Nightshade fits comfortably into the modern tradition of science fiction, a type of literature Butler has read avidly since his childhood and which he cites as an important influence on his own writing. In this novel, Butler freely employs any number of the conven tional devices, methods, situations, and techniques familiar to readers of science fiction for most of the twentieth century. As a science-fiction novel, Nightshade is virtually a tour de force in which the author breathes new life even into some rather stale conventions and imbues them with a degree of literary excellence they have rarely attained in the works of other writers.

A listing of modern predecessors in the genre would read like a who's who of science-fiction authors; it would include such names as H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury...