octavia butler doesn't get enough love these days, probably because her brand of sci fi isn't ''ooh spooky ai power brains, how will we puny hoomans survive'' her later books can really take you places and fuxk with ur ideas about biology, evolution, gender, sexuality, to such a fundamental without relying on digital tech she goes places in terms of individual and communal emotional psychology that liu cixin or zachary mason couldn't consider in their wildest dreams lovecraft, if he had actually lived out his later renunciation of his terrible politics, would have seen her as engaging with 'the other' the same way he did, only that she wasn't petrified by it but was creative and inspired enough to really go all in and engage with it
