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Octavia Butler (born 1947) is best known as the author of the Patternist series of science fiction novels in which she explores topics traditionally given only cursory treatment in the genre, including sexual identity and racial conflict. Butler's heroin...

The responsibility of the powerful to the powerless is the continuing theme of science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Creating worlds of the future and visions of the past no more intrinsically humane than our own society, Butler peoples her novels wi...

Concerned with genetic engineering, psionic powers, advanced alien beings, and the nature and proper use of power, Octavia E. Butler's science fiction presents these themes in terms of racial and sexual awareness. "Butler consciously explores the impact...

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER HAS not lost her capacity to imagine horrifying societies set in the near future. Her Clay's Ark (1984), a work of science fiction set in California, describes the spread of an extraterrestrial organism that changes its human carriers to something...

As a culture, we are confronted with parables. Whether they are plain, or short and simple, enigmatic fables or allegorical morality tales, most readers are conscious of a parable's function, its subtext. That is to say, we know that parables are stories from which...