Octavia E. Butler Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ruth Salvaggio

SOURCE: "Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine," in Black American Literature, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 78-81.

Salvaggio is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University. In the following essay, she discusses Butler's black, female protagonists in the Patternist novels.

A traditional complaint about science fiction is that it is a male genre, dominated by male authors who create male heroes who control distinctly masculine worlds. In the last decade, however, a number of women writers have been changing that typical scenario. Their feminine and feminist perspectives give us a different kind of science fiction, perhaps best described by Pamela Sargent's term "Women of Wonder." In a sense, Octavia Butler's science fiction is a part of that new scenario, featuring strong female protagonists who shape the course of social events. Yet in another sense, what Butler has to offer is something very different. Her...
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