Editing Octavia E. Butler (section)

== Critical reception ==
''[[The New York Times]]'' regarded her novels as "evocative" and "often troubling" explorations of "far-reaching issues of race, sex, power".<ref name="obit" /> Writing in ''[[The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction]]'', [[Orson Scott Card]] called her examination of humanity "clear-headed and brutally unsentimental",<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Card |first=Orson Scott |date=January 1992 |title=Books to Look For |magazine=Fantasy and Science Fiction}}</ref> and ''[[The Village Voice]]''{{'}}s [[Dorothy Allison]] described her as "writing the most detailed social criticism" where "the hard edge of cruelty, violence, and domination is described in stark detail".<ref>{{Cite news|title=The Future of Female: Octavia Butler's Mother Lode|last=Allison|first=Dorothy|date=December 19, 1989|work=The Village Voice|page=67}}</ref> ''[[Locus (magazine)|Locus]]'' regarded her as "one of those authors who pay serious attention to the way human beings actually work together and against each other, and she does so with extraordinary plausibility."<ref>{{cite web|title=Parable of the Sower: Synopses & Reviews|url=http://www.powells.com/book/parable-of-the-sower-9780446675505|website=Powell's|access-date= March 24, 2018}}</ref> The ''[[Houston Post]]'' ranked her "among the best SF writers, blessed with a mind capable of conceiving complicated futuristic situations that shed considerable light on our current affairs."<ref>{{cite web|title=Dawn: Synopses & Reviews|url=http://www.powells.com/book/dawn-9780446603775|website=Powell's|access-date= March 24, 2018}}</ref>

Some scholars have focused on Butler's choice to write from the point of view of marginal characters and communities and thus "expanded SF to reflect the experiences and expertise of the disenfranchised".<ref name="Kilgore" /> While surveying Butler's novels, critic [[Burton Raffel]] noted how race and gender influence her writing: "I do not think any of these eight books could have been written by a man, as they most emphatically were not, nor, with the single exception of her first book, ''Pattern-Master'' (1976), are likely to have been written, as they most emphatically were, by anyone but an African American."<ref name="Raffel" /> Robert Crossley commended how Butler's "[[Feminist literature|feminist aesthetic]]" works to expose sexual, racial, and cultural [[chauvinism]] because it is "enriched by a historical consciousness that shapes the depiction of enslavement both in the real past and in imaginary pasts and futures."<ref name="Kilgore" />

Butler's prose has been praised by critics including the ''[[The Washington Post|Washington Post Book World]]'', where her craftsmanship has been described as "superb",<ref>{{Cite news|title=Mysteries of the Mayans|last=Grant|first=Richard|date=July 31, 1988|newspaper=Washington Post|page=X8|via=Nexis Uni}}</ref> and by Burton Raffel, who regards Butler's prose as "carefully, expertly crafted" and "crystalline, at its best, sensuous, sensitive, exact, not in the least directed at calling attention to itself".<ref name="Raffel">Raffel, Burton. "Genre to the Rear, Race and Gender to the Fore: The Novels of Octavia E. Butler." ''Literary Review'' 38.3 (Spring 1995): 454–461.</ref>