Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires

Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires by Gregory Hampton is a timely text that critically situates Butler's fiction in several fields of study including American, African-American, gender, and science fiction studies. Without excluding readers with an abundance of esoteric jargon Hampton succeeds at engaging the interdisciplinary discourses that respond to Butler's fiction. The predominant premise of his text is that Butler's fiction transforms the way the body is imagined with reference to race and gender. The arguments made in Changing Bodies assert that Butler's fiction artfully responds to several critical investigations of identity formation. Discussions of race, class, and sex are reoccurring topics in Hampton's interrogation of Butler's writing and are posited as being inextricable to any understanding of contemporary body politics and theory. This book is filled with exciting and insightful discussions that raise questions about what constitutes humanity in fiction and in the real world. Changing Bodies makes a significant contribution to the scholarship surrounding one of the most insightful and talented writers of her time and acts as an invitation for readers inside and outside of the academy to discover the genius of Octavia Butler.