SOURCE: "Writing Because She Must: Octavia Butler's Stories, Essays," in Chicago Tribune Books, March 31, 1996, p. 5.

Taylor-Guthrie is assistant professor of Afro-American Studies at Indiana University Northwest. In the following review, she praises the stories in Butler's Bloodchild and Other Stories as "vintage Butler."

Octavia Butler is the only woman among the four most prominent African-American science-fiction writers, a group that includes Samuel R. Delany Jr., Steven Barnes and Charles R. Saunders. Her grounding in African-American culture, concern for feminist issues and ability to imagine the future make her work unique, and were presumably factors that brought her a well-deserved MacArthur Fellowship in 1995.

Bloodchild and Other Stories should delight Butler devotees and attract new readers. The volume contains five previously published stories, each with its own afterword, and two essays, one autobiographical and the other on writing. The author's commentaries on her works are as pleasurable to read as...