La Muselivre

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it. She called herself a writer rather than a science fiction writer and said on at least one occasion, in an interview: "How dull it is to have people defining you." But she used scientific extrapolation in most of her work and did so carefully -- acknowledging what was known to be true and inventing only into the blank spaces on the map.
In the '70s and '80s, when much of the field was out in the clean, sterile sweep of space or jacking into the Web and leaving the body entirely, Butler's scientific interest was in biology. Her work is all about the body -- about disease, about reproduction, about the horrible realities of the food chain. Many of her stories feature graphic depictions of fluid-spilling, flesh-eating, oozing, gooey physicality. There were times as a reader when you might find yourself wishing her imagination and her prose were a little less vivid. In my opinion, she was one of the field's scariest writers. There was nowhere she wasn't willing to go in her imagination. There was nowhere she wasn't willing to take you.