I selected Kindred because it is one of two portals to her work that most people come across, and she wrote it to reach a certain audience.

We writers like to make those sorts of lawyerly distinctions. Well, I just will say that I’ve selected these books as the best introduction to her work, not as her best work. Could you talk us through the book, and then why you think it was one of Butler’s best? This was a big bestseller on publication. During her lifetime, she was rather prolific and published 12 novels and one short story collection. But there were only a few, just one or two people trying to prove that this speculative fiction field was as diverse and wide as humanity. There are countless Black people who were writing at the same time who were breaking down barriers.

I’ve read that she herself said that she ‘wrote herself into’ the science fiction and fantasy literature as an African-American. You need to be able to go anywhere and for people there to know who Octavia Butler is. She needs to be famous throughout the globe, in the same fashion that you can go to Nepal and people know who Mickey Mouse is. NASA named a feature of Martian topography after her. I think that she has achieved the fame that she deserves, to an extent. Through her writing life she won pretty much every prize going: a MacArthur Fellowship, Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, Locus Awards… You have the thrill of undergoing the dream state that she was in as she was writing, and the results of those really vivid dreams. She took risks, big risks, and she allowed people to come along with her as she took those risks, so you had the thrill of participating in the audacity of what she was writing. And I think that gets to why she is so influential. That’s what I knew her as, a beautiful person inside and out, whose work was challenging and dangerous. But to me, she was a gracious, wise, kind, and compassionate friend. Who was she? I could write a book about that-others already have. Who was Octavia Butler, and why do you think her books have been so influential in the world of science fiction and fantasy-and literature more generally?

Let me start with a very general question.

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

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