Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler celebrates the work and explores the influence and legacy of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler. Author Nisi Shawl and scholar Rebecca J. Holden have joined forces to bring together a mix of scholars and writers, each of whom values Butler’s work in their own particular ways. As the editors write in their introduction:

“Strange Matings seeks to continue Butler’s uncomfortable insights about humanity, and also to instigate new conversations about Butler and her work — conversations that encourage academic voices to “talk” to the private voices, the poetic voices to answer the analytic… How did her work affect conceptions of what science fiction is and could be? How did her portrayals of African Americans challenge accepted assumptions and affect others writing in the field? In what ways did her commitment to issues of race and gender express itself? How did this dual commitment affect the emerging field of overtly feminist science fiction? How did it affect the perception of her work? In what ways did Butler inspire other writers and change the “face” of science fiction? How did she “queer” science fiction? In what ways did she inspire us and motivate us take up difficult subjects and tasks? In other words, what is her legacy?”

Who would have imagined that when writer Octavia Butler gazed into a dog’s eyes, her perspective would change forever?

When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren’t friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn’t my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us. My father had died, and my mother had to find work that would support the two of us. She became a maid. She had been a maid before she married—she had been taken out of school when she was only 10 and put to work to help feed herself and her younger brothers and sisters. Now she was a maid again, “staying on the place,” as it used to be called, living in her employer’s home and having no home of her own.

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Octavia-Butlers-Aha-Moment/1#ixzz2NxECQz3c