Editing Octavia E. Butler (section)

== Point of view ==
Butler began reading science fiction at a young age, but quickly became disenchanted by the genre's unimaginative portrayal of ethnicity and class as well as by its lack of noteworthy female protagonists.<ref>Smith Foster, Frances. "Octavia Butler's Black Female Future Fiction." ''Extrapolation'' 23.1 (1982): 37–49.</ref> She determined to correct those gaps by, as De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai point out, "choosing to write self-consciously as an African-American woman marked by a particular history"<ref name="Kilgore" />—what Butler herself referred to as "writing myself in."<ref name="obit" /> Butler's stories, therefore, are usually written from the perspective of a marginalized black woman whose difference from the dominant agents increases her potential for reconfiguring the future of her society.<ref name="Kilgore" />