Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler died on Saturday. As a reader, I’m generally hard to please and I probably couldn’t name fifteen writers whom I love, but I loved Octavia Butler. She was her own niche: a black, female science fiction author and because of that she brought things to the speculative fiction table that no one else could. She wrote of the nature of power and the struggle of the dominated against the dominator. She wrote of some truly weird alien sex with not altogether willing humans. She wrote of horrible, miserable futures and pasts and the people who fought tooth and nail for freedom from them.
Please go find her books and read them because she was a great writer who never got enough attention while she was alive and it would be shameful if she and her work were forgotten in death. I absolutely recommend Wild Seed. The book has a great premise as well as a conflict and an ending that I can’t imagine any other science fiction author writing.