About the Author

Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) was one of the foremost science fiction writers of her generation, the winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

Gerry Canavan is an associate professor of English at Marquette University. An editor at Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television, he has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015) and The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019). His is the author of Octavia E. Butler in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series.

Nisi Shawl is a science fiction writer, editor, and journalist whose debut novel Everfair was a 2016 Nebula finalist. A friend of Octavia Butler, Shawl edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars (2013) and co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (2013).

Reviews

"Butler's wide-ranging career as one of the earliest successful African American sci-fi writers is on full display in a capacious new collection from the Library of America . . . allowing both fans of Butler and those unfamiliar with her work to gain an impressively broad view of her oeuvre. . . . Perhaps most important, this collection presents some of Butler's most overtly race-conscious fiction, arriving at a time when the red scar of racism is arguably more visible than it has ever been this century, allowing the anthology to become a part of the country's urgent reflection on the astonishing depths of its racist past and present. . . . [America] needs her blunt but empathetic vision more than ever."
—Gabrielle Bellot, Bookforum

"The collection’s variety reveals the clarity of purpose in a body of work that ranged broadly among species, genres, and millennia. Butler’s great subject was intimate power, of the kind that transforms relationships into fulcrums of collective destiny." 
—Julian Lucas, The New Yorker