Junot Díaz in the Boston Review:
Those of us who revere Octavia Butler’s work and have never stopped mourning her passing do so in part, I suspect, because we know that no matter what happens in this Universe there will never be anyone like Butler again—not as a person and certainly not as an artist. Like Toni Morrison, Butler was a literary eucatastrophe, (a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur), a literary Kwisatz Haderach (Butler loved Dune) that occurs so very rarely in a culture and only if it is lucky.
For those who do not know her (and apparently there are still plenty who don’t): Octavia Estelle Butler is one of our greatest writers, though in the larger culture she is described as the first Black woman to write science fiction professionally. That biographeme—Black Woman Science Fiction Writer—defined Butler her entire career in spite of the fact that her extraordinary and most well-known novel, Kindred (1979), was not science fiction at all, but a neo-slave narrative that Butler herself described as “grim fantasy.” Butler died in 2006, at the age of fifty-eight, far, far too young, publishing fourteen books (fifteen if we count the posthumous collection, Unexpected Stories). They radically transformed multiple canons—U.S. literature, African diasporic literature, feminist literature, science fiction, speculative fiction—but also radically altered the imaginaries of generations of readers and artists. Now with Kindred on television, in an eight-part series by FX on Hulu, a different set of audiences will have the opportunity to discover Butler for themselves.
More here.