The five novels in Octavia Butler's "Pattern-master" series explore the history of the Patternists, human mutants with telepathic powers. In the first novel of the series, Patternmaster (1976), the Patternists battle the "Clayarks" and each other for control of the world.

Butler's "Xenogenesis" trilogy, like Kindred, is a complex exploration of the relationship between rulers and subjugated. After a nuclear holocaust, Earth's few surviving humans are offered rescue by a race of alien traders in exchange for their genetic material. The moral questions that are faced by both humans and first-and second-generation hybrids are related in Dawn: Xenogenesis (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989).

Butler's recent "Earthseed" series is set in a violent America of the early twenty-first century. Lauren Oya Olamina is a young African-American teen with the ability to feel other people's pain. She "discovers" her own religion, called Earthseed, and...