This introduction to the special section on Octavia Butler provides a brief review of her significance as an author of science fiction. When Butler began to publish, the genre was dominated by tales of adventure written in the heroic mode and featuring an extension into the future of familiar racial and gender hierarchies. To address the question of whether humanity is capable of meaningful change, Butler looked to the body. From the evolutionary and biological sciences, she took the notion of the body as the foundation of social arrangements, but to that scientific base she added an understanding of race and gender the modalities in which we live our humanity as historically contingent and thus alterable. In her narratives the undoing of the human body is both literal and metaphorical, for it signifies the profound changes necessary to shape a world not organized by hierarchical violence. Her narratives privilege those already schooled in adapting to hostile conditions: black or female or queer characters that know the vulnerability of the body and understand that heroic resistance will not ensure survival. With such point-of-view characters and their strategies of accommodation, Butler expanded sf to reflect the experiences and expertise of the disenfranchised. But though her futures are organized around hitherto marginal characters and communities, they are predicated on change so profound that they cannot be assimilated neatly into sf written in the nationalist mode of afrofuturism. And, because they are often grim and lack a guarantee of success, neither do they belong with popular sf's utopian mode of liberal pluralism. Butler's originality places her at the cutting edge of the genre. The introduction closes with summaries of the essays and reflections that comprise the special section.
