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love and birth in the context of social inequality.

 

- Her prose is so transparent, so efficient, and it pierces to the bone. Her stories refuse to simplify moral choices, which are treated with the complexity of authentically grown-up fiction. Her writing can be very quiet and sometimes the affect in her texts seems almost flat-perhaps because of the distanced/disciplined self-consciousness of her very hard-working protagonists, from Kindred's Dana to XENOGENESIS's Lilith to Fledgling's Shori. It is worth considering that Butler's prose represents at the very level of the words on the page-the kind of iron control necessary to survive under impossible circumstances. The unvarnished and unromanticized face of human necessity takes on a resolute beauty in her stories.

 

- The underlying inequities and the lack of social privilege of the point-of-view characters are not the sole focus of the reader's attention.

Not so in her short fiction: it is all bone. The reader cannot ignore the underlying injustices, the characters' helplessness, the deeply personal and heartbreaking power dynamics and the pain that motivates their bad decisions.