SOURCE: Birns, Nicholas. “Octavia Butler: Fashioning Alien Constructs.” The Hollins Critic XXXVIII, no. 3 (June 2001): 1-14.

In the following essay, Birns contends that Octavia Butler “employs her African American and science fiction heritages to see anew the way things are.”

In her essay “Furor Scribendi” Octavia Butler, with stunning practicality, tells beginning writers to read a lot, to write something every day and, above all, to “persist.” Advice so responsible is hard to find—especially from writers. Butler's approach to writing is different from that of many—even of many science fiction writers. For Butler, writing is a procedure for solving problems, making new meanings, imagining alternative outcomes in their largest sense. Butler does not write poetically, but neither does she indulge in dogged scientific exposition. Her books are exciting, though this excitement is not that of the cheap thriller but a kind of patient excitement, where the reader...