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Influence

In interviews with Charles Rowell and Randall Kenan, Butler credited the struggles of her working-class mother as an important influence on her writing. Because Mrs. Butler received little formal education herself, she made sure that young Octavia was given the opportunity to learn by bringing her reading materials that her white employers threw away, from magazines to advanced books. She also encouraged Butler to write. She bought her daughter her first typewriter when she was ten years old, and, seeing her hard at work on a story, casually remarked that maybe one day she could become a writer, causing Butler to realize that it was possible to make a living as an author. A decade later, Mrs. Butler would pay more than a month’s rent to have an agent review her daughter's work. She also provided Butler with the money she had been saving for dental work to pay for Butler’s scholarship so she could attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, where Butler sold her first two stories.

A second person to play an influential role in Butler’s work was American writer Harlan Ellison. As a teacher at the Open Door Workshop of the Screen Writers Guild of America, he gave Butler her first honest and constructive criticism on her writing after years of lukewarm responses from composition teachers and baffling rejections from publishers. Impressed by her work, Ellison suggested her to attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, and even contributed $100 towards her application fee. As the years passed, Ellison's mentorship became a close friendship.

Reception and legacy

Critical reception

Most critics praise Butler on her unflinching exposition of human flaws, which she depicts with striking realism. The New York Times regarded her novels as “evocative” if “often troubling” explorations of “far-reaching issues of race, sex, power.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction called her examination of humanity “clear-headed and brutally unsentimental” and 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.” 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.” 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.”

Scholars, on the other hand, focus 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.” 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.” Robert Crossley commended how Butler’s “feminist aesthetic” works to expose sexual, racial, and cultural chauvinisms 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.”

Butler has been praised widely for her spare yet vivid style, with Washington Post Book World calling her craftsmanship “superb.” Burton Raffel regards her prose as “carefully, expertly crafted” and “crystalline, at its best, sensuous, sensitive, exact not in the least directed at calling attention to itself.”