A time for silence*

Science-fiction writer Octavia Butler has died.

Butler, 58, died after falling and striking her head Friday on a walkway outside her home in Lake Forest Park. The reclusive writer, who moved to Seattle in 1999 from her native Southern California, was a giant in stature (she was 6 feet tall by age 15) and in accomplishment.

What a horrible and unfitting end to her life.

I've only read Dawn, but I've wanted to read Kindred and some of her other work for as long as I've known about her, which has been several years now. Dawn is a wonderful book, one that will really work to take you outside your comfort level in terms of human-alien relations. But that's what Butler's work was about: Challenging comfortable conventions, and bringing race and gender and sexuality into the often white male sci-fi equation. And she did it with a grace and beauty that doesn't quite make it into a lot of other science fiction.

The literary world will need to work hard to replace Butler; she was one-of-a-kind.

(HT: Hugo)

*Taken from Octavia Butler quotation.