Octavia Butler died this week. Butler wrote captivating science fiction, short stories such as the award-winning Bloodchild, as well as fiction such as the Patternist series and was known for her humane, if to this reader sometimes alarming stories. Butler was an African American woman who dominated a genre not known for African American women. If she had challenges though, she was as matter of fact about her efforts to publish, as she was of her habit of writing a different sort of family history into science fiction:
"When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read," Ms. Butler told The New York Times in 2000. "The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing."
Octavia Butler achieved acclaim as the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, two Hugo Awards and Nebula awards. Here is a tribute to her via YouTube
