Octavia Butler: Find Articles: Literary Analysis/Criticism

This book maps the intersection of feminism and science fiction through close readings of science fiction literature by Octavia E. Butler, Richard Calder, and Melissa Scott and the movies The Matrix and the Alien series.

Octavia E. Butler's works of science fiction invite readers to consider the structures of power in society and to ask what it means to be human. Butler addresses social justice issues such as poverty, racism, and violence against women and connects the history of slavery in the United States with speculation on a biologically altered future world. The first section of this volume, "Materials," lists secondary sources and interviews with Butler and suggests texts that instructors might pair with her works. Essays in the second section, "Approaches," situate Butler in science fiction, modernism, and Afrofuturism and provide interdisciplinary approaches from political science, philosophy, art, and digital humanities. The contributors present strategies for teaching Butler in literature courses as well as courses designed for adult learners, preservice teachers, and students at historically black colleges and universities.

"Anxieties about embodiment and posthumanism have always found an outlet in the science fiction of the day. In Bodies of Tomorrow, Sherryl Vint argues for a new model of an ethical and embodied posthuman subject through close readings of the works of Gwyneth Jones, Octavia Butler, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, and other science fiction authors. Vint's discussion is firmly contextualized by discussions of contemporary technoscience, specifically genetics and information technology, and the implications of this technology for the way we consider human subjectivity."--Amazon

"...The predominant premise of his text is that Butler's fiction transforms the way the body is imagined with reference to race and gender...Discussions of race, class, and sex are reoccurring topics in Hampton's interrogation of Butler's writing and are posited as being inextricable to any understanding of contemporary body politics and theory. This book is filled with exciting and insightful discussions that raise questions about what constitutes humanity in fiction and in the real world..."--Amazon

Cyberfiction: After the Future explores a world where cybernetics sets the terms for life and culture - our world of ubiquitous info-tech, instantaneous capital flows, and immanent catastrophe. Economics fuses with technology to create a new kind of speculative fiction: cyberfiction. Paul Youngquist reveals the ways in which J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and William Gibson, among others, map a territory where information reigns supreme and the future is becoming a thing of the past.

Includes a chapter entitled: "Space and time : the interdependency of history, identity, and survival in Octavia Butler’s Kindred."

A reading guide for the Xenogenesis or Lilith's Brood series.

This noteworthy anthology--published by a feminist small press in memory of Butler, an African-American science-fiction author--consists of a wide-ranging selection of sometimes-dense scholarly essays, highly readable reminiscences and personal essays, poems, correspondence, photographs, and interviews..."--Amazon