Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Butler, Octavia - Michelle Erica Green (essay date 1994)

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Michelle Erica Green (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: "'There Goes the Neighborhood': Octavia Butler's Demand for Diversity in Utopias," in Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, edited by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten, Syracuse University Press, 1994, pp. 166-89.

[In the following essay, Green discusses Butler's fiction in terms of its criticism of popular science fiction utopias and its social critique on such topics as racism and sexism.]

Octavia E. Butler's Dawn, the first novel in the trilogy Xenogenesis, is an angry utopian novel, a scathing condemnation of the tendency of human beings to hate, repress, and attack differences they do not understand. It pleads for an end to fear and prejudice, insisting that aggressive social intervention must counteract the ancient hierarchical structures of thought that humans share with their closest animal relatives. The illustration on the jacket sleeve of...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Ruth Salvaggio (essay date Summer 1984)
   2. Octavia Butler with Frances M. Beal (interview date March/April 1986)
   3. Sandra Y. Govan (essay date Spring-Summer 1986)
   4. Adele S. Newson (review date Summer 1989)
   5. Frances Bonner (essay date Spring 1990)
   6. Hoda M. Zaki (essay date July 1990)
   7. Octavia Butler with Randall Kenan (interview date Spring 1991)
   8. Orson Scott Card (review date January 1992)
   9. Michelle Erica Green (essay date 1994)
   10. Rebecca O. Johnson (review date February 1994)
   11. Elyce Rae Helford (essay date Summer 1994)
   12. Hoda Zaki (review date July 1994)
   13. Cathy Peppers (essay date March 1995)
   14. Jim Miller (review date February/March 1996)
   15. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (review date 31 March 1996)
   16. Octavia Butler with Stephen W. Potts (interview date November 1996)
   17. Madelyn Jablon (essay date 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Octavia Butler