Sunday, February 26, 2006

Damnit. Science fiction author Octavia Butler has died.

Butler was the first "major" genre author I met personally, when I attended a conference as a guest panelist here in Kansas City. I hadn't read anything by her when I was notified she was the guest of honor, so I immediately read one of her Xenogenesis novels, about alien "gene traders" who take up weird sexual relationships with donor species -- in Butler's case, humans eking out a life after a global nuclear war.

Although Butler was a genuine talent, I could never shake the feeling that her MacArthur grant was undeserved.* But she could still prove me wrong; I've only read a fraction of her output and it's very likely the rest deserves close attention.

*Ideally, of course, all good SF writers would receive "genius" grants by default.
Posted by at

1 comment:

Carol Maltby said...

It's a great loss. We have so relatively few women writing science fiction, even these days. While I haven't read that much of her work, I think her Xenogenesis trilogy is just brilliant.

7:51 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)