a genre that is not renowned for nuance on any of these subjects). Even her early Patternist series is awesome. It's like she sprung up fully formed as one of the great scifi writers (though, apparently, she had several years of rejection, so I guess she honed her craft in relative obscurity).

I suspect I was slow to read her because her best known work, Kindred, just didn't sound like something I would like (I did end up reading it, and liking it, though it's not my favorite of her work, and I don't really get excited about alternate histories or time travel stories). But, most of her other stuff is right up my alley. She's got dystopia covered with the Parable series, she's got weird aliens in Lilith's Brood, and she's got creepy evolutionary speculation in the Patternist series.

I really just can't say enough good things about Butler, and strongly recommend every scifi fan check her out. I wish she'd written more, as I've read most of her novels a couple of times, and loved nearly all of them. It's disappointing to have discovered someone so good, and then run out of books by them to read, knowing there will never be another. (Similarly, I never "got" Asimov as a kid, but then read Foundation as a young adult and finally understood it and loved it, only to find he'd died a couple months before...but, at least Asimov wrote enough books to keep one busy for years.)

FYI for those who haven't read it, Butler's "Parable of the Sower" is one of the most crucial novels of the last century. It mixes a future so dark and plausible it makes other dystopias look sweet and cartoonish with -- incredibly -- a cosmic optimism so deep and hopeful it makes you proud to be human. It's really an amazing book.