This does not mean I’m giving away the story. Events will hook you anyway by their immediacy, intimacy, and odd resonance with what we are already experiencing. In fact, you may find yourself carrying the plot forward in your mind long after you put the book down. For Butler, the future depends not only on a mega-force like global warming—which is depicted here in gradual and frightening reality of long droughts and then floods—but also on human behavior. She makes very clear that human behavior caused global warming, not the other way around; at least, not until it was almost too late. Unlike many in science fiction, but like such feminist science fiction writers as Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin, and Marge Piercy, Butler doesn’t just create a future based on new science and new technology, she also shows the results of old human behavior that guides them.

In a science fiction world that was, in her lifetime, mostly by and for white male writers and readers, Octavia Butler has always been considered an oddity. She herself felt uniquely well-suited. As she explained: “I’m black, I’m solitary, I’ve always been an outsider.” Her characters are young and old, Latina, African American, and more, all in the most natural and uniquely American of ways.

When young Lauren starts walking cross-country to save her future life, for instance, there is an echo of enslaved Africans walking north to save their lives in the past. In defining God, her characters come up with the idea that God is Change, the Truth of Life.

It’s not surprising that Octavia Butler became the first science fiction writer ever to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Award; or that she inspired millions of readers who had never seen themselves in science fiction or future fantasy before; or that African American science fiction writers, mostly but not only women, cite her as their almost sole inspiration; or that the science fiction books she read as a child were given to her mother by families who employed her as a maid; or that she now has been translated and read in countries around the world; or that her own life sounds like science fiction.

But as she often pointed out, what she wrote was neither science nor fiction, because “All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design?”

Octavia Butler was playing out our very real possibilities as humans. I think she can help each of us to do the same.

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